Arsenal Pulp Press: 223 books

Paris Is Burning (Jennie Livingston, 1991) captures the energy, ambition, wit, and struggle of African-American and Latino participants in the 1980s New York drag ball scene. This book contextualizes the film within the longer history of drag balls, the practices of documentary, the fervor of the culture wars, and the development of queer theory and critical race studies.

A Queer Film Classic on the 2005 film debut by French-Canadian director Jean-Marc Vallée (best known for Dallas Buyers Club and Wild), about a young gay man who struggles to find his sense of self amidst a "crazy" family of four brothers and a homophobic father who seeks to cure him. The film won...

The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book is a powerful and historically accurate graphic portrayal of Indigenous resistance to the European colonization of the Americas, beginning with the Spanish invasion under Christopher Columbus and ending with the Six Nations land reclamation in Ontario in 2006....

Winner, Governor General's Literary Award Finalist, Lambda Literary Award and Ferro-Grumley Award for LGBT Fiction "Raziel Reid is a really extraordinary guy. He's got a great thing going."-Anne Rice School is just like a film set: there's The Crew, who make things happen, The...

The stories in Skids are the stories of street kids; they are harrowing yet moving confessionals about young kids on their own, many of them runaways or addicts, eking out existences in shelters, treatment centers, or dysfunctional families. Told in the vernacular of the street, Skids reverberates...

This riveting, beautifully produced graphic memoir tells the story of the early years of the Vietnam war as seen through the eyes of a young boy named Marco, the son of a Vietnamese diplomat and his French wife. The book opens in America, where the boy’s father works for the South Vietnam embassy;...

"Compton pushes us to look beneath the surface—past those comforting tales of nationhood and racial solidarity—to the more nebulous and ever-shifting truth. This is a brilliant and original work that should be mandatory reading for any student of race and history."—Danzy Senna, author of Caucasia...

François Cusset, author of the acclaimed book French Theory, investigates the queering of the French literary canon by American writers and scholars in this thought-provoking and free-minded journey across six centuries of literary classics and sexual polemics. Cusset presents the foundations...

S. Bear Bergman is an acclaimed writer and lecturer on trans issues. In hir third essay collection, Bear tackles the concept of the "modern family" as the trans parent of a young son; in Bear's extended family "orchard," drag sisters, sperm-donor parents, and other relations provide more branches...

As Canadians, we remember the stories told to us in high-school history class as condensed images of the past--the glorious Mountie, the fearsome Native, the Last Spike. National Dreams is an incisive study of the most persistent icons and stories in Canadian history, and how they inform our sense...

This is a vivid graphic history of the Chinese experience in North America over the last 150 years, beginning with the immigration of Chinese to "Gold Mountain" (the Chinese colloquialism for North America) in the 1800s that resulted in decades of discrimination, subjugation, and separation from loved...

Vivek Shraya's debut collection of poetry is a bold and timely interrogation of skin-its origins, functions, and limitations. Poems that range in style from starkly concrete to limber break down the barriers that prevent understanding of what it means to be racialized. Shraya paints the face of everyday...

A Queer Film Classic: Chen Kaige’s 1992 film about two male Peking opera stars and the woman who comes between them; its treatment of gender performance and homosexuality was unprecedented in Chinese film. Winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes.

Lambda Literary Award finalist Michael V. Smith is a multi-talented force of nature: a novelist, poet, improv comic, filmmaker, drag queen, performance artist, and occasional clown. In this, his first work of nonfiction, Michael traces his early years as an inadequate male-a fey kid growing...