LGBTQ+
A hate crime strikes the house of Max, Brian, and their newly adopted son Donte. Clinging to his idealism, Max helps his family navigate this difficult time with grit, faith, and acceptance. This novel was written by Malcolm Varner of Grove City, Ohio who is a social worker and mental health advocate. He received his undergraduate degree from Oberlin and his MSSA from Case Western Reserve University.
Someone is murdering the homeless in Detroit's Cass Corridor--by immolation. These horrific crimes wouldn't require an investigation by Charlie Mack and her crack team investigators, except one of the burned bodies is her mother's friend. There's a lot wrong with this case: the police won't admit a serial killer is on the loose, drug trafficking intersects with the deaths, and a rogue cop is involved. The timing also couldn't be worse--Charlie and Mandy are finally moving in together. This case becomes the most difficult of Charlie's career when she transforms herself into a street person, and mixes with the corridor's gangs, do-gooders, and the down-and-out to uncover evidence the police can't continue to ignore.
There's only one place Joanna Kane can tell it like it is. Her journal:
I hate Terri Rubin, the woman I'm in love with. She called and told me she's dating a woman named Sonya. I hate this Sonya and I hate Terri and I hate myself because I was never like this in my life. Do you know what it's like to come out when you're in your forties, having menopausal symptoms, for God's sake, and then fall madly in love with someone? All of a sudden you're in adolescencefor the first time. You don't even recognize yourself. My whole adult life I was this cool, collected writer, strutting around in jeans and leather jacket, advising friends and siblings about their relationships, being a devoted daughter and a responsible professional person and a good citizen, and then one day I woke up and realized I was gay, and then this sassy woman walked into my life and I fell in love at first sight, after spending my life thinking that never really happened and only watching West Side Story because of the gangs. And now I've become the kind of person I used to make fun of, who becomes hysterical because her beloved tells her she's dating some woman named Sonya who has an apothecary store in Bethesda, Maryland.
I'm sick of being in this endless rut, I'm sick of Cleveland, and I'm thinking of moving to Washington, DC to be with Terri Rubin who I hate.
A revolutionary memoir about domestic abuse by the award-winning author of Her Body and Other Parties
In the Dream House is Carmen Maria Machado's engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad, and a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing relationship with a charismatic but volatile woman, Machado struggles to make sense of how what happened to her shaped the person she was becoming. And it's that struggle that gives the book its original structure: each chapter is driven by its own narrative trope--the haunted house, erotica, the bildungsroman--through which Machado holds the events up to the light and examines them from different angles. She looks back at her religious adolescence, unpacks the stereotype of lesbian relationships as safe and utopian, and widens the view with essayistic explorations of the history and reality of abuse in queer relationships. Machado's dire narrative is leavened with her characteristic wit, playfulness, and openness to inquiry. She casts a critical eye over legal proceedings, fairy tales, Star Trek, and Disney villains, as well as iconic works of film and fiction. The result is a wrenching, riveting book that explodes our ideas about what a memoir can do and be.
Amazon's Best Biographies and Memoirs of 2017 List
"This touching memoir of the late neurologist Oliver Sacks, by a photographer and writer with whom he fell in love near the end of his life, turns a story of death into a celebration." --The New Yorker
A beautifully written once-in-a-lifetime book, about love, about life, soul, and the wonderful loving genius Oliver Sacks, and New York, and laughter and all of creation. --Anne Lamott
The performance art of burlesque, once a faded form, has made a comeback in the twenty-first century, and it has shimmied back to life with a vengeance in Cleveland. Thanks to fans and entrepreneurs, neo-burlesque has taken the stage--and it's more inclusive, less seedy, and emphatically fun.
Rust Belt Burlesque traces the history of burlesque in Cleveland from the mid-1800s to the present day, while also telling the story of Bella Sin, a Mexican immigrant who largely drove Northeast Ohio's neo-burlesque comeback. The historical center of Cleveland burlesque was the iconic Roxy Theater on East Ninth Street. Here, in its twentieth-century heyday, famed dancers like Blaze Starr and comics like Red Skelton and Abbott and Costello entertained both regulars and celebrity guests.
Erin O'Brien's lively storytelling and Bob Perkoski's color photos give readers a peek into the raucous Ohio Burlesque Festival that packs the house at the Beachland Ballroom every year. Today's burlies come in all shapes, ethnicities, and orientations, drawing a legion of adoring fans. This is a show you won't want to miss.
One of NPR's "Best Books of 2020," and winner of the 2020 Independent Publisher Awards' gold medal for LGBTQ+ nonfiction, Raechel Anne Jolie's blazing memoir is now available in paperback.
Raechel Anne Jolie's early life in a working-class Cleveland exurb was full of race cars, Budweiser-drinking men, and the women who loved them. When she was four, though, her life changed forever when her father was hit by a drunk driver and suffered a debilitating brain injury.
Rust Belt Femme is the chronicle of her survival. Fearlessly honest, wry, and tender, Jolie digs into both the pain of past traumas and the joy of teenaged discovery to craft a love letter to the brassy, big-haired women who raised her and the 90s alternative, riot grrrl culture that shaped her into who she is today: a queer femme with PTSD and a deep love of the Midwest.
Personal and political, lyrical and fierce, Rust Belt Femme speaks to anyone who was once a misfit kid trying to find their place in the world.