TC Tidbits: Final Book In The Paolini's Beloved Series Coming Out This Fall

Read the Publishers Weekly blurb about it.

Amy S. Recommends....

The Book of Luminous Things "The Book of Luminous Things is an anthology that includes poetry from all around the globe. Because of its diverse subject matter and wide variety of perspectives, this anthology appeals both to those just getting into poetry and long time poetry lovers. In exploring what it means to be human, Milosz repeatedly chooses the voices that will challenge readers, inspiring them to think and to live a worthy life."



The Great Fires
"Jack Gilbert has the unique gift of whispering secrets between the lines of his poetry. Every word, line, and poem is placed precisely in relation to others, to create meaning, arising from all of it. A widely celebrated American poet, Gilbert explores the meaning behind action and change, making claims about love, death, and especially regret, that come from the soul. (Gilbert also just came out with a volume called The Dance Most of All that looks back on his life, but The Great Fires is, in my opinion, his best work.)"

The Wild Iris
"Written from the perspective of various flowers, The Wild Iris is one of Gluck's most carefully crafted volumes. Through this unique lens, readers are able to go beyond the normal bounds of thought, moving directly into nature and the wilder side of being alive."




Otherwise
"This compilation of several of Kenyon's volumes explores how meaning
can be found in the daily, simple, and ordinary. A good place for new
lovers of poetry to begin, Otherwise is highly accessible without a
hint of condescension."

Lambda Literary Recommends...

Untied

Meredith Baxter is a beloved and iconic television actress, most well-known for her enormously popular role as hippie mom, Elyse Keaton, on Family Ties. Her warmth, humor, and brilliant smile made her one of the most popular women on television, with millions of viewers following her on the small screen each week. Yet her success masked a tumultuous personal story and a harrowing private life. For the first time, Baxter is ready to share her incredible highs, (working with Robert Redford, Doris Day, Lana Turner, and the cast of Family Ties), and lows (a thorny relationship with her mother, a difficult marriage to David Birney, a bout with breast cancer), finally revealing the woman behind the image.

From her childhood in Hollywood, growing up the daughter of actress and co-creator of One Day at a Time Whitney Blake, Baxter became familiar with the ups and downs of show business from an early age. After wholeheartedly embracing the 60s counterculture lifestyle, she was forced to rely on her acting skills after her first divorce left her a 22-year-old single mother of two. Baxter began her professional career with supporting roles in the critically panned horror film Ben, and in the political thriller All the President's Men.

More lucrative work soon followed on the small screen. Baxter starred with actor David Birney as the title characters in controversial sitcom Bridget Loves Bernie. While the series only lasted a year, her high-profile romance with Birney lasted 15 volatile and unhappy years. Hiding the worst of her situation from even those closest to her, Baxter’s career flourished as her self-esteem and family crumbled. Her successful run as Nancy on Family was followed by her enormously popular role on Family Ties, and dozens of well-received television movies.

After a bitter divorce and custody battle with Birney, Baxter increasingly relied on alcohol as a refuge, and here speaks candidly of her decision to take her last drink in 1990.

And while another ruinous divorce to screenwriter Michael Blodgett taxed Baxter’s strength and confidence, she has emerged from her experiences with the renewed self-assurance, poise, and understanding that have enabled her to find a loving, respectful relationship with Nancy Locke, and to speak about it openly.

Told with insight, wit, and disarming frankness, Untied is the eye-opening and inspiring life of an actress, a woman, and a mother who has come into her own.

Breaking Out of Bedlam

Cora Sledge is horrified when her children, who doubt her ability to take care of herself, plot to remove her from her home. So what if her house is a shambles? Who cares when she last changed her clothes? If an eighty-two-year-old widow wants to live on junk food, pills, and cigarettes, hasn’t she earned the right? When her kids force her into The Palisades, an assisted living facility, Cora takes to her bed, planning to die as soon as possible. But life isn’t finished with her yet, not by a long shot.

