Two-Spirit people, identified by many different tribally specific names and standings within their communities, have been living, loving, and creating art since time immemorial. It wasn't until the 1970s, however, that contemporary queer Native literature gained any public notice. Even now, only a handful of books address it specifically, most notably the 1988 collection Living the Spirit: A Gay American Indian Anthology. Since that book's publication twenty-three years ago, there has not been another collection published that focuses explicitly on the writing and art of Indigenous Two-Spirit and Queer people. This landmark collection strives to reflect the complexity of identities within Native Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer, and Two-Spirit (GLBTQ2) communities. Gathering together the work of established writers and talented new voices, this anthology spans genres (fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and essay) and themes (memory, history, sexuality, indigeneity, friendship, family, love, and loss) and represents a watershed moment in Native American and Indigenous literatures, Queer studies, and the intersections between the two. Collaboratively, the pieces in Sovereign Erotics demonstrate not only the radical diversity among the voices of today's Indigenous GLBTQ2 writers but also the beauty, strength, and resilience of Indigenous GLBTQ2 people in the twenty-first century. Contributors: Indira Allegra, Louise Esme Cruz, Paula Gunn Allen, Qwo-Li Driskill, Laura Furlan, Janice Gould, Carrie House, Daniel Heath Justice, Maurice Kenny, Michael Koby, M. Carmen Lane, Jaynie Lara, Chip Livingston, Luna Maia, Janet McAdams, Deborah Miranda, Daniel David Moses, D. M. O'Brien, Malea Powell, Cheryl Savageau, Kim Shuck, Sarah Tsigeyu Sharp, James Thomas Stevens, Dan Taulapapa McMullin, William Raymond Taylor, Joel Waters, and Craig Womack
Coyote & Crow the roleplaying game, is a multiple award winning and nominated sci-fi and fantasy tabletop role playing game set in a First Nations alternate future where colonization never happened. This game was created and lead by an all Native team. In March 2021, Coyote & Crow became one of the most successful role playing games to ever fund on Kickstarter, raising more than $1 million dollars. Since then, they’ve successfully launched two more games, Naasii and Wolves.It is the Newberry Bookshop's honor to carry Coyote and crow!
We crisscrossed the country, going rez to rez, community to community, stopping off at your grandma's and auntie's houses, collecting only the best and keenest fry bread grease across turtle island.NTVS x Steven Paul Judd collector piece. REAL LIP BALM! *not real frybread grease ;)
"The Indigenous Hulk" by Steven Paul Judd. Indigenous Hulk gets mad when treaties are broken.
Indigenous people are central to the story of popular culture in the Western Hemisphere, and popular culture is important to many Indigenous people and experiences. This exhibition, drawn from the Newberry’s growing collections for American Indian and Indigenous Studies, shares four centuries of Indigenous creators, athletes, activists, and fans engaged with pop—from pamphlets to comic books, and from daguerreotypes to video games.This zine -companion to the show is 56 pages long featuring contributions from three Indigenous creators; Lee Francis 4, Hoka Skenandore, and Azie Dungey.
Tuck into these savory, satisfying indigenous recipes using the ultimate building blocks of Native cuisine and companion planting. Cultivated together for generations (in the case of maize, up to 80,000 years!), the Three Sisters—squash, beans, and corn—served as staple crops for indigenous people of the Western hemisphere, who are still making yummy meals out of them today. In this follow up to the sweet-tooth-friendly Indigenous Noms, Dr. Faith shares her favorite recipes made from the Three Sisters, like Pumpkin Energy Bites, Crispy Corn Fritters, and Cracklin' Bread, accompanied by funny anecdotes and plenty of attitude. Along with suggestions for vegetarian and healthy adaptations, this zine will get your mouth watering—and might inspire you to plant a garden.Tuck into these savory, satisfying indigenous recipes using the ultimate building blocks of Native cuisine and companion planting. Cultivated together for generations (in the case of maize, up to 80,000 years!), the Three Sisters--squash, beans, and corn--served as staple crops for indigenous people of the Western hemisphere, who are still making yummy meals out of them today. In this follow up to the sweet-tooth-friendly Indigenous Noms, Dr. Faith shares her favorite recipes made from the Three Sisters, like Pumpkin Energy Bites, Crispy Corn Fritters, and Cracklin' Bread, accompanied by funny anecdotes and plenty of attitude. Along with suggestions for vegetarian and healthy adaptations, this zine will get your mouth watering--and might inspire you to plant a garden.
A revolutionary memoir about domestic abuse by the award-winning author of Her Body and Other Parties 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.
