For the last seven years, I’ve worked with art and artists, particularly those who prioritize spaces like nightclubs as spaces of expression. Museums and nightclubs have both helped me bring my fullest self to fruition, from my queer experiences to my immigrant experiences. I believe something magical resides within those spaces that connect friends, family, and music, and it remains difficult to put a finger on, but you recognize it when you see it. These books are just a taste of a way to better understand that experience of collectivity—across love, friendship, and art—and I hope you enjoy them as much as I have!
I wrote
Dancing on My Own: Essays on Art, Collectivity, and Joy
I have always felt that parties sometimes feel more than parties, that there is something unruly and magical in a group of people coming together. Ehrenreich’s book gave me a longer view of the history and potential of what she calls “collective joy”—its political, social, and spiritual power.
Ehrenreich is a kind and accessible writer and covers a broad range of topics and geographies in the history of “parties.”
In Dancing in the Streets Ehrenreich uncovers the origins of communal celebration in human biology and culture. She discovers that the same elements come up in every human culture throughout history: a love of masking, carnival, music-making and dance. Although sixteenth-century Europeans began to view mass festivities as foreign and 'savage', Ehrenreich shows that they were indigenous to the West, from the ancient Greek's worship of Dionysus to the medieval practices of Christianity as a 'danced religion'. Exhilarating in its scholarly range, humane, witty and impassioned, Dancing in the Streets will generate debate and soul-searching.
I loved Hewitt’s writing style; it’s lush and intimate and deeply personal, and overall a heartwrenching queer memoir about loving someone who doesn’t want to love themselves anymore.
Trained as a poet, Hewitt has a knack for turning very mundane personal experiences into luminous scenes infused with spirituality.
A luminous memoir from the prize-winning poet - a story of love, heartbreak and coming of age, and a tender exploration of queer identity.
'Beautiful' Colm Toibin 'Rapturous' New York Times 'Extraordinary' Observer 'Stunning' Sunday Times
When Sean meets Elias, the two fall headlong into a love story. But as Elias struggles with severe depression, the couple comes face to face with crisis.
Wrestling with this, Sean Hewitt delves deep into his own history, enlisting the ghosts of queer figures and poets before him. From a nineteenth-century cemetery in Liverpool to the pine forests of Gothenburg, Hewitt plumbs the darkness…
Homeless following the death of his adoptive parents in a car crash and the subsequent loss of their farm tenancy, Seb decides to enrol as a residential student at the Asklepios Foundation, a College of Natural Medicine, boasting a sanctuary modelled on an ancient Greek healing temple. Spending a night…
I was genuinely surprised and challenged by this inventive book by Cathy Park Hong that follows a mysterious translator into a dystopic new world.
Written in a pygin that combines over ten different languages, this poetry collection is deeply weird but oddly moving, despite its formal inventiveness, and connects politics to poetry in a novel and haunting way.
Named one of the Los Angeles Times's Best Science Fiction Books in 2007, Dance Dance Revolution is a genre-bending tour de force told from the perspective of the Guide, a former dissident and tour guide of an imagined desert city.
Growing up, I craved gay love stories because they didn’t seem possible; when I read Miller’s adaptation of Achilles and Patroclus’ relationship from Greek Myth, I began to think that we’d been here all along.
I was so taken by this love story that I read fan fiction about it for months afterward, trying to prolong the afterglow for as long as I could. I cried, danced, and cried again.
**OVER 1.5 MILLION COPIES SOLD** **A 10th ANNIVERSARY SPECIAL EDITION, FEATURING A NEW FOREWORD BY THE AUTHOR**
WINNER OF THE ORANGE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION THE INTERNATIONAL SENSATION A SUNDAY TIMES AND NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
'Captivating' DONNA TARTT 'I loved it' J K ROWLING 'Ravishingly vivid' EMMA DONOGHUE
Greece in the age of heroes. Patroclus, an awkward young prince, has been exiled to the court of King Peleus and his perfect son Achilles. Despite their differences, Achilles befriends the shamed prince, and as they grow into young men skilled in the arts of war and medicine, their bond blossoms…
Sea Sagas of the North is about story and transformation.
Story is a simple device common to every human culture. Put simply, the patterns of good story match the shapes of our lives. Story was once tales told at every flickering fireside, the children’s faces upturned and wide-eyed. Now it…
In the rhapsodic, 90-page first essay, Heart Museum of Chew-Bose’s collection, she gushes in the most eloquent way possible about simply…being alive.
This book is a trojan horse, considering topics like race, identity, and creativity without branding itself as such. Instead, Chew-Bose seeks to render her object—emotions—in as acute detail as possible. I relate to and aspire to her sensibility. Like Chew-Bose, I want to be “a critic who prefers the term “enthusiast,” and an essayist who worries [he’s] really a poet.”
Named a best book of 2017 by NPR, The Guardian, Slate, NYLON and The Globe and Mail (Canada)
From Durga Chew-Bose, “one of our most gifted, insightful essayists and critics” (Nylon), comes "a warmly considered meld of criticism and memoir" (New Yorker), a lyrical and piercingly insightful debut collection of essays about identity and culture.
Too Much and Not the Mood is a beautiful and surprising exploration of what it means to be a first-generation, creative young woman working today. On April 11, 1931, Virginia Woolf ended her entry in A Writer’s Diary with the words “too much and not…
In its shortest form, the book is about family and art that is about family—but family in the broadest sense—my actual family, my art family, and my friends.
As a memoir, it’s about my life in the years after I graduated, living in New York from 2017 to 2022, trying to make sense of the transformations in art, fashion, and identity politics that were happening around me, and also still trying to have fun.
Cities of Women is a dual timeline novel that interweaves the contemporary story of Verity Frazier, a disillusioned professor lacking passion and love in her life, with the tale of a medieval woman, who transforms herself into the artist, Anastasia, an unidentified illuminator of the manuscripts of the historical Christine…
Upon the Corner of the Moon begins the story of real people who’ve been rewritten into emblems of evil. Macbeth is raised in the royal court, immersed in Christian teachings and guided toward leadership alongside his foster-brother and rival, Duncan. Gruach is raised in the traditions of a Goddess religion…
