The delivery room decoded—by the internet’s favorite labor nurse. Childbirth is one of life’s most powerful experiences—but it can also be overwhelming. The internet is full of conflicting advice, scary stories, and rigid expectations. Too often, expecting parents are told to create a perfect “birth plan,” only to feel defeated or afraid when things don’t go exactly as envisioned. That’s where Jen Hamilton comes in. A labor and delivery nurse, ER veteran, and unexpected mom herself, Jen has been a steady presence at thousands of births—and on millions of screens. In Birth Vibes, she shares her own stories, all while guiding readers through what to expect in labor and delivery with humor and heart. Jen busts harmful myths, breaks down what really happens in the delivery room, and gives readers the tools to advocate for the care they want. Instead of rigid plans, she encourages parents to focus on their birth vibes—the feeling and environment they want to create—and provides helpful scripts and insider advice to help get there.Birth Vibes is the ultimate companion for anyone preparing to give birth—or support someone who is. Warm, funny, and deeply grounded in real-life experience, this is the guide every parent deserves.

A sexy modern take on ancient Greek myths.She keeps her eyes on me while she lights the end of my cigarette. I stare back at her. Something in the pills and in her eyes is opening up my muscles like hands parting from prayer, like trees breathing.Eros is a stunning collection of short stories, grounded in truth and coloured with dazzling imagination and alluring, unpredictable mystery. Revealing how queerness, nature and myth have been intertwined for eternity, these are stories of gods and goddesses. Of Zeus, of Eurydice, of Hermaphroditus, of Icarus before he flew into the sun. Stories of queer life, lust, revenge, wrath, passion and sex. Of yearning, love, loss. Some transformations span across a life, and others, an evening. Perspectives will shift. Houses will burn. Lovers will learn their fate. Zoe Terakes has skilfully blended myth and modernity to illuminate the complex and enduring truth of trans lives, resisting a history of erasure and delivering a sexy, soul-touching book to read to your lover . . . or yourself.'Goddamn, these stories set my queer heart alight. In finally making queer and trans undertones of ancient Greek myth explicit, Zoe Terakes has forged something both classic and eternal, timely and timeless.' BENJAMIN LAW

2024 Daniel E. Griffiths Research Award WinnerAn expansive volume presenting crip approaches to writing, research, and publishing. Crip Disability as Method is an expansive volume presenting the multidisciplinary methods brought into being by disability studies and activism. Mara Mills and Rebecca Sanchez have convened leading scholars, artists, and activists to explore the ways disability shapes authorship, transforming cultural production, aesthetics, and media.Starting from the premise that disability is plural and authorship spans composition, affect, and publishing, this collection of thirty-five compact essays asks how knowledge about disability is produced and shared in disability studies. Disability alters, generates, and dismantles method. Crip authorship takes place within and beyond the commodity version of authorship, in books, on social media, and in creative works that will never be published. The chapters draw on the expertise of international researchers and activists in the humanities, social sciences, education, arts, and design. Across five sections—Writing, Research, Genre/Form, Publishing, Media—contributors consider disability as method for creative practices of writing and other forms of composition; research methods and collaboration; crip aesthetics; media formats and hacks; and the capital, access, legal standing, and care networks required to publish. Designed to be accessible and engaging for students, Crip Authorship also provides theoretically sophisticated arguments in a condensed form that will make the text a key resource for disability studies scholars. Essays include Mel Y Chen on the temporality of writing with chronic illness; Remi Yergeau on perseveration; La Marr Jurelle Bruce on mad Black writing; Alison Kafer on the reliance of the manifesto genre on disability; Jaipreet Virdi on public scholarship for disability justice; Ellen Samuels on the importance of disability and illness to autotheory; Xuan Thuy Nguyen on decolonial research methods for disability studies; Emily Lim Rogers on virtual ethnography; Cameron Awkward-Rich on depression and trans reading methods; Robert McRuer on crip theory in translation; Kelsie Acton on plain language writing; and Georgina Kleege on description as an access and aesthetic technique.

How the Word Is Passed meets Braiding Sweetgrass in a cultural and personal reclamation of Black history and Black botanical mastery, told through the stories of long-lived trees. The histories of trees in America are also the histories of Black Americans. Pecan trees were domesticated by an enslaved African named Antoine; sycamore trees were both havens and signposts for people trying to escape enslavement; poplar trees are historically associated with lynching; and willow bark has offered the gift of medicine. These trees, and others, testify not only to the complexity of the Black American narrative but also to a heritage of Black botanical expertise that, like Native American traditions, predates the United States entirely. In When Trees Testify, award-winning plant biologist Beronda L. Montgomery explores the way seven trees—as well as the cotton shrub—are intertwined with Black history and culture. She reveals how knowledge surrounding these trees has shaped America since the very beginning. As Montgomery shows, trees are material witnesses to the lives of enslaved Africans and their descendants. Combining the wisdom of science and history with stories from her own path to botany, Montgomery talks to majestic trees, and in this unique and compelling narrative, they answer.

