The House Of Impossible Beauties

NAMED A RECOMMENDED BOOK OF 2018 BY Buzzfeed • The Wall Street Journal • The Millions • Southern Living • Bustle • Esquire • Entertainment Weekly • Nylon• Mashable • Libary Journal • Thrillist “Cassaras’s propulsive and profound first novel, finding one’s home in the world—particularly in a subculture plagued by fear and intolerance from society—comes with tragedy as well as extraordinary personal freedom.” -- Esquire A gritty and gorgeous debut that follows a cast of gay and transgender club kids navigating the Harlem ball scene of the 1980s and ’90s, inspired by the real House of Xtravaganza made famous by the seminal documentary Paris Is Burning It’s 1980 in New York City, and nowhere is the city’s glamour and energy better reflected than in the burgeoning Harlem ball scene, where seventeen-year-old Angel first comes into her own. Burned by her traumatic past, Angel is new to the drag world, new to ball culture, and has a yearning inside of her to help create family for those without. When she falls in love with Hector, a beautiful young man who dreams of becoming a professional dancer, the two decide to form the House of Xtravaganza, the first-ever all-Latino house in the Harlem ball circuit. But when Hector dies of AIDS-related complications, Angel must bear the responsibility of tending to their house alone. As mother of the house, Angel recruits Venus, a whip-fast trans girl who dreams of finding a rich man to take care of her; Juanito, a quiet boy who loves fabrics and design; and Daniel, a butch queen who accidentally saves Venus’s life. The Xtravaganzas must learn to navigate sex work, addiction, and persistent abuse, leaning on each other as bulwarks against a world that resists them. All are ambitious, resilient, and determined to control their own fates, even as they hurtle toward devastating consequences. Told in a voice that brims with wit, rage, tenderness, and fierce yearning, The House of Impossible Beauties is a tragic story of love, family, and the dynamism of the human spirit.

"[A] glorious, glittery saga of friendship and loss... I read The Air You Breathe in two nights. (One might say I inhaled it.)." --NPR "Echoes of Elena Ferrante resound in this sumptuous saga."--O, The Oprah Magazine "Enveloping...Peebles understands the shifting currents of female friendship, and she writes so vividly about samba that you close the book certain its heroine's voices must exist beyond the page." -People The story of an intense female friendship fueled by affection, envy and pride--and each woman's fear that she would be nothing without the other. Some friendships, like romance, have the feeling of fate. Skinny, nine-year-old orphaned Dores is working in the kitchen of a sugar plantation in 1930s Brazil when in walks a girl who changes everything. Graça, the spoiled daughter of a wealthy sugar baron, is clever, well fed, pretty, and thrillingly ill behaved. Born to wildly different worlds, Dores and Graça quickly bond over shared mischief, and then, on a deeper level, over music. One has a voice like a songbird; the other feels melodies in her soul and composes lyrics to match. Music will become their shared passion, the source of their partnership and their rivalry, and for each, the only way out of the life to which each was born. But only one of the two is destined to be a star. Their intimate, volatile bond will determine each of their fortunes--and haunt their memories. Traveling from Brazil's inland sugar plantations to the rowdy streets of Rio de Janeiro's famous Lapa neighborhood, from Los Angeles during the Golden Age of Hollywood back to the irresistible drumbeat of home, The Air You Breathe unfurls a moving portrait of a lifelong friendship--its unparalleled rewards and lasting losses--and considers what we owe to the relationships that shape our lives.

"This novel is told from alternating viewpoints of two cousins--a former model and a woman with a disability--who run a café in south St. Louis, Mo., in the 1990s and face challenges with love, adoption, the law, and urban life"--Provided by publisher.

