Wondering what to read next? We have many titles available in eBook form!
It is in times of hardship and confusion that reading offers us all a greater connection with what it means to be human. Aunt Lute has always valued the way that reading bonds us all and brings us a profound understanding of our shared experiences. Now more than ever, read, read, read.
Catch up on the reading you’ve been meaning to do and check out our books at the links below!
Keep A'Livin' by Kathya Alexander
[available on Kobo, Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, Ebook.com, and iBooks]
In the small town of Uz, Arkansas, Mandy Anderson wakes up on July 4th, 1963, her mother’s birthday, to the sweltering Southern heat, a pounding headache, and the distinct thumping of her mother, Belle, kneading biscuit dough. In the raw heat, only made worse by Belle’s baking, Mandy questions why the white woman her mother works for wouldn’t want to give Belle the day off for her birthday. So begins Mandy’s journey of questioning the structures that define her world, a path that carries her through tragedy, mystical encounters, and her own spiritual and familial legacy.
Kathya Alexander’s debut historical fiction novel-in-verse follows the fiercely passionate, dedicated, and cheeky Mandy as she comes of age during the height of the Civil Rights Movement of the 20th century. Twelve-year-old Mandy and her mother, Belle, experience the extraordinary events of the 1960s, finding strength, fearlessness, and faith along the way.
Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Fifth Edition by Gloria Anzaldúa
[available on Kobo, Amazon Kindle, Barnes & Noble Nook, Ebook.com, Booksio and iBooks]
Rooted in Gloria Anzaldúa’s experience as a Chicana, a lesbian, an activist, and a writer, the essays and poems in this volume profoundly challenged, and continue to challenge, how we think about identity. Borderlands/La Frontera remaps our understanding of what a “border” is, presenting it not as a simple divide between here and there, us and them, but as a psychic, social, and cultural terrain that we inhabit, and that inhabits all of us. This edition, coming March 1, 2022, will be a more condensed edition, containing only the original text from 1987, and will be at a more accessible price point for readers.
A Simple Revolution by Judy Grahn
Winner of the Independent Publisher Book "IPPY" Award and an American Book Award!
Growing up in Las Cruces, New Mexico, the lean child of working-class Chicago transplants, Judy Grahn hungered to connect with the larger world, to create a place for herself beyond the deprivations and repressions of small town, 1950s life. Refusing the imperative to silence that was her inheritance as a woman and as a lesbian, Grahn found her way to poetry, to activism, and to the intoxicating beauty and power of openly loving other women.
The “simple” revolution she recounts involved not just the formation of new institutions (the Women’s Press Collective, Oakland Feminist Women’s Health Center, A Woman’s Place Bookstore), but the creation of whole new ways of living, including collective feminist households that cut through the political and social isolation of women.
Read more here.
Choctalking on Other Realities by LeAnne Howe
[available on Amazon, B&N Nook, Apple iBooks, Kobo]
The collected stories/essays in Choctalking on Other Realities, by Choctaw author LeAnne Howe, depict, with wry humor, the contradictions and absurdities that transpire in a life lived crossing cultures and borders. The collection begins with Howe’s stint working in the bond business for a Wall Street firm as the only American Indian woman (and ‘out’ Democrat) in the company, then chronicles her subsequent travels, invited as an American Indian representative and guest speaker, to indigenous gatherings and academic panels in Jordan, Jerusalem, Romania, and Japan.
“This collection of LeAnne Howe’s demonstrates the power, compassion, and at times riotous American Indian humor of a master storyteller. With a deep commitment to Southeastern American Indian perspectives on tribalography and tradition, Choctalking on Other Realities spans indigenous worlds from New Orleans to Amman, Jordan… With Howe as a guide, readers are invited to confront the global ironies of Indianness with wisdom, laughter, and grace.”
—Jodi A. Byrd, author of The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism
Read more here.
Flesh to Bone by ire’ne lara silva
[available on Amazon, B&N Nook, Apple iBooks, Kobo]
Rooted in a Chicana/Latina/indigenous geographic and cultural sensibility, the stories of flesh to bone take on the force of myth, old and new, giving voice to those who experience the disruption and violence of the borderlands. In these nine tales, silva metes out a furious justice—a whirling, lyrical energy—that scatters the landscape with bones of transformation, reclamation, and healing.
Read more here.
