A provocative book by an acclaimed writer-filmmaker that combines memoir and media as seen through a trans lensFollowing the death of the family patriarch, a box of newly procured family documents reveals writer-filmmaker Chase Joynt's previously unknown connection to Canadian media maverick Marshall McLuhan. Vantage Points takes up the surprising appearance of McLuhan in Joynt's family archive as a way to think about legacies of childhood sexual abuse and...

YOLT explores two artists’ lives before and after transitions: from female to male, and from near-dead to alive.The unspoken promise was that in our second life we would become the question to every answer, jumping across borders until they finally dissolve. Man and woman. Queer and straight.What if it's not true that you only live once? In this genre-transcending book, trans writer and media artist Chase Joynt and HIV-positive movie artis...

Hailed as groundbreaking upon its original release, the Oscar-winning film Boys Don’t Cry offered the first mainstream access to transmasculine embodiment in North America, one that many simultaneously celebrated and rejected. More than two decades after its original release, the film has become a lightning rod for contemporary debates about the representation of trans lives and deaths on screen.Representational possibilities for trans people have changed dramatically sinc...

Hailed as groundbreaking upon its original release, the Oscar-winning film Boys Don’t Cry offered the first mainstream access to transmasculine embodiment in North America, one that many simultaneously celebrated and rejected. More than two decades after its original release, the film has become a lightning rod for contemporary debates about the representation of trans lives and deaths on screen.Representational possibilities for trans people have changed dramatically sinc...

Finalist, Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for NonfictionA provocative book by an acclaimed writer–filmmaker that combines memoir and media as seen through a trans lensFollowing the death of the family patriarch, a box of newly procured family documents reveals writer–filmmaker Chase Joynt’s previously unknown connection to Canadian media maverick Marshall McLuhan. Vantage Points takes up the surprising appearance of McLuhan in J...

Shrill is an uproarious memoir, a feminist rallying cry in a world that thinks gender politics are tedious and that women, especially feminists, can't be funny.Coming of age in a culture that demands women be as small, quiet, and compliant as possible -- like a porcelain dove that will also have sex with you -- writer and humoristLindy West quickly discovered that she was anything but.From a painfully shy childhood in which she tried, unsuccessfull...

These widely acclaimed essays from the bestselling author of Infinite Jest -- on television, tennis, cruise ships, and more -- established David Foster Wallace as one of the preeminent essayists of his generation.In this exuberantly praised book -- a collection of seven pieces on subjects ranging from television to tennis, from the Illinois State Fair to the films of David Lynch, from postmodern literary theory to the supp...

The author of The End of Absence shares a "gorgeously written and fascinating" inquiry into the transformative power of being alone (Michael Finkel, New York Times best-selling author of True Story).The capacity to be alone, properly alone, is one of life's subtlest skills. Real solitude is a crucial ingredient for a rich interior life. It inspires reflection, allows creativity to flourish, and improves our relationships with ourselves and...

From personal loss to phantom diseases, The Empathy Exams is a bold and brilliant collection, winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction PrizeA Publishers Weekly Top Ten Essay Collection of Spring 2014Beginning with her experience as a medical actor who was paid to act out symptoms for medical students to diagnose, Leslie Jamison's visceral and revealing essays ask essential questions about our basic understanding of others: How shou...

Sixteen literary luminaries on the controversial subject of being childless by choice, in this critically acclaimed, bestselling anthologyOne of the most provocative and talked-about books of the year, Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed is the stunning collection exploring one of society’s most vexing taboos.One of the main topics of cultural conversation during the last decade was the supposed “fertility crisis,” and whether modern women could fi...

In this deeply smart and sneakily poignant collection of essays, the bestselling author of Fraud and Don’t Get Too Comfortable makes an inspired case for always assuming the worst—because then you’ll never be disappointed.Whether he’s taking on pop culture phenomena with Oscar Wilde-worthy wit or dealing with personal tragedy, Rakoff’s sharp observations and humorist’s flair for the absurd will have you positively reveling in the untapped power of negativity.

"We all know bad manners when we see them," NPR and Vanity Fair contributor Henry Alford observes at the beginning of his new book. But what, he asks, do good manners look like in our day and age? When someone answers their cell phone in the middle of dining with you, or runs you off the sidewalk with their doublewide stroller, or you enter a post-apocalyptic public restroom, the long-revered wisdom of Emily Post can seem downright prehistoric.Troubled by the absence of go...