Random House New Releases - Gay & Lesbian Interest

Trains and Lovers by Alexander McCall Smith

2013-06-11T00:30:00-05:00

Trains and Lovers A Novel
Written by Alexander McCall Smith

Hardcover, 256 pages | Pantheon | Fiction - Contemporary Women; Fiction - Romance - Contemporary; Fiction - Literary | $22.00 | 978-0-307-90854-4 (0-307-90854-2)

The rocking motion of the train as it speeds along, the sound of its wheels on the rails . . . There’s something special about this form of travel that makes for easy conversation, which is just what happens to the four strangers who meet in Trains and Lovers.

As they journey by rail from Edinburgh to London, the four travelers pass the time by sharing tales of trains that have changed their lives. A young, keen-eyed Scotsman recounts how he turned a friendship with a female coworker into a romance by spotting an anachronistic train in an eighteenth-century painting. An Australian woman shares how her parents fell in love and spent their life together running a railroad siding in the remote Australian Outback. A middle-aged American patron of the arts sees two young men saying goodbye in a train station and recalls his own youthful crush on another man. And a young Englishman describes how exiting his train at the wrong station allowed him to meet an intriguing woman whom he impulsively invited to dinner—and into his life.

Here is Alexander McCall Smith at his most enchanting, exploring the nature of love—and trains—in a collection of romantic, intertwined stories.

Jumpstart to Skinny by Greg Critser

2013-04-23T00:30:00-05:00

Jumpstart to Skinny The Simple 3-Week Plan for Supercharged Weight Loss
Written by Bob Harper and Greg Critser

Hardcover, 240 pages | Ballantine Books | Health & Fitness - Diets; Performing Arts - Television; Health & Fitness | $25.00 | 978-0-345-54510-7 (0-345-54510-9)

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • LOSE UP TO 20 POUNDS IN 21 DAYS!

In The Skinny Rules, celebrity trainer and coach of NBC’s The Biggest Loser Bob Harper delivers the ultimate strategy for healthy, long-term weight loss and “thin maintenance.” But what if you have a big event looming—a reunion, wedding, beach vacation, or other special occasion—and need a fast-acting plan to meet your short-term goals?

Jumpstart to Skinny features thirteen short-term Rules (no one gets thin on mere suggestions) that will supercharge your weight loss. Taking any confusion or decision making out of the equation, Harper also provides a day-by-day plan for success, including his body-toning “Jumpstart Moves” and deliciously slimming recipes specially designed for your get-skinny needs.

Jumpstart to Skinny lets you in on the secrets Bob shares with his red-carpet celebrity clients. This is not a marathon diet; it’s a quick sprint to the finish line. And the victory lap comes when you slip into that sexy dress or swimsuit and feel fantastic. Get started today!

THE FOUR-PART JUMPSTART PLAN TO A SKINNIER YOU

• Your Jumpstart Rules: Thirteen must-follow principles to get you ready for your own “big reveal,” including Rule #1, a precise breakdown of the proper protein/carbohydrate/fat proportions for every meal, and Rule #3, which explains why you need to just say no to complex carbs after breakfast during this three-week plan. These are the Rules that Bob Harper and his celebrity clients use to get ready for their big events—and now you’re in on the secrets, too.

• Your Jumpstart Day-by-Day: No decisions, no confusion! Here is the simple, three-week game plan: the food to buy and prepare ahead each week, when and how much to eat each day, and the when and how of your exercise schedule.

• Your Jumpstart Moves: Bob’s unique, twenty-minute, at-home exercise routines. From sit-ups, push-ups, and squats to jumping rope, lateral jumps, and simple chair dips, choose one of the seven “packages” of body-toning moves when your day calls for Bob’s “metabolic conditioning.”

• Jumpstart Recipes: Cleansing or juice fasting? No way! You need to eat to lose weight, so here are twenty-one days of slimmingly delicious recipes—including “Peanut Butter and Jelly” Oatmeal, Sweet Potato Hash, Spaghetti Squash Bolognese, Buffalo Chicken Salad, and Bob’s signature Shrimp Skimpy—formulated with your Jumpstart protein/carb/fat proportions (see Rule #1!) and calorie maximums in mind.