Gulf Dreams by Emma Pérez
Gulf Dreams is the story of a Chicana who comes of age in a racist, rural Texas town. Through memory, the protagonist reexamines her unresolved obsessive love for a young woman, her best friend since childhood.
“Gulf Dreams is Emma Pérez’s signature work. Not only does it tell the dirty story of family abuse and misogynistic violence that plagues the Chicano/a community—which itself forms the basis of Pérez’s famous theoretical constructs, "sitio y lengua" and "the decolonial imaginary"—but it is also a pithy rumination on the nature of romantic obsession, and the self-destructive behaviors and addictions that serve as internalized revenge against rape and conquest of the brown female body. This has the lyrical eroticism and colonial subtext of Marguerite Duras’ The Lover and the gritty cruelty of Amores Perros.”
— Alicia Gaspar de Alba
Read more here.
Good Girls Marry Doctors edited by Piyali Bhattacharya
Good Girls Marry Doctors: South Asian American Daughters on Obedience and Rebellion, edited by Piyali Bhattacharya, is the first anthology to examine the multiple facets of daughterhood in South Asian American families. The voices in this volume reveal how a Good Girl is trained to seamlessly blend professional success with the maintanence and reproduction of her family's cultural heritage.
Good Girls Marry Doctors is filled with honest stories, difficult and joyous, heartbreaking and hilarious, from a diverse array of powerful women. These narratives combine to expose struggles that are too often hidden from the public eye, while reminding those going through similar experiences that they are heard, and they are not alone.
Read more here.
Graffiti edited by Pallavi Dhawan, Devi S. Laskar, & Tamika Thompson
The editors of Graffiti gave the contributors a special challenge: to write in a way that centers neither "whiteness" nor "anti-whiteness”, that is not limited by their struggle, their oppression, or how their characters will be received by the white imagination.
The results are joyous and mind-expanding. Contributors to Graffiti include American Book Award-winner Tongo Eisen-Martin, award-winning fantasy author L. Penelope, award-winning writer Vickie Vértiz, alongside Kirin Khan, Gary Dauphin, Sarah LaBrie, Alycia Pirmohamed, Kanika Punwani, and many other acclaimed writers. It features a foreword by poet and novelist Elmaz Abinader, and an introduction by novelist Nayomi Munaweera.
Read more here.
The Issue is Power (2nd ed.) by Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz
[available on Amazon]
Political activist and writer Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitz brought an insightful eye and a sharp analytical mind to probe the problems facing America at the turn of the century. First published in 1992, the hard-hitting essays in this collection scan the connections across a wide range of issues: whether the topic is class, racism, Israel and Palestine, war, anti-Semitism, violence against women or violence by women, the issue is power—in all its complexity.
Now in its second edition and no less relevant nearly three decades later, her work—dedicated, persistent—continues to remind us of the strength in community.
“Here is a book for everyone who dares to want to help make history. Melanie Kaye/Kantrowitzis passionate, strategic, pithy, generous, realistic, controversial, unquenchable—like the best of our movements for change. As a writer and lifelong doer, she gives us reasons to believe in achievable justice, and maps for acting on that belief.”—Adrienne Rich
Read more here.
Junglee Girl by Ginu Kamani
[available on Amazon, B&N Nook, Apple iBooks, Kobo]
Junglee (stemming from the Sanskrit root "jungle") is used in India to label the wild, the uncivilized, the untamed. Used most commonly as condemnation or censure, it aims to break the spirit of women yearning for personal power. The female protagonists in these eleven stories recklessly pursue their sensual paths through a complex social world that seeks to shut them out. With wily irreverence and a willful rawness, Kamani pulls back the veil of convention, inch by inch, and draws the reader into the disquieting truth of women's lives, charting territory both intimate and bizarre.
Read more here.
Me as Her Again: True Stories of an Armenian Daughter by Nancy Agabian
[available on Amazon, B&N Nook, Apple iBooks, Kobo]
Untangling knots of personal identity and family history, Nancy Agabian deftly weaves a narrative alternately comical and wrenching. At the heart of this unraveling is a grappling with the history of trauma and upheaval experienced by her paternal grandmother, who survived the Armenian Genocide, and the legacy of that wounding experience for Agabian and her extended family.
Read more here.
