Rust Belt Femme

One of NPR's "Best Books of 2020," and winner of the 2020 Independent Publisher Awards' gold medal for LGBTQ+ nonfiction, Raechel Anne Jolie's blazing memoir is now available in paperback. Raechel Anne Joli

A fierce, unyielding memoir of queer self-discovery in '90s Cleveland

Raechel Anne Jolie's early life in a working-class Cleveland exurb was full of race cars, Budweiser-drinking men, men covered in car grease, and the women who loved them. After her father came home from his third-shift job, took the garbage out to the curb and was hit by a drunk driver., her life changed. Raechel and her mother struggled for money: they were evicted, went days without utilities, and took their trauma out on one another. Raechel escaped to the progressive suburbs of Cleveland Heights, leaving the tractors and ranch-style homes home in favor of a city with vintage marquees, music clubs, and people who talked about big ideas. It was the early 90s, full of Nirvana songs and chokers, flannel shirts and cut-off jean shorts, lesbian witches and local coffee shops. Rust Belt Femme is the story of how these twin foundations--rural Ohio poverty and alternative 90s culture--made Raechel into who she is today: a queer femme with PTSD and a deep love of the Midwest.

"Elements of Tara Westover’s Educated... The mill comes to represent something holy to [Eliese] because it is made not of steel but of people." —New York Times Book Review One woman's story of working in the backbreaking steel industry to rebuild her life—but what she uncovers in the mill is much more than molten metal and grueling working conditions. Under the mill's orange flame she finds hope for the unity of America. Steel is the only thing that shines in the belly of the mill... To ArcelorMittal Steel Eliese is known as #6691: Utility Worker, but this was never her dream. Fresh out of college, eager to leave behind her conservative hometown and come to terms with her Christian roots, Eliese found herself applying for a job at the local steel mill. The mill is everything she was trying to escape, but it's also her only shot at financial security in an economically devastated and forgotten part of America. In Rust, Eliese brings the reader inside the belly of the mill and the middle American upbringing that brought her there in the first place. She takes a long and intimate look at her Rust Belt childhood and struggles to reconcile her desire to leave without turning her back on the people she's come to love. The people she sees as the unsung backbone of our nation. Faced with the financial promise of a steelworker’s paycheck, and the very real danger of working in an environment where a steel coil could crush you at any moment or a vat of molten iron could explode because of a single drop of water, Eliese finds unexpected warmth and camaraderie among the gruff men she labors beside each day. Appealing to readers of Hillbilly Elegy and Educated, Rust is a story of the humanity Eliese discovers in the most unlikely and hellish of places, and the hope that therefore begins to grow.

Secrets of Delicious Vegan Cuisine from the Beloved New York Eatery For over 40 years the landmark Angelica Kitchen served mouthwatering, plant-based dishes to tens of thousands of customers in New York City. While the restaurant has since closed, more than 100 of its most popular recipes live on in this inspirational cookbook. From essential rice and beans to exotic Asian root-vegetable stew, this volume showcases the range of this famous eatery’s artful technique, with instruction perfect for the home cook. The Angelica Home Kitchen explores the economic, social, and ecological impact that our food choices have outside the kitchen. This iconic work delves into philosophies and principles of consumption while offering delicious, well-balanced, healthy dishes made from-the-heart and at an affordable cost. Author Leslie McEachern, the owner of Angelica Kitchen, shares her locally-sourced, farm-grown path to nourish the body and spirit. In balance, we rekindle our connection between ourselves, the earth, and our community. This must-have cookbook is beloved by vegetarians and omnivores alike for its passion, creativity, and above all—flavor!

In Die Hard style, Silas Cade takes his atypical brand of "auditing" from Wall Street to Main Street Fans of Lee Child's Jack Reacher and Vince Flynn's Mitch Rapp will want to add Silas Cade to their lineup. Cade, the tough-guy auditor antihero introduced in Clawback, employs a brand of financial reform that comes with plenty of firepower. Needing a respite from Wall Street, Cade jumps at a job opportunity in western Pennsylvania—but finds that Main Street is just as dirty. The job seems easy enough—check out a Pittsburgh manufacturer and file a report—but Cade quickly discovers corruption at every level. His revelations catch the attentions of hair-trigger Russian mobsters and a blonde assassin named Harmony. Cade’s estranged brother is dragged into the fray as the tension builds to bullet-riddled showdowns across defunct steel mills, forests, and Appalachian fracking fields. Cooper again delivers a timely plot involving Wall Street greed, financial corruption, and the plight of blue-collar workers.

A questioning of the belief in the power of LGBTQ visibility through the lives of queer women in the rural Midwest Today most LGBTQ rights supporters take for granted the virtue of being “out, loud, and proud.” Most also assume that it would be terrible to be LGBTQ in a rural place. By considering moments in which queerness and rurality come into contact, Visibility Interrupted argues that both positions are wrong. In the first monograph on LGBTQ women in the rural Midwest, Carly Thomsen deconstructs the image of the rural as a flat, homogenous, and anachronistic place where LGBTQ people necessarily suffer. And she suggests that visibility is not liberation and will not lead to liberation. Far from being an unambiguous good, argues Thomsen, visibility politics can, in fact, preclude collective action. They also advance metronormativity, postraciality, and capitalism. To make these interventions, Thomsen develops the theory of unbecoming: interrogating the relationship between that which we celebrate and that which we find disdainful—the past, the rural, politics—is crucial for developing alternative subjectivities and politics. Unbecoming precedes becoming. Drawing from critical race studies, disability studies, and queer Marxism, in addition to feminist and queer studies, the insights of this book will be useful to scholars theorizing issues far beyond sexuality and place and to social justice activists who want to move beyond visibility.

The queer recluse, the shambling farmer, the clannish hill folk—white rural populations have long disturbed the American imagination, alternately revered as moral, healthy, and hardworking, and feared as antisocial or socially uncouth. In Peculiar Places, Ryan Lee Cartwright examines the deep archive of these contrary formations, mapping racialized queer and disability histories of white social nonconformity across the rural twentieth-century United States. Sensationalized accounts of white rural communities’ aberrant sexualities, racial intermingling, gender transgressions, and anomalous bodies and minds, which proliferated from the turn of the century, created a national view of the perversity of white rural poverty for the American public. Cartwright contends that these accounts, extracted and estranged from their own ambivalent forum of community gossip, must be read in kind: through a racialized, materialist queercrip optic of the deeply familiar and mundane. Taking in popular science, documentary photography, news media, documentaries, and horror films, Peculiar Places orients itself at the intersections of disability studies, queer studies, and gender studies to illuminate a racialized landscape both profoundly ordinary and familiar.