God Believes in Love by Gene Robinson

2012-09-18T00:30:00-05:00

God Believes in Love Straight Talk About Gay Marriage
Written by Gene Robinson

Hardcover, 208 pages | Knopf | Political Science - Social Policy; Social Science - Gay Studies; Religion - Bible - Criticism, Interpretation | $24.00 | 978-0-307-95788-7 (0-307-95788-8)

From the Bishop of the Diocese of New Hampshire in the Episcopal Church, the first openly gay person elected (in 2003) to the historic episcopate and the world's leading religious spokesperson for gay rights and gay marriage—a groundbreaking book that lovingly and persuasively makes the case for same-sex marriage using a commonsense, reasoned, religious argument, made by someone who holds the religious text of the Bible to be holy and sacred and the ensuing two millennia of church history to be relevant to the discussion, equally familiar with the secular and political debate going on in America today, and for whom same-sex marriage is a personal issue; Robinson was married to a woman for two decades and is a father of two children and has been married to a man for the last four years of a twenty-three-year relationship.

Left-handed by Jonathan Galassi

2012-03-20T00:30:00-05:00

Left-handed Poems
Written by Jonathan Galassi

Hardcover, 128 pages | Knopf | Poetry - Single Author - American; Biography & Autobiography - Gay & Lesbian | $26.00 | 978-0-307-95708-5 (0-307-95708-X)

An emotionally riveting collection that tells a powerful story of passion, loss, and transformation.

Left-handed unfolds in the manner of an intense, searching novella. At its center is a one-way dialogue with an elusive character who beguiles and torments but also inspires the unnamed narrator, who at midlife is telling the tale.

These poems—decisive, wrenching, exquisite—show an overpowering force, at once disruptive and creative, invading a settled existence. They take us from the streets of New York City to a house in the country, from the island of Naxos to the Roman Forum. They reach back to the sonnets of Shakespeare but find inspiration, too, in contemporary life. Naked and raw, lyrical yet formally inventive, rich with the melancholy wisdom of age, this is a work of resonant and shimmering beauty.

The Stranger's Child by Alan Hollinghurst

2011-10-11T00:30:00-05:00

The Stranger's Child
Written by Alan Hollinghurst

Hardcover, 448 pages | Knopf | Fiction - Literary | $27.95 | 978-0-307-27276-8 (0-307-27276-1)

From the Man Booker Prize–winning author of The Line of Beauty: a magnificent, century-spanning saga about a love triangle that spawns a myth, and a family mystery, across generations.

In the late summer of 1913, George Sawle brings his Cambridge schoolmate—a handsome, aristocratic young poet named Cecil Valance—to his family’s modest home outside London for the weekend. George is enthralled by Cecil, and soon his sixteen-year-old sister, Daphne, is equally besotted by him and the stories he tells about Corley Court, the country estate he is heir to. But what Cecil writes in Daphne’s autograph album will change their and their families’ lives forever: a poem that, after Cecil is killed in the Great War and his reputation burnished, will become a touchstone for a generation, a work recited by every schoolchild in England. Over time, a tragic love story is spun, even as other secrets lie buried—until, decades later, an ambitious biographer threatens to unearth them.

Rich with Hollinghurst’s signature gifts—haunting sensuality, delicious wit and exquisite lyricism—The Stranger’s Child is a tour de force: a masterly novel about the lingering power of desire, how the heart creates its own history, and how legends are made.

Seven Seasons in Siena by Robert Rodi

2011-06-21T00:30:00-05:00

Seven Seasons in Siena My Quixotic Quest for Acceptance Among Tuscany's Proudest People
Written by Robert Rodi

Hardcover, 272 pages | Ballantine Books | Travel - Europe - Italy; Biography & Autobiography - Personal Memoirs; Travel | $25.00 | 978-0-345-52105-7 (0-345-52105-6)

Siena seems at first glance a typical Italian city: within its venerable medieval walls the citizens sport designer clothes, wield digital phones, and prize their dazzling local cuisine. But unlike neighboring Florence, Siena is still deeply rooted in ancient traditions—chiefly the spectacular Palio, in which seventeen independent societies known as contrade vie for bragging rights in an annual bareback horse race around the central piazza.

Into this strange, closed world steps Robert Rodi. A Chicago writer with few friends in town and a shaky command of conversational Italian, he couldn’t be more out of place. Yet something about the sense of belonging radiating from the ritual-obsessed Sienese excites him, and draws him back to witness firsthand how their passionate brand of community extends beyond the Palio into the entire calendar year. Smitten, Rodi undertakes a plan to insinuate himself into this body politic, learn their ways, and win their acceptance.

