A Reading List for Your Toxic-Masculinity-Free 2019

tired: New Year’s resolutions about diets and relationships

wired: New Year’s resolutions about emotional growth, purposeful presence, and radical love

And reading — an intentional and often transcendent walk through the words, lives, and experiences of others — is one of the best ways to stick to that resolution.

These books are for us all. But this collection is for men.

These 24 books span multiple genres, through fiction and short stories, poetry, essays, and memoir. But they share a spirit — the desire to learn, to grow, to reflect, and to love. Many, if not all, of these works engage with gender, identity, race, violence, queerness, and the intersections of these and other pressing issues of our time. All of these selections ask you hard questions about yourself, and they introduce and embrace new pathways for us as individuals and as a collective.

So here are 24 books to guide you through a 2019 free of toxic masculinity.

Michael Arceneaux — I Can’t Date Jesus: Love, Sex, Family, Race, and Other Reasons I’ve Put My Faith in Beyonce

Jamel Brinkley — A Lucky Man

Charlene Carruthers — Unapologetic: A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Radical Movements

Alexander Chee — How To Write An Autobiographical Novel: Essays

Soraya Chemaly — Rage Becomes Her: The Power of Women’s Anger

Brittney Cooper — Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower

Roxane Gay — Not That Bad: Dispatches from Rape Culture (edited by)

Casey Gerald — There Will Be No Miracles Here

Carlos Andres Gomez — Man Up: Reimagining Modern Manhood

Terrance Hayes — American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin

Jack Halberstam — The Queer Art of Failure

Essex Hemphill — Ceremonies: Prose and Poetry

Morgan Jerkins — This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America

Kiese Laymon — Heavy: An American Memoir

Audre Lorde — Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches

Thomas Page McBee — Amateur: A True Story About What Makes a Man

Janet Mock — Surpassing Certainty: What My Twenties Taught Me

Darnell L. Moore — No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black and Free in America

Mark Anthony Neal — New Black Man

Justin Phillip Reed — Indecency

Danez Smith — Don’t Call us Dead

Mychal Denzel Smith: Invisible Man, Got the Whole World Watching: A Young Black Man’s Education

Arlene Stein — Unbound: Transgender Men and the Remaking of Identity

Kevin Young — Brown