A necessary reconceptualization of Latinx identity, literature, and politics In Latinx Revolutionary Horizons, Renee Hudson theorizes a liberatory latinidad that is not yet here and conceptualizes a hemispheric project in which contemporary Latinx authors return to earlier moments of revolution. Rather than viewing Latinx as solely a category of identification, she argues for an expansive, historicized sense of the term that illuminates its political potential. Claiming the “x” in Latinx as marking the suspension and tension between how Latin American descended people identify and the future politics the “x” points us toward, Hudson contends that latinidad can signal a politics grounded in shared struggles and histories rather than merely a mode of identification. In this way, Latinx Revolutionary Horizons reads against current calls for cancelling latinidad based on its presumed anti-Black and anti-Indigenous framework. Instead, she examines the not-yet-here of latinidad to investigate the connection between the revolutionary history of the Americas and the creation of new genres in the hemisphere, from conversion narratives and dictator novels to neoslave narratives and testimonios. By comparing colonialisms, she charts a revolutionary genealogy across a range of movements such as the Mexican Revolution, the Filipino People Power Revolution, resistance to Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, and the Cuban Revolution. In pairing nineteenth-century authors alongside contemporary Latinx ones, Hudson examines a longer genealogy of Latinx resistance while expanding its literary canon, from the works of José Rizal and Martin Delany to those of Julia Alvarez, Jessica Hagedorn, and Leslie Marmon Silko. In imagining a truly transnational latinidad, Latinx Revolutionary Horizons thus rewrites our understanding of the nationalist formations that continue to characterize Latinx Studies.

Argues for the political potential of drag and trans performance in Puerto Rico and its diaspora

Written for entry-level survey courses in queer or LGBTQ+ Studies for students from all majors, this engaging text covers a wide range of topics. Early chapters consider the meaning of “queer” and examine identities such as trans, bi, and intersex. Intersections between sexuality/gender expression and other identities such as race, ethnicity, and class are also examined. The book then reviews life experiences such as families, friendship, religion and spirituality, health, and politics through the lens of queerness. Queer Studies: Beyond Binaries: -Engages undergraduates with a narrative that applies key ideas to their own lives and experiences -Questions various binaries (“either/or” pairings) to help students examine their own sexual identity and gender expression -Reviews foundational concepts from queer theory and queer history to create a deeper understanding of the concepts -Emphasizes an intersectionality approach that demonstrates how one’s identity is the product of multiple characteristics such as sexuality, gender, race, class, and dis/ability -Uses a multidisciplinary approach drawing from the social and natural sciences, humanities, and arts to provide a broad overview of perspectives -Details an individual or an event in Spotlight on sections to highlight the experiences of queer people. -Provides questions for class discussion or field activities in Issues for Investigation sections that apply the ideas covered in the chapter -Allows instructors to shape the class with different foci using the stand-alone chapters in Part III -Features an Instructor’s resource manual available to adopters with 20+ PowerPoint slides for each chapter, sample syllabi for a variety of courses, teaching tips for using the Spotlight On and Issues for Investigation sections and the suggested readings, a test bank with objective and essay questions, and student aids such as keywords, chapter outlines and summaries, and learning objectives Designed for undergraduate courses in queer or LGBT+ Studies requiring no prerequisites, Queer Studies: Beyond Binaries also serves as an excellent supplement in courses on queer theory or history, or on sexuality, gender, and women’s studies.

In 1940, the handsome, athletic, and charismatic David Sparsholt arrives at Oxford University to study engineering, unaware of his effect on others—especially on Evert Dax, the lonely son of a celebrated novelist who is destined to become a writer himself. Spanning three generations, The Sparsholt Affair plumbs the ways the friendship between these two men will influence their lives—and the lives of others’—for decades to come. Richly observed and emotionally charged, this is a dazzling novel of fathers and sons, of family and legacy, and of the longing for permanence amid life’s inevitable transience.

When a group of social activists arrives in a small town, the lives and beliefs of residents and outsiders alike are upended, in this wry, embracing novel. Big Burr, Kansas, is the kind of place where everyone seems to know everyone, and everyone shares the same values—or keeps their opinions to themselves. But when a national nonprofit labels Big Burr “the most homophobic town in the US” and sends in a task force of queer volunteers as an experiment—they’ll live and work in the community for two years in an attempt to broaden hearts and minds—no one is truly prepared for what will ensue. Furious at being uprooted from her life in Los Angeles and desperate to fit in at her new high school, Avery fears that it’s only a matter of time before her “gay crusader” mom outs her. Still grieving the death of her son, Linda welcomes the arrivals, who know mercifully little about her past. And for Christine, the newcomers are not only a threat to the comforting rhythms of Big Burr life, but a call to action. As tensions roil the town, cratering relationships and forcing closely guarded secrets into the light, everyone must consider what it really means to belong. Told with warmth and wit, Under the Rainbow is a poignant, hopeful articulation of our complicated humanity that reminds us we are more alike than we’d like to admit.