From a #1 Apple podcast host, Lambda Literary fellow, and former dominatrix, a sex-positive, judgement-free cultural deep-dive into the world of kink. When BDSM educator and former dominatrix Tina Horn first launched Why Are People Into That?!, publications from Esquire and Guardian to Vice, Bustle, Buzzfeed, and beyond heralded the undertaking as one of the best podcasts about sex. Each episode centered around a different aspect of kink, erotic fantasy, and human sexuality, thoughtfully and non-judgmentally examining why, exactly, different strokes work for different folks. From sex workers and scientists to artists, writers, and porn stars, Tina’s wide range of guests helped educate fascinated listeners across the world on the wide spectrum of humanity’s sexual appetite. But for every episode she released, with every guest expert she interviewed, she found her listeners more and more insatiable--and she soon realized that the only way to really address the titular question with all the depth and nuance it deserved was to turn that idea into a book. From spanking, bondage, and financial domination, to the most taboo fantasies involving cake, chains, and cannibalism, WHY ARE PEOPLE INTO THAT? explores the universal human drives that shape even the most specific erotic tastes, and the cultural context that molds and is molded by the way we conceptualize sex, pleasure, gender, fantasy, and power. Along the way, Tina invites us to reconsider everything we thought we knew about sex and sexuality. How, for example, should we think about "consensual nonconsent" in a post-#MeToo era? How does cross-dressing, as a sexual fantasy, fit in with our evolving cultural understanding of gender performance and identity? And what do foot fetishists, furries, and “femdoms” have in common? Blending insightful cultural criticism, investigative journalism, psychology, and spicy anecdotes from Tina’s 15+ years of hard-earned expertise in the sex industry and beyond, WHY ARE PEOPLE INTO THAT? is a philosophical-but-fun exploration of the prismatic spectrum of human desire and the expansive possibilities of pleasure. For readers of books like Kink and Sex at Dawn, this raunchy and rousing book is perfect for anyone who is interested not only in the intricacies of what we desire, but in how desire itself really works.

Two graduate students must set aside their rivalry and journey to Hell to save their professor’s soul, perhaps at the cost of their own. Alice Law has only ever had one goal: to become one of the brightest minds in the field of Magick. She has sacrificed everything to make that a reality—her pride, her health, her love life, and most definitely her sanity. All to work with Professor Jacob Grimes at Cambridge, the greatest magician in the world—that is, until he dies in a magical accident that could possibly be her fault. Grimes is now in Hell, and she’s going in after him. Because his recommendation could hold her very future in his now incorporeal hands, and even death is not going to stop the pursuit of her dreams. Nor will the fact that her rival, Peter Murdoch, has come to the same conclusion.

After she encounters a poem about love and friendship etched on the Homomonument in Amsterdam, Hélène Giannecchini is moved to attempt to do justice to a form of relation often subordinated to romance. A friendship is a filiation we choose, one that can reconfigure our understanding of co-existence. It holds love, laughter, dissent and solidarity; it can be a site of political struggle, of reinvention and rest. Thinking back to her own unconventional family formation, she sets out to piece together an alternative genealogy of lives excluded from normative discourses, whose traces may only remain in memory and archival fragments. In searching and sensitive prose, Giannecchini sifts the past to bring marginal existences into communion with each other, preserved through loving acts of witness and made full of meaning by friendship's generative force. Roving from Saint-Just's revolutionary ideal of amity to Donna Gottschalk's photography documenting radical lesbian organizing in 1960s and '70s New York, interspersed with unpublished images acquired magpie-like through chance and circumstance, An Army of Lovers Cannot Fail forms a slantwise account of queer life in the twentieth century, and a moving testament to the liberatory power of friendship.