Seven Seasons in Siena is the story of Rodi’s love affair with the people of Siena—and of his awkward, heartfelt, intermittently successful, occasionally disastrous attempts to become a naturalized member of the Noble Contrada of the Caterpillar. It won’t be easy. As one of the locals points out, someone who’s American, gay, and a writer is the equivalent of a triple unicorn in this corner of Tuscany. But like a jockey in the Palio outlasting the competition in the home stretch, Rodi is determined to wear down all resistance. By immersing himself in the life of the contrada over seven visits at different times of the year—working in their kitchens, competing in their athletic events, and mastering the tangled politics of their various feuds and alliances—the ultimate outsider slowly begins to find his way into the hearts of this proud and remarkable people.

By turns hilarious and heartwarming, and redolent with the flavor of the Tuscan countryside, Seven Seasons in Siena opens a window on daily life in one of the most magical regions in all of Italy—revealing the joys to be found when we stop being spectators and start taking an active part in life’s rich pageant.

Like Me by Chely Wright

2010-05-04T00:30:00-05:00

Like Me Confessions of a Heartland Country Singer
Written by Chely Wright

Hardcover, 304 pages | Pantheon | Biography & Autobiography - Entertainment & Performing Arts; Biography & Autobiography - Personal Memoirs; Music - Country | $25.95 | 978-0-307-37886-6 (0-307-37886-1)

Chely Wright, singer, songwriter, country music star, writes in this moving, telling memoir about her life and her career; about growing up in America’s heartland, the youngest of three children; about barely remembering a time when she didn’t know she was different.

She writes about her parents, putting down roots in their twenties in the farming town of Wellsville, Kansas, Old Glory flying atop the poles on the town’s manicured lawns, and being raised to believe that hard work, honesty, and determination would take her far.

She writes of making up her mind at a young age to become a country music star, knowing then that her feelings and crushes on girls were “sinful” and hoping and praying that she would somehow be “fixed.” (“Dear God, please don’t let me be gay. I promise not to lie. I promise not to steal. I promise to always believe in you . . . Please take it away.”)

We see her, high school homecoming queen, heading out on her own at seventeen and landing a job as a featured vocalist on the Ozark Jubilee (the show that started Brenda Lee, Red Foley, and Porter Wagoner), being cast in Country Music U.S.A., doing four live shows a day, and—after only a few months in Nashville—her dream coming true, performing on the stage of the Grand Ole Opry . . .

She describes writing and singing her own songs for producers who’d discovered and recorded the likes of Reba McEntire, Shania Twain, and Toby Keith, who heard in her music something special and signed her to a record contract, releasing her first album and sending her out on the road on her first bus tour . . . She writes of sacrificing all for a shot at success that would come a couple of years later with her first hit single, “Shut Up And Drive” . . . her songs (from her fourth album, Single White Female) climbing the Billboard chart for twenty-nine weeks, hitting the #1 spot . . .

She writes about the friends she made along the way—Vince Gill, Brad Paisley, and others—writing songs, recording and touring together, some of the friendships developing into romantic attachments that did not end happily . . . Keeping the truth of who she was clutched deep inside, trying to ignore it in a world she longed to be a part of—and now was—a world in which country music stars had never been, could not be, openly gay . . .

She writes of the very real prospect of losing everything she’d worked so hard to create . . . doing her best to have a real life—her best not good enough . . .

And in the face of everything she did to keep herself afloat, she writes about how the vortex of success and hiding who she was took its toll: her life, a tangled mess she didn’t see coming, didn’t want to; and, finally, finding the guts to untangle herself from the image of the country music star she’d become, an image steeped in long-standing ideals and notions about who—and what—a country artist is, and what their fans expect them to be . . .

I am a songwriter,” she writes. “I am a singer of my songs—and I have a story to tell. As I’ve traveled this path that has delivered me to where I am today, my monument of thanks, paying honor to God, remains. I will do all I can with what I have been given . . .”

Like Me is fearless, inspiring, true.

