Skip to main content
rile*books

Search books

Search books by title, author, publisher, keywords...

Cover of Valerie Solanas: The Defiant Life of the Woman Who Wrote Scum

Feminist Press

Valerie Solanas: The Defiant Life of the Woman Who Wrote Scum

Breanne Fahs

€23.00

The authoritative biography of the 60s countercultural icon who wrote SCUM Manifesto, shot Andy Warhol, and made an unforgettable mark on feminist history.

Breanne Fahs is an associate professor of women and gender studies at Arizona State University, where she specializes in studying women's sexuality, critical embodiment studies, radical feminism, and political activism. She has a BA in women's studies/gender studies and psychology from Occidental College and a PhD in women's studies and clinical psychology from the University of Michigan. She has published widely in feminist, social science, and humanities journals, as well as the books Performing Sex with SUNY Press (2011) and The Moral Panics of Sexuality (2013). She is the director of the Feminist Research on Gender and Sexuality Group at Arizona State University, and also works as a private practice clinical psychologist specializing in sexuality, couples work, and trauma recovery. 

Published in 2014 ┊ 352 pages ┊ Language: English

recommendations

Cover of Cockfight

Feminist Press

Cockfight

María Fernanda Ampuero

Fiction €16.00

Thirteen stories explore domestic horrors and everyday violence, providing an intimate and unflinching portrait of twenty-first-century Latin America.

Named one of the ten best fiction books of 2018 by the New York Times en Español, Cockfight is the debut work by Ecuadorian writer and journalist María Fernanda Ampuero.

In lucid and compelling prose, Ampuero sheds light on the hidden aspects of the home: the grotesque realities of family, coming of age, religion, and class struggle. A family’s maids witness a horrible cycle of abuse, a girl is auctioned off by a gang of criminals, and two sisters find themselves at the mercy of their spiteful brother. With violence masquerading as love, characters spend their lives trapped reenacting their past traumas.

Cover of Earthsong

Feminist Press

Earthsong

Suzette Haden Elgin

Sci-Fi €18.00

The final book in the Native Tongue Trilogy.

The interstellar Consortium of Planets has forsaken the irredeemably violent Earth, condemning the planet to economic and ecological chaos. As the Consortium prepares to euthanize the planet, women freedom fighters are offered one last chance to correct men’s brutal nature and stop the planet’s annihilation. In the stunning conclusion to the Native Tongue trilogy, female linguists must once again come forward to ensure the survival of humanity.

Suzette Haden Elgin (born Patricia Anne Wilkins; 1936–2015) was an American science fiction author. She founded the Science Fiction Poetry Association, and was considered an important figure in the field of science fiction constructed languages. Elgin was also a linguist; she published non-fiction, of which the best-known is the Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense series.

Cover of The Judas Rose

Feminist Press

The Judas Rose

Suzette Haden Elgin

Fiction €18.00

In the second volume of the Native Tongue trilogy, the time has come for Láadan—the secret language created to resist an oppressive patriarchy—to empower womankind worldwide. To expand the language’s reach, female linguists translate the Bible into Láadan, and a group of Roman Catholic nuns are tasked to spread the language. But when outraged priests detect their sabotage, they send a double agent to infiltrate and destroy the movement from the inside.

With a foreword by Rebecca Romney

Suzette Haden Elgin (born Patricia Anne Wilkins; 1936–2015) was an American science fiction author. She founded the Science Fiction Poetry Association, and was considered an important figure in the field of science fiction constructed languages. Elgin was also a linguist; she published non-fiction, of which the best-known is the Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense series.

Cover of Witches, Midwives, & Nurses: A History of Women Healers

Feminist Press

Witches, Midwives, & Nurses: A History of Women Healers

Barbara Ehrenreich, Deirdre English

Witches, Midwives, and Nurses examines how women-led healing was delegitimized to make way for patriarchy, capitalism, and the emerging medical industry.

As we watch another agonizing attempt to shift the future of healthcare in the United States, we are reminded of the longevity of this crisis, and how firmly entrenched we are in a system that doesn't work.

First published by the Feminist Press in 1973, Witches, Midwives, and Nurses is an essential book about the corruption of the medical establishment and its historic roots in witch hunters. In this new and updated edition, Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English delve into the current fascination with and controversies about witches, exposing our fears and fantasies. They build on their classic exposé on the demonization of women healers and the political and economic monopolization of medicine. This quick history brings us up-to-date, exploring today's changing attitudes toward childbirth, alternative medicine, and modern-day witches.

Cover of Native Tongue

Feminist Press

Native Tongue

Suzette Haden Elgin

Originally published in 1984, this classic dystopian trilogy is a testament to the power of language and women's collective action. 

