A Gift Guide Wow

or: in case you needed more emails telling you what to buy people

I think I’m supposed to be cynical about gift-giving because of how it ties into a culture of over-consumption. But the thing is, I really like Christmas personally and I really like the idea of the amorphous “holiday season” more broadly. I like that December is the month where as many people as can really phone it in at work and barely do their jobs. I like how so many cultures decided that the darkest time of the year is the time we ought to cling to one another and give each other things.

I could do without the Christmas music. The only acceptable Christmas music is when it is sung by actual carolers or by families at a Christmas party. Recorded Christmas music can go to hell. This isn’t a moral statement, just an aesthetic one.

And I’m much more into “these are books that meant a lot to me this year” or “here are craft supplies” or “I found this silverware set in a secondhand store and I thought of you” than I am into like, buying each other TVs or whatever. But that sort of goes without saying.

Anyway, if you’re trying to buy some stuff, I’ve got some suggestions of stuff. I’ll start with things I like and then go into things by me. Most of this is books, which won’t surprise you.

Things Not By Me

Willem Arondeus Backpatch: Let it be known that homosexuals are not cowards. The backpatch I wear on my vest, that I made my friend design. For anyone who wants to sew a backpatch onto a vest or hoodie and embrace their inner punk.

Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness Hoodie: this is the hoodie I wear. Support collectively run publishing. For anyone who likes our publisher and wants to be a cool black hoodie kid.

Orso: Wartime Journals of an Anarchist: When the Italian anarchist Lorenzo Orsetti fell in battle against ISIS, his comrades smuggled his journals out of Syria. Available now in English. For anyone who supports the struggle for self-determination and internationalism and wishes to remember our dead.

How to Do it Anyway: a zine designed for mass dissemination (neither the publisher nor the author take any profit from it) that describes in detail how to self-manage an abortion. For anyone who wants to preserve forbidden information and help themselves or others take control of their own lives and destinies.

Contradictionary: A book by Crimethinc that’s just honestly kind of hilarious. For anyone who likes clever wordplay or could use a toilet reader.

Defiance: Anarchist Statements Before Judge and Jury: If you need a little pick-me-up, you can’t do better than reading about all the fire people have spoken before the judges who claim to rule their fates. For anyone who wants to remember that they are brave.

Fight Like Hell, by Kim Kelly: The story of American labor told by one of the most accessible and capable writers we’ve got right now. For anyone who likes history.

Rust Belt Femme, by Raechel Anne Jolie: I took a memoir class from Raechel this year and learned so much from her. This is memoir at its finest. For the workingclass femme in your life.

Black Arms to Hold You, by Ben Passmore: I’ll be honest I haven’t read this yet, but I’m buying it for myself this year. It just came out and it’s by one of my favorite comic artists. For anyone who cares about Black history, which had better be all of you.

The Unsinkable Ship of Fools, by Jonas Goonface: This one is a porn comic book, so you either want it or don’t based on that. One of the very first characters is wearing a Feminazgul hat, so you know the author has good taste. For anyone who wants inclusive, queer, comic book smut about vampire bats and crust punks.

You can also never go wrong by buying anything sold by collectively run publishers like AK Press, Crimethinc, Bread & Roses Press, or Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness, or from collectively owned booksellers like Firestorm Books and Red Emma’s.

Things By Me

Roleplaying Games

The Defender’s Almanac: I wrote a good chunk of the lore for the companion RPG to the hit board game Defenders of the Wild. So if you like animals destroying machines to protect the wilderness (with a bit of “fighting against the enclosure of the commons”) you might like The Defender’s Almanac. The perfect gift for the board gamer you’re trying to get into RPGs.

Penumbra City: Get your dose of of class-based class war with Penumbra City (that’s an RPG pun). I designed the world of Penumbra City alongside some of my favorite people. The perfect gift for the RPG fan in your life, or any recovering steampunks you know. You can listen to and/or watch me, Jamie Loftus, my co-creators Inmn and Robin, and Bea Flowers play Penumbra City.

Danielle Cain

Buy the whole set for anyone who is into folk horror, subculture, or lefty politics.

The Lamb Will Slaughter the Lion: The first book in the Danielle Cain series puts Danielle, a punk rock traveler, in the squatted town of Freedom, Iowa, where the utopian anarchists have solved all their problems by… summoning a bloodthirsty deer. The audiobook of this one is out, and the rest will have audiobooks soon.

The Barrow Will Send What it May: The second book in the series follows our adventurers as they flee across the country to find refuge in a squatted library in a small town with a sinister secret.

The Immortal Choir Holds Every Voice: The third book has our heroes camped out in Idaho, hiding from the occult and the mundane alike, telling three stories they were told by their dead friends.

Other Books By Me

The Sapling Cage: A young adult book that follows Lorel, a young trans girl, as she disguises herself in dresses to go off and join the witches and learn about magic and get caught up trying to save the country from a would-be ruler. Give it to the youth, or to anyone at all in order to make JK Rowling mad. There’s an audiobook too.

A Country of Ghosts: Follow a journalist from the colonial core as he’s kidnapped by the wild stateless rebels of the periphery and suddenly finds himself in a country that isn’t a country. The perfect gift for the anarcho-curious in your life. There’s an audiobook too.

Escape From Incel Island: The government solved that incel problem by putting them all in an open-air prison. Our nonbinary hero Mankiller Jones has been given a simple task: get onto the island, retrieve sensitive files, and escape. But not all is as it seems on Incel Island. Short and plot-driven, this is a perfect book for someone who fell out from reading but wants to get back into books. You can listen to Robert Evans, James Stout, Shereen Younes, Gare Davis, and me play an RPG based on it if you’d like. Also there’s an audiobook of this one.

We Won’t Be Here Tomorrow: A short story anthology that includes some of the best stories I’ve ever written. Teenage cults and post-apocalyptic tea farms. A lesbian who feeds men to mermaids. A hitchhiker who accidentally summons an ancient god. A mad scientist trying to terraform earth back into something habitable. The perfect book for the partner you want to read stories to you at bedtime.

We Are Many: A year after the 2011 Occupy protests, myself and two friends edited this anthology about the strategies, tactics, and goals of that movement. Get a little piece of movement history, perfect for the friend who was there or the friend who is into history.

Zines and Other Things

Being the Explorations: Apparently AK Press has a copies left of the first few photo books I sold to them years ago, when I was traveling around living in a van. I actually made 5 of these in the end, but AK still has copies of one, two, and three. I’ll probably never reprint these, even if I find the files. Perfect for the fan of me, I guess.

Amplitudes: Stories of Queer and Trans Futurity, edited by Lee Mandelo. I’ve got a story in this anthology that you currently can’t get anywhere else, about a group of anti-authoritarian knights fighting Western Maryland as the US falls apart. A love story, even. Perfect for the queer person in your life trying to remember that we’ll still be here in the future, or anyone obsessed with the idea of starting a leftist knightly order.

Anarchism and Its Misunderstanders / Hurrah for Anarchy: a double zine (turn it over and it’s a different zine) including an essay of mine about anarchism and another about the history of May Day and the Haymarket anarchists. Perfect for the new anarchist in your life.