Esmé has been slinging radical books at Firestorm since 2019. They wear multiple hats including communications, social media marketing, and offsite sales coordination. She is a whodunit fiend continuously on the search for a confounding murder mystery that doesn't align itself with the cops.
Esmé J
Esme's Staff Picks
Showing 1 - 12 of 38 items
$19.99
Setting is everything in this slow-building nightmare on the high-seas. A whaling ship suggests chilling imagery right off the bat, but it is Nahil's mastery of atmosphere that cements the feeling of inescapable doom. You'll taste the salt on your lips and feel the dread in your own belly in this perfect marriage of ecological and queer horror!
Content warnings: body horror, animal death, medical experimentation, suicide
$15.00
The unusual structure and literary devices in the book, including a sizable portion written in second person perspective, punctuate Kincaid's searing indictment of 1980s western exceptionalism and the forever extractive relationship between the Caribbean and the global minority. Don't reach for this book if you're hoping for solutions or pacifications. But if you're wrestling with your relationship to the tourism industry, perhaps as a traveler yourself and/or a cog in a tourism-based economy like Asheville, "A Small Place" is guaranteed to give you big feelings. What you do with those feelings is entirely up to you...
Content warnings: discussions of colonial violence including slavery
$18.00
Brown’s tips for tending ‘right relationships’ include wisdoms from their experience as a long-time community organizer sprinkled with observations of the adaptions that take place in the natural world. Plus ingredients borrowed from Firestorm favorites Octavia Butler and Ursula K LeGuin as a treat. Loving Corrections offers a compassionate intervention into our self-sabotaging tendencies to erode the fragile scaffold of the better world we are trying to build.
Content warnings: discussions of harm and community responses to harm
$27.99
Acting was never McCurdy's dream; she wanted to write. This talent shines as she deftly lends humor and aching compassion to otherwise stomach-churning details of abuse and disordered eating. Part nostalgia-tinged polaroid of a skinny-jean-clad moment in the zeitgeist, part real-life horror story, I'm Glad My Mom Died is ultimately a cathartic declaration of humanity from a person who was raised to be a product.
Content warnings: child sexual abuse, graphic discussions of disordered eating, hoarding disorder, parent death, cancer
Airplane Mode pokes thoughtfully at the assumptions and supremacies underlying the tourism industry, troubling distinctions of tourist vs. traveler vs. migrant, and observer vs. observed. Habib delivers her critique with the knowing wink of someone who deeply loves the subject matter and sees herself in even the cringiest tourist impulses. This engrossing text made me confront the origins of the passport (spoiler, it's not great!), the "ugly American" sins I have perpetrated abroad, and the forces of human nature that motivate each cramped, stuffy journey through the sky.
Content warnings: discussions of colonial violence including slavery and indenture
In some ways Shesheshen's problems are not very relatable. I'll wager that few of us have personally battled the urge to lay parasitic eggs inside of our partners, or have been forced to dodge homicidal in-laws. But underneath her grotesque exterior, Shesheshen is any of us asking to be accepted in our fucked-up entirety. This tender ace romance between polar opposites is equal parts humorous and healing. I came for the shapeshifting shenanigans, but stayed for the gentle ways only survivors of abuse can make each other feel truly seen.
Content warnings: mild body horror, parent death, child abuse, fucked up sibling relationships
A beautiful collection of nature essays that wears its tender, nerdy heart on its sleeve! This exploration of deep sea life and mixed-race queerness is perfect for lovers of Why Fish Don't Exist, Undrowned, and The Brilliant Abyss.
Content Warnings: sexual violence, domestic violence, disordered eating, animal death
$25.99
The best contribution to the conversion camp cannon since "But I'm a Cheerleader!" Any skeptics of meme king Chuck Tingle's debut horror novel will have to eat their words, or perhaps regurgitate them in a cloud of flies...
Camp Damascus is not a one note experience, and Tingle expertly balances the bitter taste of ✨religious trauma✨ with the sweetness of first love, friendship in the face of the greatest odds, and the most satisfying "fuck around and find out" moment in literary history.
Content Warnings: homophobia, ableism against an autistic character, religious trauma, emotionally abusive parents, gaslighting, mild to medium body horror, death, bugs
Chapter by chapter, Gordon challenges the roots of anti-fat rhetoric with her signature mixture of clearheaded reasoning and deep compassion. Bad science doesn't stand a chance as Gordon eviscerates flawed studies and baseless "common sense" that have become foundational to mainstream conversations around fatness.
Content Warnings: Discussions of fatphobia, systemic racism, & disordered eating
Patricia Wants To Cuddle juxtaposes campy cryptid horror against the backdrop of a dating competition show. It is a combination so unexpected yet SO delicious you'll never watch The Bachelor the same way again!
Content Warnings: Disappearances, gore, death, car crash, gun violence
Legally classified as property of "The Company," Murderbot has hacked its own governor module to pursue the freedom to ignore bad orders and binge every serial drama it can download. Armed with razor-sharp sarcasm – and literally gun arms – Murderbot is the reluctant nonbinary, asexual, it/its hero we didn't know we needed. It is grumpy, socially inept, and utterly heartwarming as it learns what it means to see itself as a person 🥹
This is the kind of book series that introduces you to a motley crew of characters who soon begin to feel like real-life friends. You will celebrate their wins, and mourn their losses. You will wish you too could traverse wormholes on a sentient spaceship with a serious attitude problem.
Content Warnings: action movie level violence, slavery and indentured servitude, a fuck ton of f-bombs!
$16.99
A YA graphic novel in the tradition of some of our favorite radical sci-fi storytellers. Two non-binary teens from very different worlds meet amidst a drawn-out war, becoming intergalactic pen pals and devoted friends. Through their messages we learn about the players in this conflict: a powerful empire, a relentless resistance army, and an egalitarian society of humans and AI on the run. Blue Delliquanti breathes life into a very queer cast of characters who must find the courage to question their directives and create new paths towards freedom. It is beautifully illustrated, heartwarming, and unapologetically anti-authoritarian. Dear publishers, these are the revolutionary stories we want to read. More of this!!!
Content Warnings: war, non-lethal injuries, hunger, death of parents (not depicted)