What They Always Tell Us by Martin Wilson

2010-02-09T00:30:00-05:00

What They Always Tell Us
Written by Martin Wilson

Trade Paperback, 304 pages | Delacorte Books for Young Readers | Juvenile Fiction - Family; Juvenile Fiction - Social Situations; Juvenile Fiction - Social Situations - Emotions & Feelings | $7.99 | 978-0-385-73508-7 (0-385-73508-1)

JAMES AND ALEX have barely anything in common anymore—least of all their experiences in high school, where James is a popular senior and Alex is suddenly an outcast. But at home, there is Henry, the precocious 10-year-old across the street, who eagerly befriends them both. And when Alex takes up running, there is James’s friend Nathen, who unites the brothers in moving and unexpected ways.

From the Hardcover edition.

Being Homosexual by Richard Isay

2009-05-05T00:30:00-05:00

Being Homosexual Gay Men and Their Development
Written by Richard Isay

Trade Paperback, 176 pages | Vintage | Psychology & Psychiatry - Human Sexuality | $15.00 | 978-0-307-38957-2 (0-307-38957-X)

Richard Isay was the first person to challenge the homophobia of the psychoanalytic community and prove, through his own story and those of his patients, that homosexuality is an innate characteristic rather than a learned pathology. Now revised and updated for the 21st-century, the groundbreaking Being Homosexual carries the reader through the main developmental stages in the gay male's life cycle from the initial awareness of same-sex impulses to coming out, forming friendships with other gay men, and a mature integration of one's sexual identity. An invaluable resource for gay men, Being Homosexual is a compassionate and powerful work.

I'm Looking Through You by Jennifer Finney Boylan

2008-10-21T00:30:00-05:00

I'm Looking Through You Growing Up Haunted: A Memoir
Written by Jennifer Finney Boylan

Trade Paperback, 288 pages | Broadway | Biography & Autobiography | $14.95 | 978-0-7679-2175-6 (0-7679-2175-5)

From the bestselling author of She’s Not There comes another buoyant, unforgettable memoir—I’m Looking Through You is about growing up in a haunted house...and making peace with the ghosts that dwell in our hearts.

For Jennifer Boylan, creaking stairs, fleeting images in the mirror, and the remote whisper of human voices were everyday events in the Pennsylvania house in which she grew up in the 1970s. But these weren’t the only specters beneath the roof of the mansion known as the “Coffin House.” Jenny herself—born James—lived in a haunted body, and both her mysterious, diffident father and her wild, unpredictable sister would soon become ghosts to Jenny as well.

I’m Looking Through You is an engagingly candid investigation of what it means to be “haunted.” Looking back on the spirits who invaded her family home, Boylan launches a full investigation with the help of a group of earnest, if questionable, ghostbusters. Boylan also examines the ways we find connections between the people we once were and the people we become. With wit and eloquence, Boylan shows us how love, forgiveness, and humor help us find peace—with our ghosts, with our loved ones, and with the uncanny boundaries, real and imagined, between men and women.

Wide Awake by David Levithan

2008-09-09T00:30:00-05:00

Wide Awake
Written by David Levithan

Trade Paperback, 240 pages | Knopf Books for Young Readers | Juvenile Fiction - Love & Romance; Juvenile Fiction - Social Situations - Prejudice & Racism; Juvenile Fiction - Social Situations - Values | $8.99 | 978-0-375-83467-7 (0-375-83467-2)

In the not-too-impossible-to-imagine future, a gay Jewish man has been elected president of the United States. Until the governor of one state decides that some election results in his state are invalid, awarding crucial votes to the other candidate, and his fellow party member. Thus is the inspiration for couple Jimmy and Duncan to lend their support to their candidate by deciding to take part in the rallies and protests. Along the way comes an exploration of their relationship, their politics, and their country, and sometimes, as they learn, it's more about the journey than it is about reaching the destination.

Only David Levithan could so masterfully and creatively weave together a plot that's both parts political action and reaction, as well as a touching and insightfully-drawn teen love story.

From the Hardcover edition.

Swish by Joel Derfner

2008-05-13T00:30:00-05:00

Swish My Quest to Become the Gayest Person Ever
Written by Joel Derfner

Hardcover, 272 pages | Crown | Biography & Autobiography - Personal Memoirs; Biography & Autobiography - Gay & Lesbian | $23.95 | 978-0-7679-2430-6 (0-7679-2430-4)

Joel Derfner is gayer than you.

Don’t feel too bad about it, though, because he has made being gayer than you his life’s work. At summer day camp, when he was six, Derfner tried to sign up for needlepoint and flower arranging, but the camp counselors wouldn’t let him, because, they said, those activities were for girls only. Derfner, just to be contrary, embarked that very day on a solemn and sacred quest: to become the gayest person ever. Along the way he has become a fierce knitter, an even fiercer musical theater composer, and so totally the fiercest step aerobics instructor (just ask him—he’ll tell you himself).

