Anthologies

In Retro Five, the acclaimed literary magazine Joyland has collected fourteen of its editors’ favorites stories from the last year. Annabel Graham explores scars left and secrets found in a teenage girl’s first summer in New York; Olga Breydo refracts the American ritual of homecoming through the eyes of a young Ukrainian immigrant in Missouri. C.E. Hyun tells the tale of a Norse god reborn as a young woman living in Venice, and childhood friends reconnect at Los Angeles’s Chateau Marmont in Duncan Birmingham’s tale. Some themes are universal: Lillian Weber focuses on complications between roommates, and Michele Lyn King sharply depicts the ghost of an ex-girlfriend hovering over a nascent relationship at an everytown-college.

In these eleven stories—collected from the first year of Platypus Press’ Shorts digital fiction series—we meet a jaded group of teenagers as they gather by the river to avoid their strained home lives, a servant haunted by his kindly master in the stifling summer heat, and a lost daughter still searching for her mother. Travel through time: over mountains, across islands, to a dystopian near-future, to the places where families and memories are scattered like dreams. Featuring stories from: Beth Hahn, Jae Kim, Leesa Cross-Smith, Kristen Arnett, Nur Nasreen Ibrahim, Hala Alyan, Jennifer Tseng, Jimin Han, Shuly Xóchitl Cawood, Sarah Thankam Mathews, and Jenny Wu. Anthology edited by Michelle Tudor.

"More than a book about a series of books, it is an ode to the child readers we were, and the ways we have learned to name the experiences we couldn't find written."  —Melissa Febos, author of Abandon Me & Girlhood A nostalgia-packed, star-studded anthology featuring contributors such as Kristen Arnett, Yumi Sakugawa, Gabrielle Moss, and others exploring the lasting impact of the beloved Baby-Sitters Club series In 1986, the first-ever meeting of the Baby-Sitters Club was called to order in a messy bedroom strewn with Ring-Dings, scrunchies, and a landline phone. Kristy, Claudia, Stacey, and Mary Anne launched the club that birthed an entire generation of loyal readers. The Baby-Sitters Club series featured a diverse, complex cast of characters and touched on an impressive range of issues that were underrepresented at the time: divorce, adoption, childhood illness, class division, and racism, to name a few. In We Are the Baby-sitters Club, writers and a few visual artists from Generation BSC will reflect on the enduring legacy of Ann M. Martin's beloved series, thirty-five years later—celebrating the BSC's profound cultural influence. Contributors include author Gabrielle Moss, illustrator Siobhán Gallagher, and filmmaker Sue Ding, as well as New York Times bestselling author Kristen Arnett, Lambda Award–finalist Myriam Gurba, Black Girl Nerds founder Jamie Broadnax, and Paris Review contributor Frankie Thomas.The first anthology of its kind from editors Marisa Crawford and Megan Milks, We Are the Baby-Sitters Club will look closely at how Ann M. Martin's series shaped our ideas about gender politics, friendship, fashion and beyond—and what makes the series still a core part of many readers' identities so many years later.

One of Bustle's Best Books of May A feminist anthology inspired by legendary Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl , featuring twenty-four new essays on the triumphs and heartbreaks of modern singlehood from acclaimed and bestselling authors, including Kristen Arnett, Morgan Parker, Evette Dionne, and Melissa Febos. Sixty years ago, Helen Gurley Brown's Sex and the Single Girl sent shockwaves through the United States, selling more than two million copies in three weeks. Helen’s message was radical for its time: marriage wasn’t essential for women to lead rich, fulfilling lives. Now, in these critical, wry, and expansive essays, twenty-four writers reconsider Helen’s advice and how it applies to their own paths, fielding topics that she couldn’t—or wouldn’t—conceive of in 1962: contraception and abortion (an omission demanded by her publisher), queer and trans womanhood, polyamory, celibacy, interracial dating, bodies of all kinds, consent, sex work, IVF, and the pop culture that both saves and fails us. Eliza Smith and Haley Swanson’s revisionist anthology honors Brown’s irreverent spirit while also validating our modern experiences of singlehood, encouraging us all to reclaim joy where it’s so often been denied.

Edited by Shelly Oria --author and editor of Indelible in the Hippocampus --this explosive, intersectional collection of essays, fiction, poems, plays, and more, explores the universality of human reproductive experiences, as well as their distinct individuality. An enlisted sailor must choose between her military career and keeping an unexpected pregnancy. A mother of three decides to become a surrogate, but is unprepared for everything that happens next. A trans man's pregnancy forces them to approach their key relationships in a new way. A woman's choice to live a child-free life is put to the test when her husband's dying wish is for them to become parents. Forced sterilization camps line the borders of America in a dystopian future that may not be far off. In their own unique and unforgettable way, each storyteller examines our crisis of access to care in ways that are at turns haunting, heartbreaking, and outright funny. This collection is a collaboration with the Brigid Alliance, a nationwide service that arranges and funds confidential and personal travel support to those seeking abortion care.