Here are 100 books that The Pervert fans have personally recommended if you like
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My love for strange women began with a love of the tomboy, growing up in the ‘80s and 90’s with characters like Pippi Longstocking and George from The Famous Five. They’re young women who broke the rules of decorum or gender presentation—and they just always seemed to be having a lot more fun. Or at least more interesting experiences. This love of rebels and unruly women has stuck with me, and I think our depiction of women like this has become deeper and more varied. I just love a character who’s a bit of an odd duck, is irrepressible or voracious, or just plain messy. Nice is boring—give me the chaos.
Very few books have affected me more than this autobiographical Japanese manga. The book's author, artist, and protagonist is a young woman navigating her family relationships, mental health, and sexuality. In the grips of depression, desperate to be touched, the protagonist goes to an escort agency—but the plot is not the point.
Nagata’s willingness to “go there” feels so fresh, and is so vulnerable and heartfelt. As a queer person there was a lot to identify with, as a writer I took away a determination to try and be even half as vulnerable in my writing, and as a young woman I felt seen in a new way.
My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness is an honest and heartfelt look at one young woman's exploration of her sexuality, mental well-being, and growing up in our modern age. Told using expressive artwork that invokes both laughter and tears, this moving and highly entertaining single volume depicts not only the artist's burgeoning sexuality, but many other personal aspects of her life that will resonate with readers.
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
When I was a kid in the 80s the superhero comics I was obsessed with were beginning to deal with the real world in a new way. And their creators were beginning to push and pull at the boundaries of the medium with a new spirit of play and provocation. I still love comics that seriously deal with real life – its complexities and its profound weirdness – and that push the medium in new directions and reckon with its history. I also want to be absorbed and moved and to identify intently with characters. It’s what I try to do in my own work, and what I look for in that of others.
Everything Lynda Barry touches is earthy human gold.
One! Hundred! Demons! is one part memoir of a difficult childhood, one part comics how-to, and six parts warmth and humor and unruly red hair. It isn’t quite as dark as some of her other work, though it certainly gestures in that direction at times.
It also exemplifies Barry’s knack for finding beauty and delight inside the most difficult, unfair garbage life can throw at you. Such a great book.
Inspired by a 16th-century Zen monk s painting of a hundred demons chasing each other across a long scroll, acclaimed cartoonist Lynda Barry confronts various demons from her life in seventeen full colour vignettes. In Barry s hand, demons are the life moments that haunt you, form you and stay with you: your worst boyfriend; kickball games on a warm summer night; watching your baby brother dance; the smell of various houses in the neighbourhood you grew up in; or the day you realize your childhood is long behind you and you are officially a teenager. As a cartoonist, Lynda…
Like most, I grew up reading the classic literature assigned to me at school. But what I always found lacking were characters and themes that related to me—a queer, poor, half-Mexican in 80’s rural Texas. I wanted to be a writer at an early age, but took a 15-year detour as an editor at DC Comics, Scholastic, and other big publishing houses. While there, I was proud to find new diverse talent with new perspectives and voices. Stories are magical when they act as windows through which we learn about others, but they can be even more powerful when they act as mirrors in which we can see ourselves.
The award-winning author of Stargazing does it again with a beautiful new fairy tale for any age. While it isn’t a reimagining of a specific tale, it has all the feels and tropes of a Disney movie—only we’re learning more about a budding friendship between a brilliant young dressmaker and a prince who struggles to be his true queer self.
If I had this story when I was a boy, I would have read it until the book fell apart and had to buy a new one. As it is now, it has a special place on my bookshelf—and in my heart.
A fairy tale for any age, Jen Wang's The Prince and the Dressmaker will steal your heart.
Paris, at the dawn of the modern age:
Prince Sebastian is looking for a bride—or rather, his parents are looking for one for him. Sebastian is too busy hiding his secret life from everyone. At night he puts on daring dresses and takes Paris by storm as the fabulous Lady Crystallia—the hottest fashion icon in the world capital of fashion!
Sebastian’s secret weapon (and best friend) is the brilliant dressmaker Frances—one of only two people who know the truth: sometimes this boy wears…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
I'm a queer author and illustrator who has always had a passion for unique and boundary-pushing comics and graphic novels. It's a genre that has spoken to me throughout my life and this list converges my love for the format as well as the subject matter that's impacted the most vulnerable and pivotal times of my own life. So much of my experience being alive has been about figuring out who I am, and that's what my own graphic novel deals with. It seems fitting that I'd recommend a list of books that details others doing the same as I have, but in their own way.
A modestly-paced and personally relatable tale of the author's experience volunteering for an invasive ivy cleanup crew. The semi-fictionalized account highlights various social struggles and teen drama as well as difficulties with personal identity along the way. The energy this book captures is palpable and it's very easy as a reader to be drawn into Hazel's retelling of their memorable experience throttling ivy with their peers, confronting their own fears and biases along the way.