In Swish, Derfner takes his readers on a flamboyant adventure along the glitter-strewn road from fabulous to divine. Whether he’s confronting the demons of his past at a GLBT summer camp, using the Internet to “meet” men—many, many men—or plunging headfirst (and nearly naked) into the shady world of go-go dancing, he reveals himself with every gayer-than-thou flourish to be not just a stylish explorer but also a fearless one. So fearless, in fact, that when he sneaks into a conference for people who want to cure themselves of their homosexuality, he turns the experience into one of the most fascinating, deeply moving chapters of the book. Derfner, like King Arthur, Christopher Columbus, and Indiana Jones—but with a better haircut and a much deeper commitment to fad diets—is a hero destined for legend.

Written with wicked humor and keen insight, Swish is at once a hilarious look at contemporary ideas about gay culture and a poignant exploration of identity that will speak to all readers—gay, straight, and in between.

Fellow Travelers by Thomas Mallon

2008-05-06T00:30:00-05:00

Fellow Travelers
Written by Thomas Mallon

Trade Paperback, 368 pages | Vintage | Fiction - Historical | $14.95 | 978-0-307-38890-2 (0-307-38890-5)

It's 1950s Washington, D.C.: a world of bare-knuckled ideology and secret dossiers, dominated by personalities like Richard Nixon, Lyndon Johnson, and Joe McCarthy. Enter Timothy Laughlin, a recent college graduate and devout Catholic eager to join the crusade against Communism. An encounter with a handsome State Department official, Hawkins Fuller, leads to Tim's first job and, after Fuller's advances, his first love affair. As McCarthy mounts a desperate bid for power and internal investigations focus on “sexual subversives” in the government, Tim and Fuller find it ever more dangerous to navigate their double lives. Moving between the diplomatic world of Foggy Bottom and NATO's front line in Europe, Fellow Travelers is a searing historical novel infused with political drama, unexpected humor, and genuine heartbreak.

Somewhere by Amanda Vaill

2008-05-06T00:30:00-05:00

Somewhere The Life of Jerome Robbins
Written by Amanda Vaill

Trade Paperback, 720 pages | Broadway | Performing Arts - Dance | $22.95 | 978-0-7679-0421-6 (0-7679-0421-4)

From the author of the acclaimed Everybody Was So Young, the definitive and major biography of the great choreographer and Broadway legend Jerome Robbins

To some, Jerome Robbins was a demanding perfectionist, a driven taskmaster, a theatrical visionary; to others, he was a loyal friend, a supportive mentor, a generous and entertaining companion and colleague. Born Jerome Rabinowitz in New York City in 1918, Jerome Robbins repudiated his Jewish roots along with his name only to reclaim them with his triumphant staging of Fiddler on the Roof. A self-proclaimed homosexual, he had romances or relationships with both men and women, some famous—like Montgomery Clift and Natalie Wood—some less so. A resolutely unpolitical man, he was forced to testify before Congress at the height of anti-Communist hysteria. A consummate entertainer, he could be paralyzed by shyness; nearly infallible professionally, he was conflicted, vulnerable, and torn by self-doubt. Guarded and adamantly private, he was an inveterate and painfully honest journal writer who confided his innermost thoughts and aspirations to a remarkable series of diaries and memoirs. With ballets like Dances at a Gathering, Afternoon of a Faun, and The Concert, he humanized neoclassical dance; with musicals like On the Town, Gypsy, and West Side Story, he changed the face of theater in America.
In the pages of this definitive biography, Amanda Vaill takes full measure of the complicated, contradictory genius who was Jerome Robbins. She re-creates his childhood as the only son of Russian Jewish immigrants; his apprenticeship as a dancer and Broadway chorus gypsy; his explosion into prominence at the age of twenty-five with the ballet Fancy Free and its Broadway incarnation, On the Town; and his years of creative dominance in both theater and dance. She brings to life his colleagues and friends—from Leonard Bernstein and George Balanchine to Robert Wilson and Robert Graves—and his loves and lovers. And she tells the full story behind some of Robbins’s most difficult episodes, such as his testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee and his firing from the film version of West Side Story.
Drawing on thousands of pages of documents from Robbins’s personal and professional papers, to which she was granted unfettered access, as well as on other archives and hundreds of interviews, Somewhere is a riveting narrative of a life lived onstage, offstage, and backstage. It is also an accomplished work of criticism and social history that chronicles one man’s phenomenal career and places it squarely in the cultural ferment of a time when New York City was truly “a helluva town.”

