Wooden Shoe Books Recommendations
Recommendations from staffers at Wooden Shoe Books, an all-volunteer anarchist bookstore in South Philadelphia
Goddess of Anarchy
The Life and Times of Lucy Parsons, American Radical
By Jacqueline Jones
Narrated by: Nylsa Smallwood
Length: 14 hours 7 minutes
From a prize-winning historian, a new portrait of an extraordinary activist and the turbulent age in which she lived
Goddess of Anarchy recounts the formidable life of the militant writer, orator, and agitator Lucy Parsons. Born to an enslaved woman in Virginia in 1851 and raised in Texas-where she met her husband, the Haymarket "martyr" Albert... Read more »
Spain in Our Hearts
Americans in the Spanish Civil War, 1936-1939
By Adam Hochschild
Narrated by: Henry Strozier
Length: 15 hours 26 minutes
From the acclaimed, best-selling author Adam Hochschild, a sweeping history of the Spanish Civil War, told through a dozen characters, including Ernest Hemingway and George Orwell: a tale of idealism, heartbreaking suffering, and a noble cause that failed For three crucial years in the 1930s, the Spanish Civil War dominated headlines in America... Read more »
Sister Outsider
Essays and Speeches
Crossing Press Feminist: Book #1
By Audre Lorde
Narrated by: Robin Eller
Length: 7 hours 31 minutes
Presenting the essential writings of black lesbian poet and feminist writer Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider celebrates an influential voice in twentieth-century literature. In this charged collection of fifteen essays and speeches, Lorde takes on sexism, racism, ageism, homophobia, and class, and propounds social difference as a vehicle for action... Read more »
A People's History of the United States
1492 to Present
By Howard Zinn
Narrated by: Jeff Zinn
Length: 34 hours 9 minutes
"A wonderful, splendid book--a book that should be ready by every American, student or otherwise, who wants to understand his country, its true history, and its hope for the future." --Howard Fast
For much of his life, historian Howard Zinn chronicled American history from the bottom up, throwing out the official version taught in schools -- with... Read more »
The Dispossessed
A Novel
Hainish Cycle
By Ursula K. Le Guin
Narrated by: Don Leslie
Length: 13 hours 25 minutes
“One of the greats….Not just a science fiction writer; a literary icon.” – Stephen King
From the brilliant and award-winning author Ursula K. Le Guin comes a classic tale of two planets torn apart by conflict and mistrust — and the man who risks everything to reunite them.
A bleak moon settled by utopian anarchists, Anarres has long been isolated... Read more »
Parable of the Sower
Earthseed: Book #1
By Octavia E. Butler
Narrated by: Lynne Thigpen
Length: 12 hours 2 minutes
Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author Octavia E. Butler paints a stunning portrait of an all-too-believable near future. As with Kindred and her other critically-acclaimed novels, Parable of the Sower skillfully combines startling visionary and socially realistic concepts. God is change. That is the central truth of the Earthseed movement, whose... Read more »
Freedom is a Constant Struggle
Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement
By Angela Y. Davis
Narrated by: Angela Davis & Coleen Marlo
Length: 5 hours 47 minutes
In these newly collected essays, interviews, and speeches, world-renowned activist and scholar Angela Y. Davis illuminates the connections between struggles against state violence and oppression throughout history and around the world. Reflecting on the importance of black feminism, intersectionality, and prison abolitionism for today's... Read more »
From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation
By Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
Narrated by: Mia Ellis
Length: 9 hours 50 minutes
The eruption of mass protests in the wake of the police murders of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, and Eric Garner in New York City have challenged the impunity with which officers of the law carry out violence against black people and punctured the illusion of a postracial America. The Black Lives Matter movement has awakened a new... Read more »
In the Dream House
A Memoir
By Carmen Maria Machado
Narrated by: Carmen Maria Machado
Length: 5 hours 28 minutes
In the Dream House
“Welcome to the Dream House in this daring new kind of memoir that defies boundaries and boldly discards the conventions of genre. Inside, Carmen Maria Machado bares her soul in all of its pain and beauty, offering an intimate and profoundly vulnerable look at her own life, love, and sexuality. Machado has a gift for exposing the raw nerves and small miracles lurking beneath the surface of our daily lives. Her words move with a strange kind of urgency, surreal and yet true, like late-night phone calls when the rest of the world is asleep. I didn’t feel like I was reading a book so much as observing a person’s innermost thoughts. In the Dream House is a unique and extraordinary book.”
Jason Foose, Changing Hands
There There
A novel
By Tommy Orange
Narrated by: Darrell Dennis, Shaun Taylor-Corbett, Alma Cuervo & Kyla Garcia
Length: 7 hours 59 minutes
There There
“There There is the kind of book that grabs you from the start and doesn’t let go, even after you’ve turned the last page. It is a work of fiction, but every word of it feels true. Tommy Orange writes with a palpable anger and pain, telling the history of a cultural trauma handed down through generations in the blood and bones and stories of individual lives. He also writes with incredible heart and humor, infusing his characters with a tangible humanity and moments of joy even as they are headed toward tragedy. There There has claimed a permanent spot in my heart despite having broken it, or maybe because it did. I think this may be the best book I’ve ever read.”
