Unbound Edition Press today announced it will publish Janet W. Hardy’s extraordinary collection of essential work, A Slut’s Life in Three Acts. The title is scheduled for publication in September 2026.
Hardy is the author or co-author of more than a dozen groundbreaking books about relationships and sexuality, including The Ethical Slut, which has sold more than 500,000 copies to date and has been translated into more than a dozen languages. She founded Greenery Press, where she served as editor in chief for more than 25 years. Hardy lives the life of a kinky poly queer genderbent geezer in Eugene, Oregon, with her equally kinky poly queer genderbent spouse.
Hardy has spent a lifetime thinking more deeply about desire than almost anyone alive — and writing about it with more wit, precision, and nerve than the subject usually gets. A Slut’s Life in Three Acts gathers the best of three previous works — plus some unpublished gems — into a single volume. Across seventy years and three acts, Hardy traces what it means to live in a body that refuses to perform on cue — and to find, in that refusal, not just a philosophy but a life: original, hard-won, and worth every word, whether gentle or painful.
Of Hardy’s work, comedian and actress Margaret Cho has said it is, “meaningful, beautiful and necessary . . . Being slutty and being alive for a long time is a true honor and a privilege . . . Let’s get old together and truly live it and not lose any of the things we used to be but just do them all better.”
Peter Campion, executive editor at Unbound Edition Press, notes: “Janet Hardy’s work performs a truly liberating act, opening up new paths for freedom, self-determination, and pleasure. What’s more, her prose is spectacular.”
Patrick Davis, publisher and editor in chief at Unbound Edition Press, acquired the title for the house and is editing it with Hardy. He said, “Hardy writes like the best musicals: with an emotion too large for ordinary language that breaks through into arresting honesty. She is funny about the body’s indignities, tender about its loyalties, and ruthlessly precise about the difference between what we want and what we imagine we want.”
For readers of the global sensation, The Ethical Slut, and anyone who has ever felt the transformative pull of a life lived fully on their own terms, A Slut’s Life in Three Acts is a vital work from a singular writer.