Attack of the Theater People by Marc Acito

2008-04-22T00:30:00-05:00

Attack of the Theater People
Written by Marc Acito

Trade Paperback, 368 pages | Broadway | Fiction | $12.95 | 978-0-7679-2773-4 (0-7679-2773-7)

In praising “the witty high school romp” How I Paid for College, the New York Times Book Review said, it “makes you hope there’s a lot more where this came from.” There is. In this hilarious sequel Attack of the Theater People, Edward Zanni and his merry crew of high school musical-comedy miscreants move to the magical wonderland that is Manhattan.

It is 1986, and aspiring actor Edward Zanni has been kicked out of drama school for being “too jazz hands for Juilliard.” Mortified, Edward heads out into the urban jungle of eighties New York City and finally lands a job as a “party motivator” who gets thirteen-year-olds to dance at bar mitzvahs and charms businesspeople as a “stealth guest” at corporate events. When he accidentally gets caught up in insider trading with a handsome stockbroker named Chad, only the help of his crew from How I Paid for College can rescue him from a stretch in Club Fed.

Laced with the inspired zaniness of classic American musical comedy, Attack of the Theater People matches the big hair of the eighties with an even bigger heart.

Don't Get Too Comfortable by David Rakoff

2006-09-12T00:30:00-05:00

Don't Get Too Comfortable The Indignities of Coach Class, The Torments of Low Thread Count, The Never- Ending Quest for Artisanal Olive Oil, and Other First World Problems
Written by David Rakoff

Trade Paperback, 240 pages | Anchor | Social Science - Essays | $15.00 | 978-0-7679-1603-5 (0-7679-1603-4)

David Rakoff takes us on a bitingly funny grand tour of our culture of excess. Whether he is contrasting the elegance of one of the last flights of the supersonic Concorde with the good-times-and-chicken-wings populism of Hooters Air; working as a cabana boy at a South Beach hotel; or traveling to a private island off the coast of Belize to watch a soft-core video shoot—where he is provided with his very own personal manservant—rarely have greed, vanity, selfishness, and vapidity been so mercilessly skewered. Somewhere along the line, our healthy self-regard has exploded into obliterating narcissism; our manic getting and spending have now become celebrated as moral virtues. Simultaneously a Wildean satire and a plea for a little human decency, Don’t Get Too Comfortable shows that far from being bobos in paradise, we’re in a special circle of gilded-age hell.

Soul Kitchen by Poppy Z. Brite

2006-07-25T00:30:00-05:00

Soul Kitchen A Novel
Written by Poppy Z. Brite

Trade Paperback, 288 pages | Broadway | Fiction | $15.00 | 978-0-307-23765-1 (0-307-23765-6)

If you can't stand the heat...Get the hell out of New Orleans!

Liquor has become one of the hottest restaurants in town, thanks in part to chefs Rickey and G-man’s wildly creative, booze-laced food. At the tail end of a busy Mardi Gras, Milford Goodman walks into their kitchen—he’s spent the last ten years in Angola Prison for murdering his boss, a wealthy New Orleans restaurateur, but has recently been exonerated on new evidence and released. Rickey remembers him as an ingenious chef and hires him on the spot.

When a pill-pushing doctor and a Carnival scion talk Rickey into consulting at the restaurant they’re opening in one of the city’s “floating casinos,” Rickey recommends Milford for the head chef position and stays on to supervise. But soon Rickey finds himself medicating a kitchen injury with the doctor’s wares, and G-man grows tired of holding down the fort at Liquor alone. As the new restaurant moves toward its opening, Rickey learns that Milford’s past is inextricably linked with one of the project’s backers, a man whose intentions begin to seem more and more sinister.

Full of the flavor of one of America’s greatest cities, Soul Kitchen is a sharp commentary on race relations in pre-Katrina New Orleans and a fast ride through the dark side of haute cuisine.

