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Cover of Bad Girls

Other Press

Bad Girls

Camila Sosa Villada

€17.00

Gritty and unflinching, yet also tender, fantastical, and funny, a trans woman’s coming-of-age tale about finding a community among fellow outcasts.

Born in the small Argentine town of Mina Clavero, Camila is designated male but begins to identify from an early age as a girl. She is well aware that she’s different from other children and reacts to her oppressive, poverty-stricken home life, with a cowed mother and abusive, alcoholic father, by acting out—with swift consequences. Deeply intelligent, she eventually leaves for the city to attend university, slipping into prostitution to make ends meet. And in Sarmiento Park, in the heart of Córdoba, she discovers the strange, wonderful world of the trans sex workers who dwell there.

Taken under the wing of Auntie Encarna, the 178-year-old eternal whose house shelters this unconventional extended family, Camila becomes a part of their stories—of a Headless Man who fled his country’s wars, a mute young woman who transforms into a bird, an abandoned baby boy who brings a twinkle to your eye.

Camila Sosa Villada’s extraordinary first novel is a rich, nuanced portrait of a marginalized community: their romantic relationships, friendships and squabbles, difficulties at work, aspirations and disappointments. It bears witness to these lives constantly haunted by the specter of death—by disease or more violent means at the hands of customers, boyfriends, or the police—yet full of passion, empathy, and insight.

Published in 2024 ┊ 208 pages ┊ Language: English

recommendations

Cover of One hundred and six EROTIC short stories

Extra Extra

One hundred and six EROTIC short stories

Fiction €27.50

To be erotic is to be alive. In this collection of erotic short stories, desire and imagination meet in stairwells, apartments, bars and glances that linger just a little longer. Commissioned for and first published in Extra Extra magazine, these unique stories range from vibrant encounters of mere minutes to hours of simmering tension.

Carefully curated and unapologetic in its imagination, it’s an invitation into a literary space shaped by lust and longing.

One Hundred and six erotic short stories contains erotic stories by Obe Alkema, Karin Amatmoekrim, Mischa Andriessen, Sarah Arnolds, Simone Atangana Bekono, Gerbrand Bakker, Maria Barnas, Leonieke Baerwaldt, Persis Bekkering, Abdelkader Benali, Hannah van Binsbergen, Marion Bloem, Fiep van Bodegom, Daan Borrel, Charlotte van den Broeck, Saskia de Coster, Eelco Couvreur, Daniël Dee, Nikki Dekker, Maxime Garcia Diaz, Don Duyns, Rob van Essen, Edwin Fagel, Mira Feticu, Moya De Feyter, Andy Fierens, Gamal Fouad, Johan Fretz, Steff Geelen, Maureen Ghazal, Arnon Grunberg, Esha Guy Hadjadj, Thomas Heerma van Voss, Mariken Heitman, Tom Hofland, Philip Huff, Auke Hulst, Nicole Kaandorp, Asha Karami, Maite Karssenberg, Mensje van Keulen, Emy Koopman, Falun Ellie Koos, Willemijn Kranendonk, Selin Kuşçu, Rachida Lamrabet, Jordi Lammers, Wietske Leenders, Sandro van der Leeuw, Sun Li, Gilles van der Loo, Hannah Chris Lomans, Alma Mathijsen, Kiriko Mechanicus, Jens Meijen, Lars Meijer, Carmien Michels, Kaweh Modiri, Roelof ten Napel, Richard de Nooy, Joost Oomen, Jamal Ouariachi, Iduna Paalman, Gustaaf Peek, Elvis Peeters, Froukje van der Ploeg, Marja Pruis, Julius Reynders, Hannah Roels, Astrid H. Roemer, Martin Rombouts, Daniël Rovers, Alfred Schaffer, Marijke Schermer, Koen Sels, Vamba Sherif, Frank Siera, Louise Souvagie, Yentl van Stokkum, Florence Tonk, Elfie Tromp, Joost Vandecasteele, Dominique van Varsseveld, Annelies Verbeke, Peter Verhelst, Wytske Versteeg, Daniël Vis, Dirk Vis, Sven Vitse, Maria Vlaar, Marwin Vos, Nadia de Vries, Niña Weijers, Han van Wieringen, Romy Day Winkel, Maartje Wortel, Pete Wu, Kira Wuck, Mia You, and Ivo Victoria