"Stielstra is a masterful essayist." --Roxane Gay, author of Bad Feminist and HungerFrom an important new writer comes this powerful collection of personal essays on fear, creativity, art, faith, academia, the Internet, and justice.In this poignant and inciting collection of literary essays, Megan Stielstra tells stories to ward off fears both personal and universal as she grapples toward a better way to live. In her titular piece "The Wrong Way To Save Your Life," she answers the question of what has value in our lives--a question no longer rhetorical when the apartment above her family's goes up in flames. "Here is My Heart" sheds light on Megan's close relationship with her father, whose continued insistence on climbing mountains despite a series of heart attacks leads the author to dissect deer hearts in a poetic attempt to interrogate her own feelings about mortality. Whether she's imagining the implications of open-carry laws on college campuses, recounting the story of going underwater on the mortgage of her first home, or revealing the unexpected pains and joys of marriage and motherhood, Stielstra's work informs, impels, enlightens, and embraces us all. The result is something beautiful--this story, her courage, and, potentially, our own.Intellectually fierce and viscerally intimate, Megan Stielstra's voice is witty, wise, warm, and above all, achingly human.
Finalist for the National Book Award for Fiction "[These stories] vibrate with originality, queerness, sensuality and the strange."--Roxane Gay "In these formally brilliant and emotionally charged tales, Machado gives literal shape to women's memories and hunger and desire. I couldn't put it down."--Karen Russell In Her Body and Other Parties, Carmen Maria Machado blithely demolishes the arbitrary borders between psychological realism and science fiction, comedy and horror, fantasy and fabulism. While her work has earned her comparisons to Karen Russell and Kelly Link, she has a voice that is all her own. In this electric and provocative debut, Machado bends genre to shape startling narratives that map the realities of women's lives and the violence visited upon their bodies. A wife refuses her husband's entreaties to remove the green ribbon from around her neck. A woman recounts her sexual encounters as a plague slowly consumes humanity. A salesclerk in a mall makes a horrifying discovery within the seams of the store's prom dresses. One woman's surgery-induced weight loss results in an unwanted houseguest. And in the bravura novella "Especially Heinous," Machado reimagines every episode of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, a show we naïvely assumed had shown it all, generating a phantasmagoric police procedural full of doppelgängers, ghosts, and girls with bells for eyes. Earthy and otherworldly, antic and sexy, queer and caustic, comic and deadly serious, Her Body and Other Parties swings from horrific violence to the most exquisite sentiment. In their explosive originality, these stories enlarge the possibilities of contemporary fiction.
The iconic Edith Farnsworth House is a singular glass home designed by Mies van der Rohe. But the oft-told history of the house overwrites Farnsworth's role as Mies's collaborator and antagonist while falsely portraying her as the architect's angry ex-lover. Nora Wendl's audacious work of creative nonfiction explodes the sex-and-real-estate myth surrounding the Edith Farnsworth House and its two central figures. An eminent physician and woman of letters, Farnsworth left a rich trove of correspondence, memoirs, and photographs that Wendl uses to reconstruct her voice. Farnsworth's memories and experiences alternate with Wendl's thoughts on topics like misogyny and professional ambition to fashion a lyrical examination of love, loneliness, beauty, and the search for the divine. Eloquent and confessional, Almost Nothing restores Edith Farnsworth to her place in architectural history and the masterpiece that bears her name.
*2022 Pattis Award Winner*A New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book A Best Book of 2021 by BuzzFeed and Real Simple An "unmissable" (Vogue), "exceptional" (The Washington Post), and "evocative" (Chicago Tribune) memoir about three Black girls from the storied Bronzeville section of Chicago that offers a penetrating exploration of race, opportunity, friendship, sisterhood, and the powerful forces at work that allow some to flourish...and others to falter. They were three Black girls. Dawn, tall and studious; her sister, Kim, younger by three years and headstrong as they come; and her best friend, Debra, already prom-queen pretty by third grade. They bonded--fervently and intensely in that unique way of little girls--as they roamed the concrete landscape of Bronzeville, a historic neighborhood on Chicago's South Side, the destination of hundreds of thousands of Black folks who fled the ravages of the Jim Crow South. These third-generation daughters of the Great Migration come of age in the 1970s, in the warm glow of the recent civil rights movement. It has offered them a promise, albeit nascent and fragile, that they will have more opportunities, rights, and freedoms than any generation of Black Americans in history. Their working-class, striving parents are eager for them to realize this hard-fought potential. But the girls have much more immediate concerns: hiding under the dining room table and eavesdropping on grown folks' business; collecting secret treasures; and daydreaming about their futures--Dawn and Debra, doctors, Kim a teacher. For a brief, wondrous moment the girls are all giggles and dreams and promises of "friends forever." And then fate intervenes, first slowly and then dramatically, sending them careening in wildly different directions. There's heartbreak, loss, displacement, and even murder. Dawn struggles to make sense of the shocking turns that consume her sister and her best friend, all the while asking herself a simple but profound question: Why? In the vein of The Other Wes Moore and The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace, Three Girls from Bronzeville is a "deeply personal" (Real Simple) memoir that chronicles Dawn's attempt to find answers. It's at once a celebration of sisterhood and friendship, a testimony to the unique struggles of Black women, and a tour-de-force about the complex interplay of race, class, and opportunity, and how those forces shape our lives and our capacity for resilience and redemption.