When 17-year-old Hazel Newlevant takes a summer job
clearing ivy from the forest in her home town of Portland, Oregon, her only
expectation is to earn a little money. Homeschooled, affluent, and sheltered,
Hazel soon finds her job working side by side with at-risk teens to be an
initiation into a new world that she has no skill in navigating. This
uncomfortable and compelling memoir is an important story of a girl's awakening
to the racial insularity of her life, the power of white privilege, and the
hidden story of segregation in Portland.
For as long as I’ve enjoyed crime novels, I’ve always been drawn to the figure of the amateur detective. Something about the notion of the every(wo)man, forced to rely on their own wits and limited resources to solve the mystery and outsmart the killer (and sometimes the police!), has always appealed to me far more than that of the professional who does it for a living. When I wrote my first novel,In the Silence, I knew from the word “go” that I wanted to tap into this rich but often-overlooked vein of crime fiction with my own plucky amateur sleuth, determined to right the wrongs of the world.
I suspect one of the reasons I enjoy reading (and writing) about amateur detectives is that I’m instinctively drawn to stories of the dispossessed – those without a voice, forced to take matters into their own hands because the proper authorities won’t listen. Kirstin Innes’ debut novel, about a woman investigating the disappearance of her sex worker sister, is not for the fainthearted: a deep dive into a parallel world that foregrounds the voices of the women who inhabit it and challenges widely-held conceptions about them – namely that they’re all poor, pathetic victims in need of rescuing. Innes’ thorough research shines throughout, and the result is a compelling, informative, and thought-provoking novel that avoids the common tropes associated with the “dead hooker” subgenre of crime fiction.
Twenty-year-old Rona Leonard walks out of her sister Fiona's flat and disappears. Six years on, worn down by a tedious job, child care and the aching absence in her life, Fiona's existence is blown apart by the revelation that, before she disappeared, Rona worked as a prostitute. Determined to uncover the truth, Fiona embarks on a quest to investigate the industry that claimed her sister. Drawn into a complex world, Fiona's life tilts on its axis as she makes shocking discoveries that challenge everything she's ever believed ... Bittersweet, sensual and rich, Fishnet is a beautifully told story of love…
I spent nearly two decades as a highly successful corporate attorney. Or, perhaps I should say, a successful attorney with a crude mouth and a love for all things spandex. And my unabashed personality was a differentiator in my career—it allowed me to cut through the corporate nonsense and personally connect with my opposition. But my career imploded when I became the subject of overt sexual harassment in my workplace and my employer worked harder at a coverup than resolution. Rather than sell back my story through litigation, I decided to write openly about sexual empowerment in the face of systemic slut-shaming.
I agree, a non-fiction recommendation is a bit of a curve ball from a romance author! But Sex Workers Unite is well worth the mention because it has been such an overwhelming inspiration for my own writing.
This book is a gut-wrenching description of both the dehumanization of sex workers and the social ills we all suffer as a result. It is not just a call for social justice—it is a warning message for those willing to turn a blind eye to the marginalization of a disenfranchised group.
A provocative history that reveals how sex workers have been at the vanguard of social justice movements for the past fifty years while building a movement of their own that challenges our ideas about labor, sexuality, feminism, and freedom
Documenting five decades of sex-worker activism, Sex Workers Unite is a fresh history that places prostitutes, hustlers, escorts, call girls, strippers, and porn stars in the center of America’s major civil rights struggles. Although their presence has largely been ignored and obscured, in this provocative history Melinda Chateauvert recasts sex workers as savvy political organizers—not as helpless victims in need of…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
As a writer, I’ve been deeply influenced by Southern literature—especially the work of William Faulkner and Flannery O’Connor. Even though I’m not from the South myself, I am drawn to Southern writers’ immodesty. I believe much of contemporary literature is too timid. It is about the mundane, the everyday. It does not elevate; instead, it diminishes. Much of the literature of the South is biblical in its sensibilities. It is unafraid to deal with the big universal issues with language that is equally big and universal. It does not pander to modesty or postmodern selfconsciousness. It is audacious. It’s the kind of writing that made me want to write.
Franklin’s book is one of the key inspirations for my book, The Reapers Are the Angels. Combining a frontier western sensibility with Faulkner’s wicked gothic brutality, Franklin tells an engrossing tale of a young prostitute who finds herself mired in a world of outlaws, perverts, dandies, and murderers. Frantically running back and forth between high comedy and guttered grotesquerie, this story feels like it’s just barely clinging to its own rails—and that sense of dangerous tipping is what feels so thrilling about it. What Franklin inherits from Faulkner is a wide-eyed beguilement with degeneracy—or what Conrad would call a “fascination of the abomination.”