Cover of Cockfight

Feminist Press

Cockfight

María Fernanda Ampuero

Fiction €16.00

Thirteen stories explore domestic horrors and everyday violence, providing an intimate and unflinching portrait of twenty-first-century Latin America.

Named one of the ten best fiction books of 2018 by the New York Times en Español, Cockfight is the debut work by Ecuadorian writer and journalist María Fernanda Ampuero.

In lucid and compelling prose, Ampuero sheds light on the hidden aspects of the home: the grotesque realities of family, coming of age, religion, and class struggle. A family’s maids witness a horrible cycle of abuse, a girl is auctioned off by a gang of criminals, and two sisters find themselves at the mercy of their spiteful brother. With violence masquerading as love, characters spend their lives trapped reenacting their past traumas.

Cover of Darryl

Divided Publishing

Darryl

Jackie Ess

Fiction €16.00

Darryl Cook is a cuckold, and that’s exactly how he likes it. He has an inheritance that spares him from work, a manageable and seemingly consequence-free drug habit, and a lovely wife called Mindy who’s generally game for anything—and for as much of it as she can get. But after an accidental overdose and some serious oversharing, Darryl’s world begins to crack up. Tormented by what seems to be the secret truth in sex, and less assured of that secret’s form, Darryl steps into what used to be called real life . . . Darryl is a disarmingly funny and unabashedly intelligent look at a community of people parsing masculinity, marriage, sex (and love) on their own terms.

Underneath the sharp satire and hilarious sexual irreverence this is a deadly serious book: a brilliant novel of a seeker, like The Pilgrim’s Progress refracted by queer internet culture. —Torrey Peters

Ess is what I might call a burgeoning cult literary figure, armed with an unmistakable lyric deadpan and a taste for provocative subject matter. — Stephen Ira, Poetry Project

What Darryl is looking for is a crisis of sufficient severity that it will cause him to feel real to himself. — Dominic Fox, Review 31

Cover of Reverse Cowgirl

Semiotext(e)

Reverse Cowgirl

McKenzie Wark

Fiction €16.00

McKenzie Wark invents a new genre for another gender: not a memoir but an auto-ethnography of the opacity of the self.

Another genre for another gender.

What if you were trans and didn't know it? What if there were some hole in your life and you didn't even know it was there? What if you went through life not knowing why you only felt at home in your body at peak moments of drugs and sex? What if you expended your days avoiding an absence, a hole in being? Reverse Cowgirl is not exactly a memoir. The author doesn't, in the end, have any answers as to who she really is or was, although maybe she figures out what she could become.

Traveling from Sydney in the 1980s to New York today, Reverse Cowgirl is a comedy of errors, chronicling the author's failed attempts at being gay and at being straight across the shifting political and media landscapes of the late twentieth century. Finding that the established narratives of being transgender don't seem to apply to her, Wark borrows from the genres of autofiction, fictocriticism, and new narrative to create a writing practice that can discover the form of a life outside existing accounts of trans experience: an auto-ethnography of the opacity of the self.

Cover of Beloved

Vintage

Beloved

Toni Morrison

Fiction €18.00

Staring unflinchingly into the abyss of slavery, this spellbinding novel transforms history into a story as powerful as Exodus and as intimate as a lullaby. 

Sethe, its protagonist, was born a slave and escaped to Ohio, but eighteen years later she is still not free. She has too many memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. And Sethe's new home is haunted by the ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved. Filled with bitter poetry and suspense as taut as a rope, Beloved is a towering achievement by Nobel Prize laureate Toni Morrison.