Find Famished here: https://www.eerdmans.com/9780802884510/famished/ About this book: A groundbreaking debut memoir that examines the rhyming scripts of diet culture and evangelical purity culture, both of which direct women to fear their own bodies and appetites Raised Baptist in an insular Appalachian community, Anna Rollins learned early that among the world's many dangers, her own body loomed large. So, she dedicated herself to keeping it small—strictly controlling her calories and exercising to the point of exhaustion while murmuring some version of the prayer: "We must decrease so that He can increase." She was picking up a similar mantra online: "Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels." To be a Christian woman was to be thin and chaste, sidestepping any pleasures of the flesh that would cause you—or a brother in Christ—to stumble into sin. But thinness was also a sign of virtue to the outside world. By day, Rollins attended schools and churches where male pastors and older women policed female bodies. By night, she scrolled websites and chat rooms where dieting itself inspired a kind of religious devotion. Despite Rollins's piety, anger grew in her chest. "I was all hunger, all need. I was ashamed. But I was also proud. I knew that I was also physical, embodied, a person with desires, despite how frequently I was told that I was not." Still, it wasn't until she found herself obsessing over how she would burn off the pasta she ate for dinner while watching her infant son struggle to breathe in the ICU that Rollins could admit to herself the extent to which she'd bought into the false promises of both purity and diet culture: That if she controlled her appetites, she would be righteous. That if she made herself smaller, she would be safe. Blending memoir, research, and reporting, Famished untangles these lies and encourages women to reclaim their appetites for life, love, and food, both physical and spiritual. Interweaving her own story of disordered eating and sexual dysfunction with those of other women she interviews, Rollins discovers a sisterhood committed to finding freedom from body shame. Along the way she rewrites her own body's story to include a purpose much greater than its size or parts or the roles she fills as daughter, wife, and mother, a body well-loved by her and beloved by God. Totally Biased Reviews is a Parley Lit production in collaboration with Parley Productions. Hosted and Edited by Asha Dore and Rebecca Tourino Collinsworth. Music by Nuclear Peasant. Find more at www.TotallyBiasedReviews.com

Find The Blue Dress here: https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374393595/thebluedress/ About this book: For fans of Jasmine Warga and Starfish, an Iranian American girl navigates complicated relationships with her mother, her best friend, and her body image in this unflinching and ultimately uplifting middle-grade debut. Sometimes Yasmin feels like her body isn't hers. And it's not just because puberty has mounted a full-on alien invasion, or that emigrating from Iran a year-and-a-half ago has meant one change after another. It's also because her mother constantly pushes her to lose weight, like sewing Yasmin a beautiful blue dress for Persian New Year that is too tight on purpose. At school, it doesn't help that Yasmin's best friend, Carmen, is petite and close to her own mother, or that popular-girl Zoe always has a mean comment to spare. Yasmin is sure her crush, Jack, won't ever like her the way she is, either. With the pressure to fit in closing in on all sides, Yasmin starts taking desperate measures. But if being thin is supposed to make her happier, then why does losing weight feel like losing parts of herself, too? From debut author Rebecca Morrison comes The Blue Dress, a heart-rending, funny, and hopeful book inspired by her own life, relatable to anyone who has ever needed to break away from someone else's vision of how they should look in order to embrace their true self I was born in Iran, immigrated to the United States in my teens, and now live in the Washington, DC, area. In 2020, after practicing law for over two decades, I decided to pursue my dreams of becoming a writer. My work has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, NBC News, Newsweek, The Independent and HuffPost, among others. My debut novel, The Blue Dress, based on my childhood as an Iranian immigrant trying to fit into my family's expectations of beauty and my American homeland is coming out on March 24, 2026. I'm represented by Erin Niumata at Folio Literary Management for adult books and John Cusick at Folio Jr. for children's books. Totally Biased Reviews is a Parley Lit production in collaboration with Parley Productions. Hosted and Edited by Asha Dore and Rebecca Tourino Collinsworth. Music by Nuclear Peasant. Find more at www.TotallyBiasedReviews.com

Buy For a Spell, here - https://uncpress.org/9781469690445/for-a-spell/

More about the book: In the Southeastern United States of the late 1970s, a regional network of radical communal gay households formed in the face of rising New Right terror. Consisting of primarily white, self-described sissies, the Southeast Network, as it came to be known, spanned from the Ozarks, to New Orleans, to Appalachian Tennessee. Though this network was short-lived, its legacy lives on today through Short Mountain Sanctuary, a thriving member of the international Radical Faerie movement. Jason Ezell's intimate account of the formation and dissolution of these sissie houses reveals a little-known history of Southern gay liberation, nonbinary gender expression, and radical feminism and femininity. Drawing on journals, letters, oral histories, collective manifestos, and newsletters, Ezell illustrates how these gay households nurtured their community through lesbian feminist practices such as collectivism, consciousness-raising, witchcraft rituals, and rural gatherings. As people and practices traveled from one house to another, these linked houses attempted to conjure underground sanctuaries for queer Southerners. Preserving their moving stories, Ezell details the visions, experiments, and shortfalls of these radical households in their attempts to build solidarity, resist mounting right-wing violence, and sustain their revolutionary dreams for queer movements yet to come.

More about Jason Ezell - https://www.instagram.com/sjezell/?hl=en

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Your host is Asha Dore. Find her at www.AshaDore.net

or on Instagram at @adjsbb Intro and exit music by Nuclear Peasant