The Third Rainbow Girl
The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia
By Emma Copley Eisenberg
Narrated by: Emma Copley Eisenberg
Length: 10 hours 32 minutes
The Third Rainbow Girl
“The facts are that in the summer of 1980, two young women were hitchhiking in Pocahontas County, West Virginia en route to the annual Rainbow Festival. Their murdered bodies were found in a remote clearing on a remote road. Over the years, multiple people confessed to the murders. Was it a local as many thought? Or an itinerant mass murderer traveling the country, raging against blacks and others? Eisenberg dives deeply into the case after spending time there years later as a Vista volunteer. This engaging book tells the story of the people of this rural county, the history of the area, and the officials who would not let the case die. It is also Emma's story: her time with these people, her loves, and her discontent. It is a stirring addition to the Appalachian story.”
Valerie, Blue Willow Bookshop
Unapologetic
A Black, Queer, and Feminist Mandate for Our Movement
By Charlene Carruthers
Narrated by: Charlene Carruthers
Length: 5 hours 49 minutes
This 21st-century activist's guide to upending mainstream ideas about race, class, and gender carves out a path to collective liberation.
Drawing on Black intellectual and grassroots organizing traditions, including the Haitian Revolution, the US civil rights movement, and LGBTQ rights and feminist movements, Unapologetic challenges all of us... Read more »
Beyond the Gender Binary
Pocket Change Collective
By Alok Vaid-Menon
Narrated by: Alok Vaid-Menon
Length: 1 hour 7 minutes
Pocket Change Collective was born out of a need for space. Space to think. Space to connect. Space to be yourself. And this is your invitation to join us.
"Thank God we have Alok. And I'm learning a thing or two myself."--Billy Porter, Emmy award-winning actor, singer, and Broadway theater performer
"When reading this book, all I feel is... Read more »
Felix Ever After
By Kacen Callender
Narrated by: Logan Rozos
Length: 8 hours 23 minutes
From Stonewall and Lambda Award–winning author Kacen Callender comes a revelatory YA novel about a transgender teen grappling with identity and self-discovery while falling in love for the first time.
Felix Love has never been in love—and, yes, he’s painfully aware of the irony. He desperately wants to know what it’s like and why it seems so easy... Read more »
1984 And The Spanish Civil War
Forgotten Stories From Spain
By Paul Read
Narrated by: Paul Read
Length: 1 hour 22 minutes
In 1937, George Orwell spent six months witnessing the rise and fall of a popular revolution on the streets of Barcelona and Catalonia. Alone amongst his contemporaries, Orwell understood what the success or failure of that Spanish Revolution would mean for the rest of the world.
1984 And The Spanish Civil War explores the background to the... Read more »
The Mother of All Questions
By Rebecca Solnit
Narrated by: Tanya Eby
Length: 5 hours 26 minutes
In a timely and incisive follow-up to her national bestseller Men Explain Things to Me, Rebecca Solnit offers sharp commentary on women who refuse to be silenced, misogynistic violence, the fragile masculinity of the literary canon, the gender binary, the recent history of rape jokes, and much more. In her characteristic style, Solnit mixes... Read more »
The Body Is Not an Apology
The Power of Radical Self-Love
By Sonya Renee Taylor
Narrated by: Sonya Renee Taylor
Length: 4 hours 49 minutes
A global movement guided by love
Humans are a varied and divergent bunch with all manner of beliefs, morals, and bodies. Systems of oppression thrive off our inability to make peace with difference and injure the relationship we have with our own bodies.
The Body Is Not an Apology offers radical self-love as the balm to heal the wounds inflicted... Read more »
An African American and Latinx History of the United States
REVISIONING HISTORY: Book #4
By Paul Ortiz
Narrated by: JD Jackson
Length: 9 hours 3 minutes
An intersectional history of the shared struggle for African American and Latinx civil rights
Spanning more than two hundred years, An African American and Latinx History of the United States is a revolutionary, politically charged narrative history, arguing that the “Global South” was crucial to the development of America as we know it. Scholar... Read more »
The Left Hand of Darkness
By Ursula K. Le Guin
Narrated by: George Guidall
Length: 9 hours 39 minutes
Winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards A groundbreaking work of science fiction, The Left Hand of Darkness tells the story of a lone human emissary to Winter, an alien world whose inhabitants can change their gender. His goal is to facilitate Winter's inclusion in a growing intergalactic civilization. But to do so he must bridge the gulf between... Read more »
A Queer History of the United States
REVISIONING HISTORY
By Michael Bronski
Narrated by: Vikas Adams
Length: 10 hours 28 minutes
Winner of a 2012 Stonewall Book Award in nonfiction
The first book to cover the entirety of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender history, from pre-1492 to the present.
In the 1620s, Thomas Morton broke from Plymouth Colony and founded Merrymount, which celebrated same-sex desire, atheism, and interracial marriage. Transgender evangelist Jemima... Read more »