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.
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
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
