Books published by Feminist Press at The City University of New York

By one of Southeast Asia’s most exciting writers, The Age of Goodbyes is a wildly inventive account of family history, political turmoil, and the redemptive grace of storytelling.In 1969, in the wake of Malaysia's deadliest race riots, a woman named Du Li An secures her place in society by marrying a gangster. In a parallel narrative, a critic known only as The Fourth Person explores the work of a writer also named Du Li An. And a third storyline is in the second person; “you” are reading a novel titled The Age of Goodbyes. Floundering in the wake of “your” mother’s death, “you” are trying to unpack the secrets surrounding “your” lineage.The Age of Goodbyes—which begins on page 513, a reference to the riots of May 13, 1969—is the acclaimed debut by Li Zi Shu. The winner of multiple awards and a Taiwanese bestseller, this dazzling novel is a profound exploration of what happens to personal memory when official accounts of history distort and render it taboo.

Informed by the author’s experience in and between genders, this debut story collection blurs fantasy and reality, excavating new meanings from our varied dysphorias. Misfit mothers, prodigal "undaughters," con artists, and middle-aged runaways populate these ten short stories that blur the lives we wish for with the ones we actually lead. A tornado survivor grapples with a new identity, a trans teen psychic can read only indecisive minds, and a woman informs her family of her plans to upload her consciousness and abandon her body. Luke Dani Blue invites the reader into a world of outlier lives made central and magical thinking made real. Surreal, darkly humorous, and always deeply felt, Pretend It’s My Body is bound together by the act of searching—for a spark of recognition and a story of one's own.

A collection of life stories so funny, moving that “you don’t have to be a Jewish feminist mama to love this book . . . but it wouldn’t hurt” (Tablet Magazine).Here are the collected autobiographical writings of memoirist, poet, and professor Faye Moskowitz. Known for both her sense of humor—even in the bleakest of circumstances—and her insight into the relationships that define who we are, where we come from, and where we hope to be going, Moskowitz shares her own life stories in “a book that will make you stand up and cheer” (The Detroit News).From her childhood in Detroit during the Great Depression to the time when her mother abandoning the family to pursue her own dreams; from helping a dying friend simply get through another day to a hilarious account of binge eating at a wedding; from finding love and leaving home to building her own family and legacy, these recounted experiences give us “her piercingly tender observations about unlikely friendships, transgressive love, disappointing plants, and sacred Jewish rituals of the kitchen” (Lilith Magazine).

Sexy, beautiful, but frustrated… a neglected housewife finds the delights and degradations of forbidden love.

An arabophone cult classic traces the impact of power, abuse, and illness on the body, by Morocco’s foremost writer of life on the margins.

An interdisciplinary exploration of Asian diasporas as gendered spaces that host uneven movements of bodies, identities, histories, and hegemonies.

A jealous husband frames his wife for his own suicide so she'll never love again.

An aristocratic naif colludes with the Nazis, then stands up against the Gulag in this epic of riches to rags.

In this evocative account of navigating pregnancy loss, Jessica Zucker confronts the cultural silence around miscarriages and illuminates how she built a movement from her experience, transforming trauma into human connection.

Black love is explored as a concept and tool for forming, sustaining, and fragmenting global Black communities in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

By turns fantastical and familiar, this graphic short story collection with South Asian roots is immersed in questions of gender, the body, and existential conformity.

Historically and culturally, various social groups such as women and people of colour have been excluded from inheritance. More recently advances in reproductive technology have also complicated notions of inheritance and genealogy. In this issue, scholars and writers reveal the multiplicity and power relations underlying inheritance while considering the broader role of feminist and reconstructionist efforts in redefining lineages of literary and intellectual inheritance.

The first of a new range of Drag Queen Story Hour books, authored and illustrated by a range of queer and feminist writers and artists. Each book is looked over by a sensitivity reader to ensure authentic, educational content.

A queer poet documents depression and grief in this autobiographical novel-in-verse.

Both on and off the rez, interlinked characters contend with history and identity as contemporary members of the Seneca Nation. Debut writer Melissa Michal weaves together an understated and contemplative collection exploring what it means to be Native. In these stories, the longing for intergenerational memory slips into everyday life: a teenager struggles to understand her grandmother''s silences, a family seeks to reconnect with a lost sibling, and a young woman searches for a cave that''s called to her family for generations.

In these stories, characters navigate fate via deft sleights of hand: a grandfather gambles on the monsoon rains; a consort finds herself a new assignment; a religious man struggles to keep his demons at bay. Central to the book is Isabella Sin, a smalltown girl transformed into a prisoner of conscience in Malaysia''s most notorious detention camp.

Structured like a Creole quadrille, this lyrical novel is a rich ethnography bearing witness to police violence in French Guadeloupe. Narrators both living and dead recount the racial and class stratification that led to a protest-turned-massacre. While Dambury''s English debut is a memorial to a largely forgotten atrocity, it is also a celebration of the vibrancy and resilience of Guadeloupeans.

Insidious assumptions of sex and violence poison a small-town family, resulting in a daughter taking survival to the extreme.

After two decades in prison, an ex-radical navigates reentry in New York by walking a series of high-strung, wealthy pooches.

This account of faith and solidarity excavates the forgotten radical activism that confronted race and gender in pre–Civil War America.