A TIME 100 Must-Read Book of 2021A New York Times Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Book of 2021. The Stonewall Book Award winner of 2022. Named a Best Book of 2021 by NPR, The New York Public Library, Publishers Weekly and more!A triumphant, genre-bending breakout novel from one of the boldest new voices in contemporary fiction.. Vern―seven months pregnant and desperate to escape the strict religious compound where she was raised―flees for the shelter of the woods. There, she gives birth to twins and plans to raise them far from the influence of the outside world.. But even in the forest, Vern is a hunted woman. Forced to fight back against the community that refuses to let her go, she unleashes incredible brutality far beyond what a person should be capable of, her body wracked by inexplicable and uncanny changes.. To understand her metamorphosis and to protect her small family, Vern has to face the past and, more troublingly, the future―outside the woods. Finding the truth will mean uncovering not only the secrets of the compound she fled but also the violent history of America that produced it.. Rivers Solomon’s Sorrowland is a genre-bending work of gothic fiction. Here, monsters aren’t just individuals but entire nations. This is a searing, seminal book that marks the arrival of a bold, unignorable voice in American fiction.

Sorrowland

In this stunning graphic novel by two-time Ignatz award–winning graphic novelist Ariel Slamet Ries, Oberon must choose between fantasy and reality when he develops the ability to conjure his dreams in real life—including the facsimile of the boy who got away.In the not-too-distant future, most of humanity resides on its last-ditch effort at utopia: Meridian, a remote alien planet where you’re more likely to be born superhuman than left-handed. None of that is important to Oberon Afolayan. Since his mildly public breakdown, his whole life seems to be spiraling out of control—from dropping out of university to breaking up with his boyfriend, it seems like only a karmic inevitability when he wakes up one day with the ability to conjure his dreams in the real world. Oberon’s newfound powers come with a facsimile of his high school crush, Kon, who mysteriously dropped off the face of the planet almost three years ago and who is a little more infuriating (if not also infuriatingly hot)than Oberon remembers. Kon makes it his mission to turn Oberon’s life around, and while they struggle to get a handle on his powers and his disastrous personal life (not to mention the appearance of strange nightmare creatures), it turns out this dream version of Kon has secrets of his own—dangerous ones. Oberon might have more on his plate than he originally thought, but is giving up his dreams—even the one he might have accidentally fallen in love with—the only way to find happiness in reality?

Strange Bedfellows

With an armored, oath-bound hero reminiscent of The Mandalorianand the Asian-inspired epic fantasy of She Who Became the Sun, Neon Yang’s Brighter than Scale, Swifter than Flame is a stunning queer novella about a dragon hunter finding home with a dragon queen.Few know the true identity of the masked guildknight of Mithrandon. She barely remembers herself.The masked guildknight―Yeva―was thirteen when she killed her first dragon. With her gift revealed, she was shipped away to the imperial capital to train in the rare art of dragon-slaying. Now a legendary dragon hunter, she has never truly felt at home―nor removed her armor in public―since that fateful day all those years ago.Yeva must now go to Quanbao, a fiercely independent and reclusive kingdom. It is rumored that there, dragons are not feared as is right and proper, but instead loved and worshipped. It is rumored that there, they harbor a dragon behind their borders.While Yeva searches for the dreaded beast, she is welcomed into the palace by Quanbao’s monarch, Lady Sookhee. Though wary of each other, Yeva is shocked to find herself slowly opening up to the beautiful, mysterious queen.As they grow closer, Yeva longs to let Lady Sookhee see the person behind the armor, but she knows she must fulfill her purpose and slay the dragon. Ultimately, she must decide who―or what―she is willing to betray: her own heart, or the sacred duty that she has called home for so long.

Brighter than Scale, Swifter than Flame

Dust Settles North

Thyme Travellers collects fourteen of the Palestinian diaspora’s best voices in speculative fiction. Speculative fiction as a genre invites a reconfiguring of reality, and here each story is a portal into realms of history, folklore and futures. . A man stands on the shore waiting to commune with those who live in the ocean. Pilgrims stretch into the distance, passing a stone cairn with a mysterious light streaming from it. Two Australian women fervently dig a tunnel to Jerusalem. Men from Gaza swim in the sea until they drown, still unconcerned. A father and son struggle to connect over the AI scripts prompting their conversation.. Building on the work of trailblazing anthologies such as Reworlding Ramallah and Palestine +100, this volume is the first of its kind in Canada. Editor Sonia Sulaiman brings together stories by speculative fiction veterans and emerging writers from Australia to Egypt, Lebanon to Canada.

Thyme Travellers: An Anthology of Palestinian Speculative Fiction

"George Abraham's poems bristle with alchemy, a narrative of love, history, family, and Palestine that pulses with longing"--

The specimen's apology

In this coming-of-age graphic novel with a fantastical twist, Nayra Mansour, a Muslim American girl, is helped on her journey to selfhood by a djinn. Nothing is going right for Nayra Mansour. There's the constant pressure from her strict family, ruthless bullying from her classmates, and exhausting friendship demands from Rami –the only other Muslim girl at school. Nayra has had enough. Just when she's considering transferring schools to escape it all, a mysterious djinn named Marjan appears.As a djinn, a mythical being in Islamic folklore, Marjan uses their powers and wisdom to help Nayra navigate her overwhelming life. But Marjan's past is fraught with secrets, guilt, and trouble, and if they don’t face what they’ve done, Nayra could pay the price.In this beautifully illustrated graphic novel, Iasmin Omar Ata has created a realistic coming-of-age story with an enchanting dose of the fantastical about strength, identity, and, most of all, friendship.

