Surfer Girls in the New World Order

I was twelve years old when my mom moved to South Florida and I was first introduced to surf culture. My step-dad’s shed was filled with boards all different shapes and sizes and on the few rare occasions I did paddle out, it was always with him by my side—and with his help navigating the powerful ocean. I was interested and wanted to learn, but I was scared. I wouldn’t be good enough, I wasn’t strong enough, the boys would make fun of me, I’d get in their way, they wouldn’t like me.

A Chanukah Noel: A True Story

A Chanukah Noel is a welcome addition to the limited but much-needed canon of interfaith children’s books, and it has the particular additional benefit of being entirely secular. This combination of qualities already sets it apart from most Christmas picture books. The story is about a young Jewish girl named Charlotte who moves to rural France and struggles to fit in.

Queen Hereafter: A Novel of Margaret of Scotland

In days of yore, the bards were a respected and integral part of the English and Scottish courts because of their ability to recount tales of recent and past glories through their gift for musical storytelling. In Queen Hereafter, Susan Fraser King tells the grand and sweeping story of a young English princess who found refuge alongside her family—including her brother the rebel prince Edgar who was fighting for the crown of England—under the protection of Warrior-King Malcolm Canmore of Scotland. Princess Margaret was pious, willful, educated, and raised to be a queen, but wanted nothing more than to become a nun and worship God in a monastery. However, this was not to be her fate.

The Memory of Love

The Memory of Love is a slow and beautiful book. I'm not the biggest fan of art that proceeds at such a deliberate pace, but this is definitely at the top of the heap for such books; the descriptions are lovely and precise, every detail picked out with absolute care. I loved the representations of African life, which felt honest and authentic.

Scam: The First Four Issues!

Is it punk to drink when you’re flat broke? Is selling plasma or sniffing glue revolutionary? Is throwing shit off a Macy’s rooftop ever cool? Nearly twenty years after his zine was released in a series of diatribes about scamming the system and living on the edge of society, Erick Lyle’s writings as zinester Iggy Scam have been edited and bound for the masses.

Redemption In Indigo

Karen Lord hails from Barbados, and her novel, Redemption in Indigo, is inspired by African folklore. I was born in Africa, and raised on similar stories—the trickster spider Anansi is only the beginning of this genre.

Fast Girls: Erotica for Women

Fast. The word itself is a contradiction. By definition, fast can mean unrestrained and held tight; reckless and secure; promiscuous and faithful. A fast girl can be one way and then another or often both at once. A fast girl can be wild, even when caught in the firmest of knots. In Fast Girls, fast means quick thinking and quicker action. Fast girls see what they want and take it, cleverly making the most of circumstances around them.

The Woman with the Bouquet

Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt was been described as one of Europe’s most beloved authors and just a few pages into the first of the five short stories that comprise The Woman with the Bouquet, I began to seriously doubt that claim. Initially, “The Dreamer from Ostend” seemed heavy-handed and awkward in its formality, so much in fact that I found it difficult to focus on the story. However, I trudged forward, and I’m happy that I did.

Vegan Baking Classics: Delicious, Easy-to-Make Traditional Favorites

Kelly Rudnicki describes herself as a “busy mother of five young children,” the oldest of whom was “diagnosed with life-threatening food allergies to dairy, eggs, peanuts, tree nuts, and legumes.” Incorporating material from her blog, Rudnicki’s first book, The Food Allergy Mama’s Baking Book, began as Vegan Baking Classics. Although the title of the book situates it in vegan media culture, I found Rudnicki’s writing style, interests, and recipe descriptions more typical of parenting and food allergy books.

The Keening

A. LaFaye’s The Keening is one part poem, and one part novel. Though the narrative is strong, it is the layered, considered language, and the dance with fantasy that make this novel something special. Both a modern-day ghost story and young adult novel, the book is complex, something that can’t be tied to just one genre. This book’s protagonist, Lyza, lives with her father on the fringe of a Maine fishing village.

Platinum

One thing to know about Platinum is that it’s about women in the hip-hop industry—several types of women. To narrow it down, there are four voices compiling the novel, each one narrating a different perspective of the industry, each one fulfilling a particular role. There’s the rapper’s devoted wife who turns a blind eye and tolerates STDs due to his infidelities.

Feminaissance

French theorist Hélène Cixous first coined the term ècriture feminine in her 1975 essay “Laugh of the Medusa,” in which she wrote “Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies.” Within the essay, Cixous posited that women write their gender into their writing, that gender is embedded in the language women use.

Poser: My Life in Twenty-Three Yoga Poses

In Poser, Claire Dederer takes on two of the most en vogue trends for young women in the early twenty-first century: yoga and attachment parenting. After a liberated childhood, having been raised in Seattle in the 1970s and 1980s by parents who embraced many of the hippie ideals of the 1960s, Dederer took those lessons of freedom to heart.

Gay Bar: The Fabulous, True Story of a Daring Woman and Her Boys in the 1950s

Will Fellows has uncovered a gem with Gay Bar, a re-issue of the 1957 novel by Helen Branson. The original memoir, typed up on an old Polish typewriter, tells the tale of the gay establishment she operated in 1950s Los Angeles. The story revolves heavily around her clientele, a group of businessmen and entrepreneurs whom she affectionately refers to as “her boys.”