2025 Bestsellers & Collective Picks

Mohammed El-Kurd’s raw eloquence and razor-sharp clarity will make you hurt and curse and cry and sometimes chuckle. A few will think, only to realize he is also talking about 'us,' the allies, the empathizers, even the comrades whose solidarity unwittingly demands the perfect victim. Mohammed El-Kurd has written a new Discourse on Colonialism for the twenty-first century. And like Aimé Césaire, he demands that we confront the truth, wipe away our crocodile tears, and take down Goliath once and for all.
—Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams

As a sixty-something-year-old former child who knew I was trans but couldn't do anything about it back then, I’m proud to stand in solidarity with young people today who still need emancipation from a social construction of childhood that denies their agency and ability to know their own best interests. Madeline Lane-McKinley’s important book makes clear just how high the stakes are.
—Susan Stryker, author of Transgender History

A comic about daily lives of high school friends at a time when ‘neurodiversity’ was not a word yet. While the characters walk a world that isn’t cut out for them (e.g. finding feelings that were suppressed to 'fit in'), their budding friendship is so full of care and honesty + the story is written with a truly caring love of the characters, this book gives me really warm feelings and makes my eyes watery.
—Koko, Firestorm Collective member

This is what I want from fiction. It starts at a place of real vulnerability, goes all the way down its own rabbit hole, and ends up potent and strange.
—Imogen Binnie, author of Nevada

Stephen Graham Jones tears into the flesh of vampire lore, transforming it into something raw and feral. Jones crafts a stark, unnervingly poetic narrative. This is vampire horror reimagined in the sharp glare of a history America cannot escape.
—Shane Hawk, co-editor of Never Whistle At Night

Grounded in Anishnabe thought and history Simpson scales up from the fractal to offer us a theory and model also of internationalism, of social and political intercommunalism and permeability occasioned also by water, as mode of transport, as a connector of worlds, regions, life forms. This is a model of Indigenous political thought that refuses all enclosures. Theory of Water enacts an intellectual and political history and diplomacy of the present that calls for shared journeys and shared futures.
—Audra Simpson, author of Mohawk Interruptus

Norman Bates, Leatherface, Buffalo Bill. It's no new insight that cis anxieties about gender have been foundational to the horror genre. Rather than distancing from these tired and frankly underwhelming tropes, Trans Voices in Horror embraces the monstrous like an old friend. These gruesome poems, paired with macabre full color illustrations, raise the bar for what transness offers to the horror genre (and vice versa). Checkmate, cis people.
—Esmé, Firestorm Collective member

Devon Price wants you to reclaim your life from ableist expectations. Even when we have a better understanding of our own brains, it can be a whole different ballgame to actually get our needs met in such a hostile world. Dr. Price offers tools, strategies, and example phrases you can use to aid in unmasking at work or around family. But more importantly, Dr. Price extends a comraderly hand that says, 'you are not alone.'
—Esmé, Firestorm Collective member

Trying to get your horny friends into anarchism? This is the book for them!  Pleasure seekers, sharing resources, living cummunally, fighting off villains, and constant questioning of what does it mean to seek liberation. Utopia isn't always as pretty as it sound.
—Junk, Firestorm Collective member

Oh so deliciously disturbing and devastating. I could not put down the book for the mystery of this apocalyptic place; the mortifying relationships and society people build when all is lost in the world; and the slow reveal of who the narrator truly is and who they love. Amid all this horror, Bazterrica still lets us see a sliver of hope in our ability to reclaim humanity and liberation.
—Koko, Firestorm Collective member

A very fun short story collection that throws a good punch at patriarchal phenomena we see in our daily lives and fictional plot 'tropes'—like boy heroes, Bond Girls, and how sometimes just 'women die' in popular media. (And then there are also just weird quirky short stories too!) I especially loved the story that gives the book title.
—Koko, Firestorm Collective member

A trans pregnancy horror for a post-Roe world, You Weren't Meant to Be Human pushes the boundary of what is publishable. I'm not going to sugar coat it, this book is disturbing and gross. Even an iron-stomached horror fanatic will feel a lurch when White goes *there.* But even as White serves up platter after platter of ghastly cosmic horror, he reminds us that the truly terrifying will always be mundanely, achingly human.
—Esmé, Firestorm Collective member