TOTALLY BIASED REVIEWS
Parley Lit presents Totally Biased Reviews, a conversational literary interview podcast about everything that should be on your next TBR list. www.parleylit.com www.totallybiasedreviews.com Your hosts are Asha Dore and Rebecca Tourino Collinsworth
info_outline
Totally Biased Reviews with Rebecca Morrison | The Blue Dress
02/06/2026
Totally Biased Reviews with Rebecca Morrison | The Blue Dress
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
/episode/index/show/5db7fe34-dc17-49ac-a74e-42435211123f/id/40024700
info_outline
Totally Biased Reviews with Jason Ezell | For a Spell
11/11/2025
Totally Biased Reviews with Jason Ezell | For a Spell
Buy For a Spell, here - 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 - Find more on and or on Instagram at @ParleyLit Your host is Asha Dore. Find her at or on Instagram at @adjsbb Intro and exit music by Nuclear Peasant
/episode/index/show/5db7fe34-dc17-49ac-a74e-42435211123f/id/38996770
info_outline
Totally Biased Reviews with Eamon Dolan | The Power of Parting
11/05/2025
Totally Biased Reviews with Eamon Dolan | The Power of Parting
Buy The Power of Parting here: Find Eamon Dolan Here: About the book: A myth-shattering, inspiring book that combines research, reportage, and memoir to explore the growing phenomenon of estrangement from toxic relatives—showing it not as a tragedy, but as an empowering and effective solution to the heartbreak of family abuse. After decades of enduring his mother’s physical and psychological torment, after years of trying in vain to set boundaries, Eamon Dolan took a radical step: he cut his mother out of his life. No more phone calls, no more visits, no more contact. Parting with his abuser gave him immediate relief and set him on a path toward freedom, confidence, and joy like none he had ever felt before. In The Power of Parting, Dolan has written the book he wishes he’d had when he was struggling to free himself from his mother’s abuse. In the process, he discovered how widespread estrangement really is. At least 27 percent of Americans are estranged from a parent, sibling, or other family member. He also learned why so much stigma surrounds this common—and often lifesaving—phenomenon. Even among therapists—the professionals who would seem most attuned to the pain relatives can inflict—there’s a bias toward reconciliation, when millions of their patients need instead to escape their abusers’ grip. Estrangement, Dolan realized, should be understood and embraced, not shrouded in shame. Drawing on his own suffering and healing, as well as experts’ advice and the testimony of other courageous survivors, Dolan first explains why abuse is much different and more prevalent than we may think, how it harms us in childhood and beyond, and why limiting or eliminating contact might be our best possible choice. Then, he walks readers through the steps of a successful, positive estrangement: how to take crucial time for yourself; how to make sure no one can gaslight you into minimizing or forgetting; how to set rules for your abuser and—if they can’t or won’t respect your limits—how to end a toxic relationship. He also offers valuable counsel on how to ease the guilt and grief that often accompany parting, and how to break the cycle of abuse that was likely passed down to you through many generations. With a convincing blend of clarity and empathy, Dolan encourages others to do what he ultimately did for himself: determine whether the people in your life treat you with the care and concern you deserve—and part ways with them if they don’t. Your host today is Asha Dore: & @adjsbb on Insta Edited and Curated by Asha Dore and Rebecca Tourino Collinsworth Produced by Parley Lit and Parley Productions Intro and Exit music by Nuclear Peasant
/episode/index/show/5db7fe34-dc17-49ac-a74e-42435211123f/id/38931395
info_outline
Totally Biased Reviews with Anna Ioanes | Painful Forms
11/05/2025
Totally Biased Reviews with Anna Ioanes | Painful Forms
Buy Painful Forms: Find out more about Anna at her website or follow her on Bluesky: @annaioanes.bsky.social About the book: Unsettling art unsettles our normalization of violence In the wake of World War II, Americans struggled to grasp the shifting scale of violence brought on by the nuclear era. To grapple with the overwhelming suffering of the sociopolitical moment, new ways of thinking about violence—as structural, systemic, and senseless—emerged. Artists and writers, however, challenged the cultural impulse to make sense of these new horrors, mobilizing what Anna Ioanes calls “aesthetic violence.” Searching for the strategies artists employed to resist the normalization of new forms of crushing violence, Ioanes examines the works of major cultural figures, including Kara Walker, James Baldwin, Andy Warhol, Yoko Ono, and Toni Morrison, as well as lesser-known artists such as playwright Maryat Lee and riot grrrl figure Kathleen Hanna. Grounded in close reading, archival research, and theories of affect, aesthetics, and identity, Painful Forms shows that artists employed forms that short-circuited familiar interpretive strategies for making sense of suffering and, as a result, defamiliarized commonsense notions that sought to naturalize state-sanctioned violence. Rather than pulling heartstrings, stoking outrage, or straightforwardly critiquing injustice, Ioanes argues, aesthetic violence forecloses catharsis, maintains ambiguities, and refuses to fully make sense, allowing audiences to experience new ways of thinking, feeling, and knowing about suffering. Your host today is Asha Dore: & @adjsbb on Insta Edited and Curated by Asha Dore and Rebecca Tourino Collinsworth Produced by Parley Lit and Parley Productions Intro and Exit music by Nuclear Peasant
/episode/index/show/5db7fe34-dc17-49ac-a74e-42435211123f/id/38929545