Nayra and the Djinn

A love letter to liberation, from Palestine to the ground beneath your feet.When you think of freedom, where are you? And where are you headed? Letters from a Living Utopia invites readers to engage with utopia as both a destination and a lived reality starting with the ground beneath our feet. Dreaming of freedom from the displaced and occupied realities of Palestine, Mx Yaffa builds bridges between the historical struggle for liberation and self-determination and the everyday, intimate, and interconnected ways that we build freedom where we are, through care, healing, and bonds of solidarity. Letters from a Living Utopia is a remarkable journey to a world in formation, emergent in our resilience and our repair, our spiritual grounding and our non-attachment, our love and joy, and our sustainable and sustaining relations to the earth in its abundance.

Letters from a Living Utopia: Reclaiming Liberation from Palestine to the World

"Blood Orange" is a highly emotional, important and timely poetry collection by Mx. Yaffa (They/She), a trans Muslim displaced Indigenous Palestinian. Their writings probe the yearning for home, belonging, mental health, queerness, transness, and other dimensions of marginalization while nurturing dreams of utopia against the background of ongoing displacement and genocide of indigenous Palestinians.The collection came quickly and relentlessly, drawn from the depths of the author's soul during a movement for a free Palestine and aligned with a solar eclipse. It beckons readers to re-evaluate what is perceived as immutable and to imagine pathways toward Utopia. "Blood Orange"- the title an homage to the Yaffa Oranges (which were appropriated first by the British and subsequently by Israel) refers to the author themselves, their homeland and blood spilled in the name of settler colonialism.This highly charged and cathartic body of work confronts the anguish and loss inflicted by genocide but also embraces a vision of a world free of it. The poems within "Blood Orange" were a means of working through and processing the grief caused by recent events and serve as an act of protest and defiance against settler colonialism as a whole.

Blood Orange

By the middle of the twenty-first century, war, famine, economic collapse, and climate catastrophe had toppled the world's governments. In the 2050s, the insurrections reached the nerve center of global capitalism—New York City. This book, a collection of interviews with the people who made the revolution, was published to mark the twentieth anniversary of the New York Commune, a radically new social order forged in the ashes of capitalist collapse.Here is the insurrection in the words of the people who made it, a cast as diverse as the city itself. Nurses, sex workers, antifascist militants, and survivors of all stripes recall the collapse of life as they knew it and the emergence of a collective alternative. Their stories, delivered in deeply human fashion, together outline how ordinary people's efforts to survive in the face of crisis contain the seeds of a new world.

Everything for Everyone: An Oral History of the New York Commune, 2052–2072

A powerfully moving debut poetry collection about the violence of colonialist occupationOne more rock thrown onto the pile to tumble the mountain on my chest ―Hasib HouraniHasib Hourani’s rock flight is a book-length poem that, over seven chapters, follows a single personal and historical narrative centered on the violent occupation of Palestine. The poem uses refrains of suffocation, rubble, and migratory bird patterns to address the realities of forced displacement, economic restrictions, and surveillance technology that Palestinians face both within Palestine and across the diaspora. Searing and fierce, tender and pleading, rock flight invites the reader to embark on an exploration of space while limited by the box-like confines of the page. Through the whole, Hourani moves between poetry and prose, historical events and meditations on language, Fluxus-like instructions and interactions with friends, strangers, and family.As incantatory and stirring as Inger Christensen’s alphabet or Raúl Zurita’s Inri, rock flight adapts themes of displacement and refusal into an interactive reading experience where the book becomes an object in flux.

rock flight

AN IGNYTE AWARD WINNER FOR BEST COMICS TEAM!"Where Black Stars Rise boldly pushes the limits of what a comic can do. ...It's a gorgeous work. I loved it." ―Trung Le Nguyen, author of The Magic FishNadia Shammas and Marie Enger's Where Black Stars Rise is an eldritch horror graphic novel that explores mental illness and diaspora, set in modern-day Brooklyn.Dr. Amal Robardin, a Lebanese immigrant and a therapist in training, finds herself out of her depth when her first client, Yasmin, a schizophrenic, is visited by a nightly malevolent presence that seems all too real.Yasmin becomes obsessed with Robert Chambers’ classic horror story collection The King in Yellow. Messages she finds in the book lead Yasmin to disappear, seeking answers she can’t find in therapy.Amal attempts to retrace her patient’s last steps―and accidentally slips through dimensions, ending up in Carcosa, realm of the King in Yellow. Determined to find her way out, Amal enlists the help of a mysterious guide.Can Amal save Yasmin? Or are they both trapped forever?“Strange is the night where black stars rise, and strange moons circle through the skies. But stranger still is lost Carcosa...” ―From The King in Yellow by Robert W. Chambers

Where Black Stars Rise

Fairly Queer

Fairly Queer Books

Fareeha

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Hi there, my name is Fareeha (she/her) I'm a queer Pakistani Muslim content creator, writer, artist and indie bookseller. I have been reading and discussing fantasy, scifi, and comics that center around the Muslim experience, queer existence, and underrepresented communities in publishing for over 3 years on TikTok.


To me, culturally specific fantasy and the burgeoning work of Muslim Futurism created by and for marginalized communities is liberation work. My Bindery will be dedicated to reading and discussing these stories that are often out of the spotlight. I hope you'll join my growing community and along the way find some more authors and cartoonists that make you feel seen.

Hi, welcome to this part of the internet. 

Welcome to my page. I like to share snippets from my life as an artist & fantasy writer trying her best. I made this channel to put all my thoughts & media opinions in one place. Expect sporadic expression and some very passionate takes. If you're finding me from tiktok, thanks for being here 💕