In 2205, the Nineteenth Amendment has long been repealed and women are only valued for their utility. The Earth's economy depends on an insular group of linguists who "breed" women to be perfect interstellar translators until they are sent to the Barren House to await death. But instead, these women are slowly creating a language of their own to make resistance possible. Ignorant to this brewing revolution, Nazareth, a brilliant linguist, and Michaela, a servant, both seek emancipation in their own ways. But their personal rebellions risk exposing the secret language, and threaten the possibility of freedom for all.

Cover of Baby

Zephyr Press

Baby

Carla Harryman

Poetry €14.00

Mangled diction from the cusp of childhood. 

Carla Harryman is the author of 11 books of poetry, prose plays and essays. Her two experimental novels, Gardener of Stars (2001) and The Words: after Carl Sandburg’s Rootabaga Stories and Jean-Paul Sartre (1999) are “explorations of the paradise and wastelands of utopian desire.” Baby continues this exploration through the convolutions of Baby, who enters the book as “fire in the womb with a skirt."

Carla Harryman is a poet, experimental prose writer, essayist, and performance writer who has collaborated with multiple visual artists and composers on bodies of work. Her work has been translated into several languages, including French, with her writing represented in more than 30 national and international anthologies. She has received the Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grants to Artists award (2004), the Opera America Next Stage Grant (with composer Erling Wold), the Alexander Gerbode Foundation, and the NEA Consortium Playwrights Commission, among additional grants and awards from the Fund for Poetry.

Harryman was a founding figure of the Bay Area language writing and a co-founder of The San Francisco Bay Area Poets Theater (1979-1986). She currently teaches Creative Writing at Eastern Michigan University and serves on the MFA summer faculty of the Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College.

Cover of Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds

Pluto Press

Trans Femme Futures: Abolitionist Ethics for Transfeminist Worlds

Nat Raha, Mijke van der Drift

LGBTQI+ €23.00

'Femme' describes a constellation of queer, gendered expressions that uproot expectations of what it means to be feminine. Building upon experiences of transformation, belonging and harm, this book is a transfeminist call for collective liberation.

Trans Femme Futures envisions the future through everyday actions that revolutionise our lives. Nat Raha and Mijke van der Drift discuss struggles around trans healthcare, the need for collectives over institutions, the importance of mutual care, and transfeminism as abolition.

The authors show how social change can be achieved through transformative practices that allow queer life to thrive in a time of climate, health, political and economic crises.

'A brilliant, useful, and immensely moving book that deals a critical blow to the epistemic austerity of our times' - Jordy Rosenberg

Cover of When My Body Was A Clinched Fist

Black Lawrence Press

When My Body Was A Clinched Fist

Enzo Silon Surin

Poetry €17.00

"Back in the day when KRS-One intoned —The Bridge is over!— he did not prefigure a poet from Queens of the fierce attitude and intellectual magnitude of Enzo Silon Surin. WHEN MY BODY WAS A CLINCHED FIST gives the Heisman to such a refrain with lyrical power-packing poetics that settles the score with a succinct— Not! No the Bridge is not over, for Surin's Queens is alive and well and under the gaze of a master observer who eulogizes lives that though at times are battered have always mattered.

Enzo Silon Surin's poems get you caught up in the deeply personal experiences of growing and visceral all-encompassing knowing from an acute witness of every breath and follicle of Black life from palm trees, sand and sea to street corner projects, suburban houses and fistfuls of black water. Surin writes about the confused and disconnected, trigger happy wannabes trapped by outdated notions of masculinity, the cracked head crackheads all held in the clutch of society's clinched fist through which the trauma that comes with being of color, addicted, broke, lost and tossed, is itself a clinched fist of black bodies caught in the Russian nesting doll America's clinched fists make.

WHEN MY BODY WAS A CLINCHED FIST is an elegy for 'the premature exits.' It is a blues for the black-on-black black and blue. Surin yields his pen like a microscopic scalpel whereby an autopsy of possibility is performed to un-clinch the remarkable bone gristle poetry in these unflinching heart-wrenching pages."—Tony Medina

Enzo Silon Surin, Haitian-born poet, educator, speaker, publisher and social advocate, is the author of two chapbooks, A Letter of Resignation: An American Libretto (2017) and Higher Ground. He is the recipient of a Brother Thomas Fellowship from The Boston Foundation and is a PEN New England Celebrated New Voice in Poetry. Surin's work gives voice to experiences that take place in what he calls "broken spaces" and his poems have appeared in numerous publications including Crab Orchard Review, Origins, Transition Magazine/Jalada, Interviewing the Caribbean, jubilat, Soundings East, The BreakBeat Poets: New American Poetry in the Age of Hip-Hop, and sx salon. Surin holds an MFA in Creative Writing from Lesley University and is currently Professor of English at Bunker Hill Community College and founding editor and publisher at Central Square Press. His debut full-length poetry collection is WHEN MY BODY WAS A CLINCHED FIST (Black Lawrence Press, 2020).