*2024 Pattis Award Winner*Winner of The Pattis Family Foundation Chicago Book Award, by The Pattis Family Foundation and the Newberry Library From skyline-defining icons to wonders of the world, the second period of the Chicago skyscraper transformed the way Chicagoans lived and worked. Thomas Leslie's comprehensive look at the modern skyscraper era views the skyscraper idea, and the buildings themselves, within the broad expanse of city history. As construction emerged from the Great Depression, structural, mechanical, and cladding innovations evolved while continuing to influence designs. But the truly radical changes concerned the motivations that drove construction. While profit remained key in the Loop, developers elsewhere in Chicago worked with a Daley political regime that saw tall buildings as tools for a wholesale recasting of the city's appearance, demography, and economy. Focusing on both the wider cityscape and specific buildings, Leslie reveals skyscrapers to be the physical results of negotiations between motivating and mechanical causes. Illustrated with more than 140 photographs, Chicago Skyscrapers, 1934-1986 tells the fascinating stories of the people, ideas, negotiations, decision-making, compromises, and strategies that changed the history of architecture and one of its showcase cities.
*2023 Pattis Award Winner*PEN Open Book Award finalistChicago Writers Association Book of the Year Award winnerStephen Curry Underrated Literati Book Club PickNamed a Best Book of Summer by Good Housekeeping, Chicago Magazine, The St. Louis Post Dispatch, Chicago Tribune, Veranda, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Publishers Weekly, and more!"[A] powerful novel.... Tragic, hopeful, brimming with love, Wolfe's debut is a remarkable achievement."--New York Times Book ReviewFor fans of Jacqueline Woodson and Brit Bennett, a striking coming-of-age debut about friendship, community, and resilience, set in the housing projects of Chicago during one life-changing summer.Even when we lose it all, we find the strength to rebuild.Felicia "Fe Fe" Stevens is living with her vigilantly loving mother and older teenaged brother, whom she adores, in building 4950 of Chicago's Robert Taylor Homes. It's the summer of 1999, and her high-rise is next in line to be torn down by the Chicago Housing Authority. She, with the devout Precious Brown and Stacia Buchanan, daughter of a Gangster Disciple Queen-Pin, form a tentative trio and, for a brief moment, carve out for themselves a simple life of Double Dutch and innocence. But when Fe Fe welcomes a mysterious new friend, Tonya, into their fold, the dynamics shift, upending the lives of all four girls.As their beloved neighborhood falls down around them, so too do their friendships and the structures of the four girls' families. Fe Fe must make the painful decision of whom she can trust and whom she must let go. Decades later, as she remembers that fateful summer--just before her home was demolished, her life uprooted, and community forever changed--Fe Fe tries to make sense of the grief and fraught bonds that still haunt her and attempts to reclaim the love that never left.Profound, reverent, and uplifting, Last Summer on State Street explores the risk of connection against the backdrop of racist institutions, the restorative power of knowing and claiming one's own past, and those defining relationships which form the heartbeat of our lives. Interweaving moments of reckoning and sustaining grace, debut author Toya Wolfe has crafted an era-defining story of finding a home--both in one's history and in one's self. "Toya Wolfe is a storyteller of the highest order. Last Summer on State Street is a stunning debut."--Rebecca Makkai, New York Times bestselling author of The Great Believers
This imprinted cap is made from 100% cotton.Each cap features an unstructured, low-profile design with a soft-lined front.Designed with a six-paneled crown and a pre-curved visor.Includes a self-fabric closure strap with an antique silver buckle.
Given our old-school predilection for print, we found a kindred spirit in Starshaped Press, the print shop behind this exclusive letterpress print depicting our beautiful building.Since 1999, Chicago-based Starshaped Press has stayed true to the original craft of letterpress. Using antique metal and wood type, the shop has bucked popular trends by showcasing the beauty and relevance of well-designed, historic type. Unlike most letterpress shops, Starshaped Press focuses on reusing existing materials (some over 150 years old) for all projects—meaning that no plastic is ever used in production.A stellar expression of the shop’s style and ethos, this handsome poster is 9 by 12" and fabulous for framing.
In honor of the Newberry's 2023 exhibition, Pop-Up Books through the Ages, Hannah Batsel and Shawn Sheehy created a wonderfully wild (and also architecturally accurate!) pop-up version of the library. Brimming with detail and imagination, the pop-up is a celebration of the centuries of history lurking within the Newberry's walls.There are plenty of Easter eggs for keen observers to uncover: The mysterious unfinished arches on the exterior of the Newberry building, the bust of Walter L. Newberry at the foot of the library's main staircase, and an early 20th-century postcard Ferriswheel located in the library's third-floor reference center.Batsel wanted to give expression to the sense of possibility and discovery she feels when she’s in the Newberry.“ You don't know what you're going to find when you go around a corner at the Newberry. In our pop-version of the library, if you're willing to pry into little crevices and look into windows, you will be rewarded.”Hannah BatselArtistBatsel's illustrations bring the pop-up Newberry to life, while Sheehy's paper engineering gives it a structure worthy of the library's iconic architecture.“ The building has a lot of character. The building IS a character. There was strong interest in featuring it in the pop-up.”Shawn SheehyPaper Engineer