A collection of letters written by people who have made panels for the Quilt--a loving memorial to those who died of AIDS--reveals a variety of individuals whose words are funny, heartwarming, tender, and moving

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER •  From two survivors of the Parkland, Florida, shooting comes a declaration for our times, and an in-depth look at the making of the #NeverAgain movement.   On February 14, 2018, seventeen-year-old David Hogg and his fourteen-year-old sister, Lauren, went to school at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School, like any normal Wednesday. That day, of course, the world changed. By the next morning, with seventeen classmates and faculty dead, they had joined the leadership of a movement to save their own lives, and the lives of all other young people in America. It's a leadership position they did not seek, and did not want--but events gave them no choice. The morning after the massacre, David Hogg told "We're children. You guys are the adults. You need to take some action and play a role. Work together. Get over your politics and get something done." This book is a manifesto for the movement begun that day, one that has already changed America--with voices of a new generation that are speaking truth to power, and are determined to succeed where their elders have failed. With moral force and clarity, a new generation has made it clear that problems previously deemed unsolvable due to powerful lobbies and political cowardice will be theirs to solve. Born just after Columbine and raised amid seemingly endless war and routine active shooter drills, this generation now says,  Enough . This book is their statement of purpose, and the story of their lives. It is the essential guide to the #NeverAgain movement.

A young gay autistic travel writer takes a head-spinning detour when murder and romance unbalance his well-planned life and career in this fun, quirky debut mystery. Autism is just another fact of life for twenty-four-year-old Oliver Popp. As long as he sticks to a comfortable itinerary planned well in advance, he gets by just fine as a staff writer for Offbeat Traveler magazine. But a curve ball drops into Oliver’s budding career when his first feature assignment takes him to Washington, D.C. to chronicle the latest tourism trends. His freelance project photographer is Ricky Warner, a gregarious and impulsively adorable shot of adrenaline. If the flirty gay photographer isn’t enough to unbalance shy Oliver from the get-go, there’s also an unsettling chance encounter with old acquaintance, Elise Perkins, and a congressional hearing that’s shaking up both the Capitol and an entrepreneurial billionaire. The unexpected distractions soon collide when a speeding car kills Elise. Funny how she just stared it down like she knew it was coming. Forget the National Mall and Mt. Vernon Square. Oliver and Ricky are game for something much more: solving a mystery and a murder.

When it comes to Confederate monuments, there is no common ground. Polarizing debates over their meaning have intensified into legislative maneuvering to preserve the statues, legal battles to remove them, and rowdy crowds taking matters into their own hands. These conflicts have raged for well over a century--but they've never been as intense as they are today. In this eye-opening narrative of the efforts to raise, preserve, protest, and remove Confederate monuments, Karen L. Cox depicts what these statues meant to those who erected them and how a movement arose to force a reckoning. She lucidly shows the forces that drove white southerners to construct beacons of white supremacy, as well as the ways that antimonument sentiment, largely stifled during the Jim Crow era, returned with the civil rights movement and gathered momentum in the decades after the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Monument defenders responded with gerrymandering and heritage laws intended to block efforts to remove these statues, but hard as they worked to preserve the Lost Cause vision of southern history, civil rights activists, Black elected officials, and movements of ordinary people fought harder to take the story back. Timely, accessible, and essential, No Common Ground is the story of the seemingly invincible stone sentinels that are just beginning to fall from their pedestals.

Imagine a medical breakthrough so powerful it could change the landscape of reproductive rights with just two pills. Just Pills unveils the extraordinary, untold story of mifepristone and misoprostol - the abortion medications that have quietly revolutionized women's healthcare across the globe.Spanning decades and continents with a tenacious cast of doctors, activists, politicians, drug suppliers, and everyday women, Just Pills tells the gripping, little-known history of mifepristone and misoprostol, better known as the abortion pills.The abortion pills are a safe, cheap, clinic-less means of ending a pregnancy, and these drugs have been quietly—yet steadily—spreading around the world. These pills are already changing the fight for abortion access as we understand it. Rebecca Kelliher dives into the history of the pills’ invention in the 1970’s and 80’s, unpacks government battles around their approval in the 1990’s, and deftly weaves together several perspectives to move beyond the pills’ origin story.As women’s rights are increasingly infringed upon in the US, this history of radical invention and persistent distribution of a life-saving drug will remind us of the work we’ve already done and inspire us to continue to pursue a world where women are free.If you've ever wondered how real change happens—how a simple pill can become a powerful instrument of liberation—this is the book you need to read.

An exposé of how far-right extremists across Europe use attacks on abortion to introduce broader fascist politics–and their connections to the American far right, from a leading investigative journalist Think today's anti-abortion ideas are rooted in religious prohibitions or arguments about where life begins? today's anti-abortion movement is largely financed and planned by far-right extremists. Many of them are avowedly fascist and white supremacist, afraid of a "great replacement" of the world's white population by other races, who are working hard to reshape governments and policies across Europe, North America and around the world. Much of this far-right organizing and funding network, however, has been overlooked by today's feminist and left movements. As investigative journalist Sian Norris uncovers here, it is through attacking abortion rights that fascist ideas from the dark web, incel chat boards, and fringe organizations comes to enter mainstream debate -- and to then shape governmental policy across Europe, from authoritarian regimes like Hungary's to liberal democracies like Britain. As Norris goes undercover at anti-abortion activist meetings, and pieces together the money trail linking American think tanks to far-right fascist groups, she maps out the pipeline by which fascism has become respectable across the Global North by taking away women's reproductive rights and autonomy.