"A complex, beautiful coming-of-age novel...a love story unlike any I've ever read." —Ali Hazelwood "A soulful book about the politics of labor and submission." —Raven Leilani Normal People meets Fifty Shades of Grey in this sharp and provocative coming-of-age debut chronicling the turbulent romance between a brilliant economics grad student and a magnetic Wall Street banker two decades her senior. When Lili Marwan—seeking to escape the unrelenting pressures of her master’s thesis, recent rejection from her foster family, and unresolved grief from the death of her parents—has an intense one-night stand with Aleksandr Petrov, her restless mind finally goes calm. At twenty-two, Lili is already opinionated beyond her years: whether it’s astrology, democratic socialism, veganism, or the ravages of late-stage capitalism run rampant. But when a tall, dark stranger buys her a drink in a FiDi bar, she meets her match. Aleksandr is formidable, fiercely intelligent, and infuriatingly disarming. He’s also two decades older than her, a Capricorn with a birth chart full of red flags, a neoliberal capitalist, and a strong believer in the power of free markets, having escaped the Soviet Union in its dying days. He’s the opposite of Lili in nearly every way. He challenges her at every turn. And she can’t stay away. Over the course of a heady New York City summer, Lili and Aleksandr reach across the divide of their differences and the decades of their lives, discovering startlingly shared experiences. Their casual arrangement—rough sex, hours where Lili does not need to make any decisions—gives way fast to an unexpected intimacy, by turns breathtaking, then devastating. As Lili struggles to understand herself and the complicated threads of her ambition, pain, and desire, she will have to decide: is she willing to risk great loss again, for the hope of profit that is finally within reach?

We live under minority rule. But who is the ruling minority? Most of us are getting screwed over. Our world is defined by inequality, insecurity, lack of community and information overload. As the world burns, mega-corporations are reporting record profits. How are they getting away with it? 'Minority rule' is the term Ash Sarkar uses to describe the irrational fear that minorities are trying to overturn and oppress majority populations. In her eye-opening debut, she reveals how minority elites rule majorities by creating the culture wars that have taken over our politics, stoking fear and panic in our media landscape. Because despite what they'll have you believe, anti-racist campaigners aren't actually silencing the 'forgotten' working class, immigrants aren't eating your pets, trans-activists aren't corrupting your children, and cancel culture isn't crushing free speech. In Minority Rule, Sarkar exposes how a strategic misdirection of blame over who is really screwing everything up is keeping the majority divided, while the real ruling minority of hedge fund managers, press barons, landlords and corporations remain on top. And it's facilitating one of the biggest power grabs in history. Most crucially, she shows us how what we really have in common is being concealed by a deafening culture of distraction – and that the first step towards a better future is understanding what is happening now, and how we got here.

From the National Book Award–longlisted author of The Need comes an extraordinary novel about a wife and mother who—after losing her job to AI—undergoes a procedure that renders her undetectable to surveillance…but at what cost? In a city addled by climate change and populated by intelligent robots called “hums,” May loses her job to artificial intelligence. In a desperate bid to resolve her family’s debt and secure their future for another few months, she becomes a guinea pig in an experiment that alters her face so it cannot be recognized by surveillance. Seeking some reprieve from her recent hardships and from her family’s addiction to their devices, she splurges on passes that allow them three nights’ respite inside the Botanical Garden: a rare green refuge where forests, streams, and animals flourish. But her insistence that her son, daughter, and husband leave their devices at home proves far more fraught than she anticipated, and the lush beauty of the Botanical Garden is not the balm she hoped it would be. When her children come under threat, May is forced to put her trust in a hum of uncertain motives as she works to restore the life of her family. Written in taut, urgent prose, Hum is a work of speculative fiction that unflinchingly explores marriage, motherhood, and selfhood in a world compromised by global warming and dizzying technological advancement, a world of both dystopian and utopian possibilities. As New York Times bestselling author Jeff VanderMeer says, “Helen Phillips, in typical bravura fashion, has found a way to make visible uncomfortable truths about our present by interrogating the near-future.”

The first love of a teenage girl is a powerful thing, particularly when the object of that desire is her best friend, also a girl. It's the kind of power that could implode a family, a friendship, a life. On a quiet summer night in Newcastle, 1972, a choice must be to act upon these desires, or suppress them? To live an openly queer life, or to try desperately not to?Over the following three decades, these two lives almost intersect in pivotal moments, the distance between them at times drawing so thin they nearly collide. Against the backdrop of an era including Australia's first Mardi Gras and the AIDS pandemic, we see these two lives ebb and flow, with joy and grief and loss and desire, until at last they come together in the most beautiful and surprising of fashions.A Language of Limbs is about love and how it's policed, friendship and how it transcends, and hilarity in the face of heartbreak - the jokes you tell as you're dying and the ways laughing at a funeral softens the edges of our grief. An unashamed celebration of queer life in all its vibrancy and colour, this story finds the humanity in all of us, and demands we claim our futures for ourselves.