Deciding that truth is the best revenge, Cora begins to write a tell-all journal that reveals once and for all the secret she has guarded since she was a young woman. In entries that are profane, profound, and gossipy, she chronicles her childhood in rural Missouri, her shotgun wedding, and the terrible event that changed the course of her life. Intermingled with her reminiscences is an account of the day-to-day dramas at The Palisades—her budding romance with a suave new resident, feuds with her tablemates, her rollicking camaraderie with the man who oversees her health care, and the sinister cloud of suspicion that descends as a series of petty crimes sets everyone on edge. The story builds to a powerful climax as Cora’s revelations about her past mesh with the unraveling intrigue in the present.

Cora is by turns outrageous, irreverent, and wickedly funny. Despite a life with more than its share of disappointment and struggle, she refuses to go gently into her twilight years, remaining intensely curious, disinclined to play it safe, and willing to start over. Breaking Out of Bedlam captures the loneliness and secrets that lurk within families, the hardscrabble reality facing women with limited resources, and the resilience of a woman who survives, despite all the odds, through an unlikely combination of passion, humor, and faith.

Fair Play

Two women, both artists, no longer young, live and work on opposite sides of a large apartment building, their studios connected by an attic passageway. They have loved and argued for decades, long enough to anticipate the other's next words and to guess her next move. Yet no matter how many times they've played the game, it is always capable of surprising them.

Tove Jansson tells the women's story in a series of brief, spare episodes, which bear the fitness of parable and the nuance of portraiture. We see the two as they watch Fassbinder films and B Westerns, critique each other's works in progress, spend time on a solitary island (recognizable to readers of Jansson's The Summer Book), and travel through the American Southwest. The type of love story that is rarely told, Fair Play is a revelatory depiction of contentment, hard-won and exhilarating.

Kiss and Tell

From her father and mother's interracial marriage to her own "you show me yours, I'll show you mine" moments on the playground—from drug experimentation to sexual/identity questions—MariNaomi lays her inner life bare. Kiss & Tell is her funny and frank memoir in graphic form: a fresh and offbeat coming-of-age story unfolding against the colorful backdrop of San Francisco in the '80s and '90s. Through deft storytelling and charming illustration, MariNaomi carries us through first love and worst love, through heartbreak and bedroom experimentation, as she grows from misfit teen to young woman.


The L Life

There have been few cultural touchstones to open people’s eyes to everyday lesbian life—until now. Through fascinating interviews and stunning portrait photography, The L Life introduces us to the women who are changing our view of the world. This candid collection is a celebration of real women, alongside headline-makers such as breast cancer researcher and bestselling author Dr. Susan Love; groundbreaking authors Alison Bechdel and Ann Bannon; entertainers such as actress Jane Lynch and comedian Kate Clinton; Congresswoman Tammy Baldwin and longtime activist Phyllis Lyon; award-winning film producer Christine Vachon; and many more.

Venus With Biceps

Over the last one hundred years, the image of the physically strong, confident, muscular woman has been the object of derision, fascination, and erotic fantasy; she is often portrayed, in both photography and illustration, as a sexy dominatrix, sexless mannequin, or sideshow freak. In this fascinating collection of rare archival images from the late-nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, authors David L. Chapman and Patricia Vertinsky trace the peculiar yet fascinating history of muscular women in popular culture.

One of the battlefields in this cultural conflict appeared in popular imagery: posters, advertisements, comic books, magazine illustrations, and (most particularly) photography all offered outlets of expression for many muscular women. Until quite recently, however, such females were packaged for the general public as physical monstrosities, lesbian man-haters, kinky sex objects, or beautiful living statues. At the same time, many women, including those in the emerging female bodybuilder community, have had to fight hard to reclaim the image of female muscularity as their own.

Featuring some two hundred full-color and black-and-white illustrations, many never before published, Venus with Biceps is a beautiful and historically significant book about gender, image, social expectations, and female power.

TC Tidbits: Tyler Perry as Alex Cross?

A cast of some heavy hitting starts line up to be in the movie version of James Patterson's I, Alex Cross.
Read more about it here.

April Kicks Off Poetry Month By Introducing Us To C.D. Wright

Investigative journalism is the poet's realm when C.D. Wright returns to her native Arkansas and examines an explosive incident from the Civil Rights movement. Wright interweaves oral histories, hymns, lists, newspaper accounts, and personal memories--especially those of her incandescent mentor, Mrs. Vititow--with the voices of witnesses, neighbors, police, activists, and black students who were rounded up and detained in an empty public swimming pool. This history leaps howling off the page.

