Literature can be incendiary. The right book at the right time is like a call to arms – the opening move in a campaign for change. Here at Turnaround, we distribute a range of socially and politically conscious authors and publishers creating sharp, timely works. From calls for a socialist revolution to eviscerating take-downs of homophobia, fatphobia, racism and misogyny, the manifestos in our stable smash the status quo and carve their own path.
Below, we have pulled together a list of some of our recent and upcoming favourite works designed to ignite and inspire.
Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coats
Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’ attempt to answer the question, ‘how can American reckon with its fraught racial history?’ The book deals with the USA’s continued exploitation of black bodies, as black Americans continue to be disproportionately threatened, locked up and killed in the streets.
Available now from Text Publishing.
You Have the Right to Remain Fat by Virgie Tovar
Virgie Tovar’s You Have the Right to Remain Fat is a punchy and personal manifesto that challenges society’s fatphobic beliefs and behaviours. Tovar takes aim at diet culture, and the insidious lie that fat people must wait to be thin before they can start the best days of their lives.
Available now from Melville House UK.
I’m Afraid of Men by Vivek Shraya
When Vivek Shraya was a child, the men in her life violently disapproved of her ‘feminine’ qualities. To protect herself, she had to learn to convincingly enact masculinity, and as an adult still struggles with the repercussions of that time. In I’m Afraid of Men she offers a multifaceted perspective on gender, homophobia and transphobia, and a hopeful reimaging of masculinity.
Out in August 2018 from Random House Canada.
Why I Am Not a Feminist by Jessa Crispin
Why I Am Not a Feminist is a call for revolution. Jessa Crispin accuses the contemporary feminist movement of irrelevance and banality, skewering what she sees as an ineffectual pose with lacerating humour and political observation and calling for the total destruction of the system of oppression.
Available now from Melville House.
What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape by Sohaila Abdulali
In the 1980s, Sohaila Abdulali was the first Indian rape survivor to speak out about her experience, writing about how we perceive rape and rape victims in a women’s magazine. Thirty years later, the article went viral in the wake of the 2012 rape and murder of Jyoti Singh Pandey in Delhi. In What We Talk About When We Talk About Rape, Abdulali asks pertinent questions about who is raped and who commits rape, how we raise our sons, and if it is possible to recover joy after sexual assault.
Out in October 2018 from Myriad Editions.
Not Quite Not White by Sharmila Sen
What does it mean to be white? And how much does whiteness figure into Americanness? In Not Quite Not White, Sharmila Sen asks these questions and more as she interrogates race and identity in the United States. Having never identified with a race in the India of her childhood, Sen was ‘assigned’ a race upon emigration to the US at the age of 12, and spent the ensuing decade trying to assimilate. Now, she suggests that someone’s ‘not-whiteness’ could be the very thing that makes them American.
Out August 2018 from Penguin Books USA
As Black As Resistance by William C Anderson and Zoe Samudzi
William C Anderson and Zoe Samudzi’s essay The Anarchism of Blackness was shared widely when it was first published in the fifth issue of ROAR magazine in 2017. In this volume, the authors expand on their original writings with passion and fervour, charting a course for the Black Lives Matter generation.
Available now from AK Press
How We Desire by Carolin Emcke
What if, instead of discovering our sexuality only once, during puberty, we discover it again later – and then again after that? In this essay, Carolin Emcke pays homage to the radical tenderness of desire regardless of sexual orientation, and examines how prejudice against homosexuality has persisted even in countries where it has been decriminalised.
Out in November 2018 from Text Publishing.