It's 1911 and the townsfolk of Old Texas, Alabama, have had enough. Every Saturday night for a year, E. O. Smonk has been destroying property, killing livestock, seducing women, cheating and beating men, all from behind the twin barrels of his Winchester 45-70 caliber over-and-under rifle. Syphilitic, consumptive, gouty, and goitered—an expert with explosives and knives—Smonk hates horses, goats, and the Irish, and it's high time he was stopped. But capturing old Smonk won't be easy—and putting him on trial could have shocking and disastrous consequences, considering the terrible secret the citizens of Old Texas are hiding.
As a young teenager, I lived in a small Texas town and loved touring the Victorian “gingerbread” homes full of antiques. I had an overwhelming desire to time travel back to the mid-1800s. When I learned of Diamond Bessie’s story, I was immediately intrigued because of the period, and also by the circumstances of her life. Why does a woman enter the world’s oldest profession? I discovered that I absolutely love research and “time traveled” back to that era by devouring everything I could get my hands on about life in the 19th century, especially for a marginalized woman like Bessie.
In my quest to learn about the inner lives of 19th-century prostitutes, I found three memoirs, all gold mines. Demi-mondaines always used a stage name and that’s what the eponymous Madeleine chose. Even though she wasn’t a writer by trade, her story as a young “public woman” in the 1890s is riveting, and heartbreaking. When Madeleine’s autobiography was first published by Harper & Brothers in 1919, it caused a scandal and led to a lawsuit against the publisher. Harper eventually successfully defended itself but still ended up withdrawing the book from circulation. It wouldn’t be available to the public again for nearly 70 years.
An insider's eloquent, moving account of life as a nineteenth century prostitute. This memoir offers a vivid account of brothel life in 1890s North Americain the city (Chicago, St. Louis), the Western boom town (Butte, Montana), and on the Canadian frontier. Containing the introductions to the 1919 and 1986 editions (by Judge Ben B. Lindsey and scholar Marcia Carlisle, respectively), its eponymous narrator offers great insight into the daily workings of both "high" and "low" class houses, as well as her relationships with madams, clientele, and members of the "legitimate" society in which prostitution flourished.
I began my freelance career as a travel writer, though I now also write about drinks. While living in London I worked for a while at the men’s magazine, Mayfair, and around that time went out for several months with a woman who was a stripper. I didn’t know that when we met, so judged her by her personality not her profession. One of the magazine’s models was murdered, and one of the staff questioned by police. He was totally innocent. I wanted to write the kind of book I like reading, bringing together those two storylines to create a fictional version of a very real part of London life.
I absolutely loved this book, set in the London of the 1960s. It starts with the murder of a prostitute and takes you into the shady world of Soho with its drugs and clubs, its swingers and its singers. A young PC is assigned to work with the CID to catch the killer, as he found the body. The writing is vivid and it appeals as the murder, though central, is only part of a broader picture of the London of that era.
A gripping crime novel inspired by the "Jack the Stripper" killings in 1960s London.
Bad Penny Blues is the latest gripping crime fiction from Cathi Unsworth, London's undisputed queen of noir. Set in late 1950s and early 1960s London, it is loosely based on the West London "Jack the Stripper" killings that rocked the city. The narrative follows police officer Pete Bradley, who investigates the serial killings of a series of prostitutes, and, in a parallel story, Stella, part of the art and fashion worlds of 1960s "Swinging London," who is haunted by visions of the murdered women.
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
As a university professor, I often teach popular women’s writing, and I realized that I needed to teach Latinx popular fiction as well. Women’s popular writing in the United States reflects but also shapes the way women see themselves in a global neoliberal world. After I had written an article on class and Chicanx and Latinx fiction, I also realized that class and race are key to thinking about how Latinas/Chicanas both create and follow market trends in an effort to “better” themselves in addition to showing how various Latinas/Chicanas see each other in terms of race, ethnicity, and gender.
I also write about this book in my work. I again have problems with it, but it gives a kind of slice-of-life snapshot of Cuban life at that moment (around 2005), and especially about jineteras, or “jockeys,” women who supplement their income by going out with wealthy foreigners. Doing research on that book gave me a look at Cuba that was invaluable. And it is sometimes funny. It serves as a kind of coda to my book in that it reproduces many of the rhetorical moves of other chica lit but in a completely different setting.
Based on the wildly popular, semi-autobiographical "Havana Honey" series published by Salon.com, Dirty Blonde and Half-Cuban is a gritty portrait of one woman's determination to infiltrate modern Cuba and find the father she has never known.
While on her search, privileged American Alysia Briggs ends up broke and alone in Havana. She's then forced to adopt the life of the jineteras -- educated Cuban women who supplement a desperate income by accommodating sex tourists.
With an eye for detail and a razor wit, Lisa Wixon relates Alysia's journey and creates a love song to Cuba, a heartfelt tribute to a…
