A Finalist for the 2025 Lambda Literary Award for LGBTQIA+ AnthologyThrough essays, short stories, and poems, Swagger documents the butch experience by highlighting butch stories and butch voices, which often go unheard or are misunderstood. Books can be mirrors and windows—reflecting our lives back to us or opening them up to others. The writers featured in the pages inside have bravely shared their stories and their hearts with the intent that this antho...

My Mother Says Drums Are For Boys is a humorous and heartfelt memoir comprised of stories about that middle place where boy and girl collide. Rae Theodore grew up as a young butch (or tomboy, as it was called back in the day), wanting to play the drums, wear football jerseys like her brother and always be in close proximity to Olivia Newton-John. She’s tried to conform to gender norms at different points in her life. She really has. It wasn’t until Rae came out later in life and embraced t...

Leaving Normal: Adventures in Gender is a literary memoir that takes an unflinching, humorous and sometimes heartbreaking look at living as a masculine-centered woman in a pink/blue, boy-girl, M/F world. It's a story for anyone who has ever felt different, especially those living in the gender margins without a rulebook.

Readers have followed New York Times bestselling author Jen Lancaster through job loss, sucky city living, weight loss attempts, and 1980s nostalgia. Now, in this bitter and witty memoir, Jen chronicles her efforts to achieve cultural enlightenment, with some hilarious missteps and genuine moments of inspiration along the way.Jen uses any means necessary on her quest to better herself: reading canonical literature, viewing classic films, attending the oper...

In Such a Pretty Fat, Jen Lancaster learned how to come to terms with her body. In My Fair Lazy, she expanded her mind. Now the New York Times bestselling author gives herself—and her generation—a kick in the X, by facing her greatest challenge to date: acting her age.Jen is finally ready to put away childish things (except her Barbie Styling Head, of course) and embrace the investment-making, mortgage-carrying, life-insurance-having adult she’s become. F...

Jen Lancaster's cultural inferiority complex had to come from somewhere...and now fans can find out where in this hilarious New York Times bestselling memoir from the author of Bitter is the New Black.Before she was bitter, before she was lazy, Jen Lancaster was a badge-hungry Junior Girl Scout with a knack for extortion, an aspiring sorority girl who didn't know her Coach from her Louis Vuitton, and a budding executive who found herself bewildere...

Jen Lancaster hates to burst your happy little bubble, but life in the big city isn't all it's cracked up to be. Contrary to what you see on TV and in the movies, most urbanites aren't party-hopping in slinky dresses and strappy stilettos. But lucky for us, Lancaster knows how to make the life of the lower crust mercilessly funny and infinitely entertaining.Whether she's reporting rude neighbors to Homeland Security, harboring a crush on her grocery store clerk, or fightin...

The "hilarious" (New York Times Book Review) collection of short stories from the award-winning humorist Simon Rich includes the story that inspired the Seth Rogen comedy An American Pickle.Twenty years ago, Barney the Dinosaur told the nation's children they were special. We're still paying the price.From "one of the funniest writers in America" comes a collection of stories culled from the front lines of the millennial culture wars (Jimm...

These poems topics range from hate crimes to playgrounds, from international conflict to hometowns, from falling in love to the desperation of loneliness. Gibsons work seizes us by the collar and hauls us inside some of her darkest moments, then releases us out the other side. 

We all dream about it, but Wade Rouse actually did it. Discover his journey to live the simple life in this hilarious memoir.Finally fed up with the frenzy of city life and a job he hates, Wade Rouse decided to make either the bravest decision of his life or the worst mistake since his botched Ogilvie home perm: to uproot his life and try, as Thoreau did some 160 years earlier, to "live a plain, simple life in radically reduced conditions."In this rollickin...

Stonewall Book Award Honor Book winner; Hilary Weston Writers' Trust of Canada Prize for Non-Fiction finalistIvan Coyote is a celebrated storyteller and the author of ten previous books, including Gender Failure (with Rae Spoon) and One in Every Crowd, a collection for LGBT youth. Tomboy Survival Guide is a funny and moving memoir told in stories, in which Ivan recounts the pleasures and difficulties of growing up a tomboy in Canada’s Yuk...

**AN ALA BEST BOOK FOR YOUNG ADULTS PICK • A brave teen stands tall amidst the walls of a judgmental academy, flaunting his unique, glamorous, and unapologetic self.“Gutsy, funny, over-the-top Bill Bloom is a profile in courage.”—The Washington Post“Freak Show has it all. It’s hilarious, sad, sexy, and glamorous—just the way life should be.”—Perez Hilton“A groundbreaking, eve-opening, romantic, bittersweet story of one boy’s determination to seek a...