"It's 2003 and Romy Hall is at the start of two consecutive life sentences at Stanville Women's Correctional Facility, deep in California's Central Valley. Outside is the world from which she has been severed: the San Francisco of her youth and her young son, Jackson. Inside is a new reality: thousands of women hustling for the bare essentials needed to survive; the bluffing and pageantry and casual acts of violence by guards and prisoners alike;...

Torey Adams, a high school junior with a seemingly perfect life, struggles with doubts and questions surrounding the mysterious disappearance of the class outcast.

"In Nigeria, vagabonds are those whose existence is literally outlawed: the poor, the queer, the drivers and dancers, the abused and displaced and vulnerable. Blending unvarnished realism with myth and fantasy, Vagabonds! traces characters for whom life itself is a form of resistance: a driver for a debauched politician; a fashion designer who gives birth to a grown daughter; a lesbian couple; a wife and mother trying to escape from her violent husband....

"A letter has beckoned to Raimundo since he received it over fifty years ago from his youthful passion, handsome Cícero. But having grown up in an impoverished area of Brazil where the demands of manual labor thwarted his becoming literate, Raimundo has long been unable to read. As young men, he and Cícero fell in love, only to have Raimundo's father brutally beat his son when he discovered their affair. Even after Raimundo succeeds in making a...

"The National Book Award winning author returns to his original fictional territory--the lives of the dispossessed in San Francisco--with a parable about the limitations of desire and life at the margins of society. In such earlier works of fiction as The Rainbow Stories and The Royal Family, William T. Vollmann wrote memorably of characters living in the seamy underbelly of San Francisco's Tenderloin district. In this new novel, Vollmann returns...

Placing sexual culture at the center of power relations in Revolutionary-era Philadelphia, Clare A. Lyons uncovers a world where runaway wives challenged their husbands' patriarchal rights and where serial and casual sexual relationships were commonplace. By reading popular representations of sex against actual behavior, Lyons reveals the clash of meanings given to sex and illuminates struggles to recast sexuality in order to eliminate its subversive...

When Lyddie Berry's husband is lost in a whaling disaster, she becomes the dependent of her ruthless son-in-law, who tries to take everything she and her husband had worked for.

In a Queer Time and Place opens with a probing analysis of the life and death of Brandon Teena, a young transgender man who was brutally murdered in small-town Nebraska. After looking at mainstream representations of the transgender body as exhibited in the media frenzy surrounding this highly visible case and the Oscar-winning film based on Brandon's story, Boys Don't Cry, Halberstam turns her attention to the cultural and artistic production of...

A man's body is found in an abandoned apartment. His friends look on-victims of heroin addiction. Hidden in the shadows they keep vigil as the hours pass, paying homage to a friend whose body is taken away. Piece by broken piece, their stories are laid out-lives fallen through the cracks, hopes fl aring and dying, love overwhelmed by a stronger need, and the havoc wrought by drugs, distress, and the disregard of the wider world.

"Kensington, Philadelphia, is distinguished only by its poverty. It is home to Ryan, Giancarlos, and Emmanuel, three Puerto Rican children who live among the most marginalized children and families in the United States. This is their coming-of-age story.It is also the story of families beset by violence-the violence of homelessness, hunger, incarceration, stray bullets, sexual and physical assault, the hypermasculine logic of the streets, and the...