lgbtq | Macmillan's Books for the First-Year Experience

Farrar, Straus & Giroux BYR
Hardcover
320 pages • $18.99
ISBN: 9780374312718

A Memoir-Manifesto

George M. Johnson

“An exuberant, unapologetic memoir infused with a deep but cleareyed love for its subjects.”

—Jennifer Harlan, The New York Times Book Review

In their groundbreaking young adult memoir, prominent writer and LGBTQIA+ activist George M. Johnson shares both glorious and gut-wrenching memories of growing up Black and queer in America. From getting bullied at age five, to visiting flea markets with their loving grandmother, to the thrilling frontiers of first relationships, Johnson’s early life is a profound tapestry of everyday experiences. As a rising star in cultural criticism, Johnson turns their passion for exploring intersectional identities to their own life by weaving questions of gender, masculinity, brotherhood, family, and Black joy throughout their stories. Posing the same questions to the reader, they invites us to consider what social influences have governed our own lives. Most central to Johnson’s journey is how to reconcile their Blackness and their queerness—identities that are sometimes at odds in their story. The answer is a reassuring testimony for queer men of color: They are equal parts to a whole and perfectly designed person. The bravery with which Johnson shares their story is breathtaking. All Boys Aren’t Blue establishes their legacy as an essential voice among young adults for generations to come.

George M. Johnson is a writer and activist based in New York. Johnson has written on race, gender, sex, and culture for Essence, The Advocate, BuzzFeed News, Teen Vogue, and more than forty other national publications. They have appeared on BuzzFeed’s AM2DM as well as on MSNBC.

All Boys Aren’t Blue has been adopted for First-Year Experience programs at:

Kean University (NJ)

Graywolf Press
Paperback
272 pages • $18.00
ISBN: 9781644450383

Paperback available in May 2021

A Memoir

Carmen Maria Machado

“A tour-de-force meditation on trauma, survival and the language we use to talk about it all.”

—Time

In the Dream House is Carmen Maria Machado’s engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad, and a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing relationship with a charismatic but volatile woman, Machado struggles to make sense of how what happened to her shaped the person she was becoming. And it’s that struggle that gives the book its original structure: each chapter is driven by its own narrative trope—the haunted house, erotica, the bildungsroman—through which Machado holds the events up to the light and examines them from different angles. She looks back at her religious adolescence, unpacks the stereotype of lesbian relationships as safe and utopian, and widens the view with essayistic explorations of the history and reality of abuse in queer relationships. Machado’s dire narrative is leavened with her characteristic wit, playfulness, and openness to inquiry. She casts a critical eye over legal proceedings, fairy tales, Star Trek, and Disney villains, as well as iconic works of film and fiction. The result is a wrenching, riveting book that explodes our ideas about what a memoir can do and be.

Carmen Maria Machado is the author of Her Body and Other Parties, which was a finalist for the National Book Award and winner of the National Book Critics Circle’s John Leonard Prize. She holds an M.F.A. from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and has been awarded fellowships and residencies from the Guggenheim Foundation, Yaddo, Hedgebrook, and the Millay Colony for the Arts. She lives in Philadelphia and is the Abrams Artist-in- Residence at the University of Pennsylvania.