Astra Magazine is the new literary magazine of the moment, a must-read for anyone interested in the most vital contemporary literature from around the world. Astra Magazine connects readers and writers from New York to Mexico City, Lagos to Berlin, Copenhagen to Singapore and beyond around a unified aesthetic that highlights the luxurious pleasures of reading. Each issue contains prose, poetry, art and comics, artfully produced on silky smooth paper with luxurious French flaps. The Ecstasy Issue contains work by Mieko Kawakami, Fernanda Melchor, Catherine Lacey, Leslie Jamison, Solmaz Sharif, Terrance Hayes, Don Mee Choi, Ada Limón, Chinelo Okparanta, Sayaka Murata, Katharina Volckmer, Kate Zambreno, and many more.

Astra Magazine is the new literary magazine of the moment, a must-read for anyone interested in the most vital contemporary literature from around the world. Astra Magazine connects readers and writers from New York to Mexico City, Lagos to Berlin, Copenhagen to Singapore and beyond. Each issue contains prose, poetry, art and comics, artfully produced on silky smooth paper with luxurious French flaps. It's the most covetable accessory of the fall — dark and playful, pretty and smart. The Filth issue features work by Elif Batuman, Sheila Heti, Raven Leilani, Aracelis Girmay, Samuel R. Delany, Brontez Purnell, Wayne Koestenbaum, Clarice Lispector, McKenzie Wark, Mariana Enríquez, Safiya Sinclair, Maggie Millner, and many more. There is a moral element to filth. It is both what we have been taught to hide, and the subversive pleasure in revealing it. Many of the writers in this issue are queer or trans or otherwise outsiders. When you are taught that an intrinsic part of you is shameful, you find power in that shame. All that filth, compressed by the pressure, sparkles like diamonds when it is let it into the light. Have you ever felt the relief of telling your own secrets? There’s a reason why people revel in their own filth. It’s a place for reveling

"Escape Into Meaning is the debut essay collection by the creator of the highly addictive, deeply informative, always unconventional Nerdwriter channel, which has 3 million subscribers on YouTube. In this debut collection of eleven incisive, engaging, and humorous essays, readers are immersed in a fascinating and multifaceted montage of subjects-from the origins of Superman to the future of the city of Venice to the life of Ralph Waldo Emerson to the oeuvre of Quentin Tarantino"--

If writing about music is like dancing about architecture, you'd do best to hone your chops and avoid clich�s (like the one that begins this sentence) by learning from the prime movers. How to Write About Music offers a selection of the best writers on what is perhaps our most universally beloved art form. Selections from the critically-acclaimed 33 1/3 series appear alongside new interviews and insights from authors like Lester Bangs, Chuck Klosterman, Owen Pallet, Ann Powers and Alex Ross. How to Write About Music includes primary sources of inspiration from a variety of go-to genres such as the album review, the personal essay, the blog post and the interview along with tips, writing prompts and advice from the writers themselves. Music critics of the past and the present offer inspiration through their work on artists like Black Sabbath, Daft Punk, J Dilla, Joy Division, Kanye West, Neutral Milk Hotel, Radiohead, Pussy Riot and countless others. How to Write About Music is an invaluable text for all those who have ever dreamed of getting their music writing published and a pleasure for everyone who loves to read about music.

Gritty and unflinching, yet also tender, fantastical, and funny, a trans woman’s tale about finding a community on the margins. In Sarmiento Park, the green heart of Córdoba, a group of trans sex workers make their nightly rounds. When a cry comes from the dark, their leader, the 178-year-old Auntie Encarna, wades into the brambles to investigate and discovers a baby half dead from the cold. She quickly rallies the pack to save him, and they adopt the child into their fascinating surrogate family as they have so many other outcasts, including Camila. Sheltered in Auntie Encarna’s fabled pink house, they find a partial escape from the everyday threats of disease and violence, at the hands of clients, cops, and boyfriends. Telling their stories—of a mute young woman who transforms into a bird, of a Headless Man who fled his country’s wars—as well as her own journey from a toxic home in a small, poor town, Camila traces the life of this vibrant community throughout the 90s. Imbuing reality with the magic of a dark fairy tale, Bad Girls offers an intimate, nuanced portrait of trans coming-of-age that captures a universal sense of the strangeness of our bodies. It grips and entertains us while also challenging ideas about love, sexuality, gender, and identity.

A Vogue Best Book of the Year "What Ferrante did for female friends—exploring the tumult and complexity their relationships could hold—Spiegelman sets out to do for mothers and daughters. She’s essentially written My Brilliant Mom." —Slate A memoir of mothers and daughters—and mothers as daughters—traced through four generations, from Paris to New York and back again. For a long time, Nadja Spiegelman believed her mother was a fairy. More than her famous father, Maus creator Art Spiegelman, and even more than most mothers, hers—French-born New Yorker art director Françoise Mouly—exerted a force over reality that was both dazzling and daunting. As Nadja’s body changed and “began to whisper to the adults around me in a language I did not understand,” their relationship grew tense. Unwittingly, they were replaying a drama from her mother’s past, a drama Nadja sensed but had never been told. Then, after college, her mother suddenly opened up to her. Françoise recounted her turbulent adolescence caught between a volatile mother and a playboy father, one of the first plastic surgeons in France. The weight of the difficult stories she told her daughter shifted the balance between them. It had taken an ocean to allow Françoise the distance to become her own person. At about the same age, Nadja made the journey in reverse, moving to Paris determined to get to know the woman her mother had fled. Her grandmother’s memories contradicted her mother’s at nearly every turn, but beneath them lay a difficult history of her own. Nadja emerged with a deeper understanding of how each generation reshapes the past in order to forge ahead, their narratives both weapon and defense, eternally in conflict. Every reader will recognize herself and her family in I'm Supposed to Protect You From All This, a gorgeous and heartbreaking memoir that helps us to see why sometimes those who love us best hurt us most.