Miko Kings: An Indian Baseball Story by LeAnne Howe
[available on Amazon, B&N Nook, Apple iBooks, Kobo]
Miko Kings is set in Indian Territory's queen city, Ada, Oklahoma, during the baseball fever of 1907, but moves back and forth from 1969 during the Vietnam War to present-day Ada. The story focuses on an Indian baseball team but brings a new understanding to the term "America's favorite pastime."
For tribes in Indian Territory, baseball was an extension of a sport they'd been playing for centuries before their forced removal to Indian Territory. In this lively and humorous work of fiction informed by careful historical research, LeAnne Howe weaves original and fictive documents such as newspaper clippings, photographs, typewritten letters, and handwritten journal entries into the narrative.
Read more here.
El Mundo Zurdo edited by Larissa M. Mercado-López, Sonia Saldívar-Hull, and Antonia Castañeda
[available at Amazon, B&N Nook, Apple iBooks, Kobo]
Aunt Lute Books is excited to announce the publication of El Mundo Zurdo 3, the newest collection of diverse essays and poetry that offer scholarly and creative responses inspired by the life and work of Gloria Anzaldúa, selected from the 2012 meeting of The Society for the Study of Gloria Anzaldúa.
Read more here.
Olivia on the Record: A Radical Experiment in Women's Music by Ginny Z Berson
The burgeoning lesbian and feminist movements of the '70s and '80s created an impetus to form more independent and equitable social and cultural institutions—bookstores, publishers, health clinics, and more—to support the unprecedented surge in women's arts of all kinds. Olivia Records was at the forefront of these models, not only recording and distributing women's music but also creating important new social spaces for previously isolated women and lesbians through concerts and festivals.
Ginny Z. Berson, one of Olivia's founding members and visionaries, kept copious records during those heady days—days also fraught with contradictions, conflicts, and economic pitfalls. With great honesty, Berson offers her personal take on what those times were like, revisiting the excitement and the hardships of creating a fair and equitable lesbian-feminist business model—one that had no precedent.
Radical Acts: Theatre and Feminist Pedagogies of Change edited by Ann Elizabeth Armstrong and Kathleen Juhl
[available on Amazon, B&N Nook, Apple iBooks, Kobo]
Radical Acts is an innovative compilation of essays and interviews about how feminist approaches to teaching theatre challenge and engage students, teachers, and audiences alike. Contributors include theatre practitioners working in a wide variety of settings and with diverse social groups, offering inspiring accounts of how to create a more inclusive, reflexive, and liberating theatre education. Includes essays by Cherríe Moraga, Rebecca Schneider, and Joni L. Jones/Omi Osun Olomo; interviews with Deb Margolin and Kate Bornstein.
Read more here.
Shell Shaker by LeAnne Howe
[available on Amazon, B&N Nook, Apple iBooks, Kobo]
Why was Red Shoes, the most formidable Choctaw warrior of the 18th century, assassinated by his own people? Why does his death haunt Auda Billy, an Oklahoma Choctaw woman, accused in 1991 of murdering Choctaw Chief Redford McAlester? Moving between the known details of Red Shoes' life and the riddle of McAlester's death, this novel traces the history of the Billy women whose destiny it is to solve both murders—with the help of a powerful spirit known as the Shell Shaker.
Read more here.
Teacher at Point Blank: Confronting Sexuality, Violence, and Secrets in a Suburban School by Jo Scott-Coe
Why would a high school teacher who loves teaching leave school—after half a career in the classroom?
Teacher at Point Blank answers this question at a time when concerns about school performance, safety, and teacher attrition are at an all-time and often anxious high. Meditating on subtle and overt forms of violence in secondary public education from an up-close and “pink collar” point of view, Jo Scott-Coe examines her own workplace as a microcosm of the national compulsory K-12 system, where teachers—now nearly 80% women—find themselves idealized and disparaged, expected to embody the dedication of parents, the coldness of data managers, and the obedience of Stepford spouses.
Read more here.
The Woman Who Owned the Shadows by Paula Gunn Allen
The Woman Who Owned the Shadows starts where the rest of the world leaves Indians off: at the brink of death. Ephanie Atencio is in the midst of a breakdown from which she can barely move. She has been left by her husband and is unable to take care of her children. To heal, Ephanie must seek, however gropingly, her own future. She leaves New Mexico for San Francisco, where she begins again the process of remembering, of trying to sort out the parts of her, ultimately finding a way to herself, relying no longer on men, but on her primary connections to the spirit women of her people and to the women of her own world.
Read more here.