April says:

"I was first introduced to Wright and her fever dream, elegiac sense of poetry in an ill-lit classroom at Western Michigan University--the farthest, I believe, one can get from the sweltering segregated south she conjures. And I have come to deeply appreciate her rendition of an epic poem.

In her latest book, One with Others, Wright creates a sort of visual poetic documentary
of the Civil Rights Movement as it travels through small town Arkansas. The book focuses
on a single event in 1969, Sweet Willie Wine's Walk Against Fear, and the way this walk shook and shaped the Delta town for years. Wine believed 'If white people can ride down their highways with guns, I can walk down the highway unarmed'. But as one reads one learns that peaceful action can wreak its own special sort of havoc. Wright tells the reader the story of Joe Williams, a black man, who (in the days before his deployment to Vietnam) decided to integrate the local bowling alley with a couple of his friends; they parked their truck in the parking lot and walked inside. The sound of the truck being knocked over on its side by the crew of 'Concerned Citizens' reached them as they loosed their solitary bowling ball, walked out, righted the truck, and drove off. The bowling alley was burned down soon after.

It's a book about division between people and the way we have politely paved over it in the last few decades. (The picture on the cover is actually of a pump house, grown over with vines, that once fed water into the local White Only pool; the pool has since become a parking lot.)

One with Others is also an elegy to V., Wright's goombah, her mentor. During Wine's Walk, V. (a white Catholic local woman) carried the water and the shoes in her car. For this action, she was ostracized; friends call it 'crossing over'; she was as good as dead to the community, so she was forced out of her home, her town, even her state. One cannot read this book and feel the loss of never having met V. in person. She is drawn so sharply by what she has on her shelves to what she has chosen to write on the walls of her Hell's Kitchen apartment, that she leaps at the reader from the page, and says, 'You have your life until you use it.'

In the end, this is an epic book. Wright will draw any reader into this account--poet or
not."

Jackie Highly Recommends You Read This Amazing and All Too True Story

"One of America's great chefs" (Vogue) shares how his drive to cook immaculate food won him international renown-and fueled his miraculous triumph over tongue cancer.

In 2007, chef Grant Achatz seemingly had it made. He had been named one of the best new chefs in America by Food & Wine in 2002, received the James Beard Foundation Rising Star Chef of the Year Award in 2003, and in 2005 he and Nick Kokonas opened the conceptually radical restaurant Alinea, which was named Best Restaurant in America by Gourmet magazine. Then, positioned firmly in the world's culinary spotlight, Achatz was diagnosed with stage IV squamous cell carcinoma-tongue cancer.

The prognosis was grim, and doctors agreed the only course of action was to remove the cancerous tissue, which included his entire tongue. Desperate to preserve his quality of life, Grant undertook an alternative treatment of aggressive chemotherapy and radiation. But the choice came at a cost. Skin peeled from the inside of Grant's mouth and throat, he rapidly lost weight, and most alarmingly, he lost his sense of taste. Tapping into the discipline, passion, and focus of being a chef, Grant rarely missed a day of work. He trained his chefs to mimic his palate and learned how to cook with his other senses. As Kokonas was able to attest: The food was never better. Five months later, Grant was declared cancer-free, and just a few months following, he received the James Beard Foundation Outstanding Chef in America Award.

Life, on the Line tells the story of a culinary trailblazer's love affair with cooking, but it is also a book about survival, about nurturing creativity, and about profound friendship. Already much- anticipated by followers of progressive cuisine, Grant and Nick's gripping narrative is filled with stories from the world's most renowned kitchens-The French Laundry, Charlie Trotter's, el Bulli- and sure to expand the audience that made Alinea the number-one selling restaurant cookbook in America last year.

Jackie says:
"This book gives me goosebumps. It's food, it's bravery, it's triumph, it's profound creativity in the face of tragedy, it's passion...it's simply amazing and I think everyone should read it. Now."

TC Tidbits: Don't Forget To Fool Around A Little Today!