James and Aaron recount the top 10 things that got them through 2021. In part one, they share 10-6. As always, please consider buying books from the authors we mention (or any others!) from independent bookstores. If you don't have one, we can recommend Loyalty Bookstores: https://www.loyaltybookstores.com

Aaron's 10-6:

10. Hunter Fashion Magazine: Summer of Love Issue 36 SS 2020
You can follow the magazine on Instagram: @hunterfashionmagazine

9. Brontez Purnell, 100 Boyfriends. 

Johnny Would You Love Me If My Dick Were Bigger

The Cruising Diaries: Expanded Edition by Brontez Purnell and Janelle Hessig

The recipient of a 2018 Whiting Writers' Award for Fiction, he was named one of the thirty-two Black Male Writers of Our Time by T: The New York Times Style Magazine in 2018. Purnell is also the frontman for the band the Younger Lovers, a cofounder of the experimental dance group the Brontez Purnell Dance Company, the creator of the renowned cult zine Fag School.
Follow Purnell on Instagram: @brontezpurnell

8. Keat’s Odes: A Lover’s Discourse by Anahid Nersessian
“When I say this book is a love story, I mean it is about things that cannot be gotten over—like this world, and some of the people in it.”

https://www.anahidnersessian.com

7. Sufjan Stevens’s Carrie and Lowell
https://sufjanstevens.bandcamp.com

 
6.  Art

Matt Pipes: https://www.mattpipes.com 

Blake Gildaphish: https://blakegildaphish.com

 Joshua Benmore: https://www.joshuabenmore.com

 John Chester Kaine: @johnchesterkaine on Instagram

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James's 10-6:
10. Linda Gregg's New & Selected, called All of It Singing.  James talks about "Part of Me Wanting Everything to Live," "The Problem of Sentences," and "Winter Light."

9. Jean Smart in Hacks and in Mare of Easttown. You can watch Jean Smart accept the Emmy for Lead Actress in a Comedy for her turn in Hacks here.  

8. Michelle Orange, Pure Flame: a Legacy. FSG, 2021. Author website: https://michelleorange.com

7.    Natasha Trethewey, Memorial Drive. HarperCollins, 2020. In 2007, Trethewey was interviewed on Fresh Air and recounts part of the events that she revisits in Memorial Drive. You can listen to that interview here.

6. Ted Lasso. The eponymous coach has a blue-check Twitter account you can follow @TedLasso