The Rivals by Johnette Howard

2006-06-13T00:30:00-05:00

The Rivals Chris Evert vs. Martina Navratilova Their Epic Duels and Extraordinary Friendship
Written by Johnette Howard

Trade Paperback, 304 pages | Three Rivers Press | Biography & Autobiography - Sports | $14.00 | 978-0-7679-1885-5 (0-7679-1885-1)

In the annals of sports, no individual rivalry matches the intensity, longevity, and emotional resonance of the one between two extraordinary women: Chris Evert and Martina Navratilova.

Over sixteen years, Evert and Navratilova met on the tennis court a record eighty times—sixty times in finals. At their first match in Akron, Ohio, in 1973, Chris was an eighteen-year-old star and Martina, two years her junior, was an unknown Czech making her first trip to the United States. It would be two years before Martina finally beat Chris, and another year—after Navratilova had dropped twenty pounds and improved her game—before Evert publicly betrayed her first hint of concern. By then, the women were already friends and sometimes doubles partners, and the colorful story that would captivate the world was under way.

The Rivals is the first book to examine the intertwined journey of these legendary champions, based on extensive interviews with each. Taking readers on and off the courts with vivid, never-before-published material, award-winning sportswriter Johnette Howard shows how Evert and Navratilova came of age during the rambunctious golden age of tennis in the 1970s, and how—together—they redefined women’s athletics during a time of volcanic change in sports and society. Their epic careers unfolded against the backdrop of the fight for Title IX, the gay rights movement, the women's movement and the fall of the iron curtain. Howard draws entertaining, intimate, and myth-shattering portraits of Evert and Navratilova, describing the personal migrations each woman made, and showing how enmeshed their lives became.

Navratilova and Evert’s ability to forge and maintain a friendship during sixteen years of often-cutthroat competition has always provoked wonder and admiration. They were a study in contrasts, a collision of politics and style and looks. Chris was the crowd darling while Martina, her greatest foil, was often cast as the villain. Chris was the imperturbable champion who proved toughness and femininity weren’t mutually exclusive; Martina was portrayed as both emotionally fragile and some fearsome Amazon. Chris’s off-court life was presumed to be bedrock solid, the stuff of Main Street America; Martina’s was derided as outrageous and sometimes chaotic, even during her invincible years. Yet, through it all, the two remained friends who lifted each other to heights that each says she couldn’t have reached without the other.

Women’s tennis now is more popular than ever, thanks in large part to the trailblazing of Evert and Navratilova. A rivalry like theirs, filled with so many grace notes, is unique in sports history.

The Full Spectrum by Billy Merrell

2006-05-09T00:30:00-05:00

The Full Spectrum A New Generation of Writing About Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, Questioning, and Other Identities
Written by David Levithan and Billy Merrell

Trade Paperback, 288 pages | Knopf Books for Young Readers | Juvenile Nonfiction - Social Situations - Homosexuality; Juvenile Nonfiction - Social Situations - Adolescence | $9.95 | 978-0-375-83290-1 (0-375-83290-4)

Teens are more aware of sexuality and identity than ever, and they’re looking for answers and insights, as well as a community of others. In order to help create that community, YA authors David Levithan and Billy Merrell have collected original poems, essays, and stories by young adults in their teens and early 20s. The Full Spectrum includes a variety of writers—gay, lesbian, bisexual, straight, transitioning, and questioning—on a variety of subjects: coming out, family, friendship, religion/faith, first kisses, break-ups, and many others.

This one of a kind collection will, perhaps, help all readers see themselves and the world around them in ways they might never have imagined. We have partnered with the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network (GLSEN) and a portion of the proceeds from this book will be donated to them.

The Riddle of Gender by Deborah Rudacille

2006-02-14T00:30:00-05:00

The Riddle of Gender
Written by Deborah Rudacille

Trade Paperback, 400 pages | Anchor | Social Science - Gender Studies | $17.00 | 978-0-385-72197-4 (0-385-72197-8)

When Deborah Rudacille learned that a close friend had decided to transition from female to male, she felt compelled to understand why.

Coming at the controversial subject of transsexualism from several angles–historical, sociological, psychological, medical–Rudacille discovered that gender variance is anything but new, that changing one’s gender has been met with both acceptance and hostility through the years, and that gender identity, like sexual orientation, appears to be inborn, not learned, though in some people the sex of the body does not match the sex of the brain.

Informed not only by meticulous research, but also by the author’s interviews with prominent members of the transgender community, The Riddle of Gender is a sympathetic and wise look at a sexual revolution that calls into question many of our most deeply held assumptions about what it means to be a man, a woman, and a human being.

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