We

Yevgeny Zamyatin

In a glass-walled city ruled by the totalitarian One State, citizens have no privacy, no identity, no freedom, and no names: they each bear only a number.

The Salt Eaters

Toni Cade Bambara

“Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?”

The Waves

Virginia Woolf

Six children—three girls and three boys—play in a garden by the sea.

A Strategy for Labor

André Gorz

“A system that makes people work like zombies to produce useless, destructive, or self-destructive things has outlived its usefulness.”

The Cancer Journals

Audre Lorde

Between 1978 and 1980, Audre Lorde wrote about her experience with breast cancer and mastectomy, connecting her trials and treatment to her own work and to the collective effort of liberation for all women.

Burnout

Hannah Proctor

Hannah Proctor visits the concept of burnout as the experience of political defeat—the disappointment, despair, and grief that emerges when one becomes aware that the political project they have committed themselves to may not succeed.

Sisters of the Yam

bell hooks

bell hooks approaches notions of self-care among communities of Black women, locating it within the work of grief, testimony, and reconciliation.

Annals of the Western Shore

Ursula K. Le Guin

In these three short novels, Le Guin takes us to the Western Shore, where people of magic and people of war and people of books all try to make their lives together.

Searoad

Ursula K. Le Guin

This collection of interlocking stories tells of the people who live in a small town on the Oregon coast.

Mitz

Sigrid Nunez

In the summer of 1934, Leonard and Virginia Woolf adopted a marmoset named Mitz.

This pair of essays from Virginia Woolf attends to women’s exclusion from educational institutions and economic independence on two fronts.

The Empusium

Olga Tokarczuk

In 1913, a young Pole arrives at a health resort in the Silesian mountains, a place known to be free of consumption due to the still, damp air.

Trauma and Recovery

Judith Herman

Herman’s canonical work focuses on the necessity of understanding trauma within a social and political context.

Waking the Moon

Elizabeth Hand

An ancient secret order finds itself up against its most powerful foe: the Moon Goddess has returned.

We, the Heartbroken

Gargi Bhattacharyya

“Heartbreak is the heart of all revolutionary consciousness.”

Apocalypse

Lizzie Wade

An apocalypse is always both an ending and a beginning.

Reclaiming Work

André Gorz

“We must dare to prepare ourselves for the Exodus from ‘work-based society’: it no longer exists and will not return.”

Slow River

Nicola Griffith

Lore wakes up in an alley, naked, a huge gash running down her back, her identity implant—the only proof of her heritage in one of the world’s richest families—gone.