Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

Alison Bechdel

Publisher's Comments
This breakout book by Alison Bechdel takes its place alongside the unnerving, memorable, darkly funny family memoirs of Augusten Burroughs and Mary Karr. It's a father-daughter tale pitch-perfectly illustrated with Bechdel's sweetly gothic drawings and — like Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis — a story exhilaratingly suited to the graphic memoir form.

Meet Alison's father, a historic preservation expert and obsessive restorer of the family's Victorian house, a third-generation funeral home director, a high school English teacher, an icily distant parent, and a closeted homosexual who, as it turns out, is involved with male students and a family babysitter. Through narrative that is alternately heartbreaking and fiercely funny, we are drawn into a daughter's complex yearning for her father. And yet, apart from assigned stints dusting caskets at the family-owned "fun home," as Alison and her brothers call it, the relationship achieves its most intimate expression through the shared code of books. When Alison comes out as homosexual herself in late adolescence, the denouement is swift...graphic...and redemptive.

Chew On This: Everything You Don't Want to Know about Fast Food
Eric Schlosser and Charles Wilson

Publisher's Comments
Based on Eric Schlosser's bestselling Fast Food Nation, this is the shocking truth about the fast food industry - how it all began, its success, what fast food actually is, what goes on in the slaughterhouses, meatpacking factories and flavour labs, global advertising, merchandising in UK schools, mass production and the exploitation of young workers in the thousands of fast-food outlets throughout the world. It also takes a look at the effects on the environment and the highly topical issue of obesity. Meticulously researched, lively and informative, with first-hand accounts and quotes from children and young people, Eric Schlosser presents the facts in such a way that allows readers to make up their own minds about the incredible fast food phenomenon.

Talking the Walk: A Communications Guide for Racial Justice

Hunter Cutting and Makani Themba-Nixon

Publisher's Comments
Talking the Walk is an incomparable resource for learning to discuss and spin issues of race and racial justice. Hunter Cutting and Makani Themba-Nixon help build the capacity of progressive activists and advocates to conduct media work, reframe public debate, and interrupt media stereotypes with messaging around racial justice. This guide is a treasure for democratizing the media landscape and fighting back against our corporate media-saturated environment.

Exile in Guyville : How a Punk Rock Redneck Faggot Texan Moved to West Hollywood and Refused to Be Shiny and Happy

Dave White

Publisher's Comments
Here's the diary of a man who in mid-life found himself uprooted and dumped into West Hollywood, an unfamiliar place not exactly known for stability. White explores his neighborhood - "queens: 6 percent; cranky 70-year-old Russians who give you the evil eye when you walk past: 2 percent; blonde girls with big, round, hard fakeys who think Jennifer Anniston just got lucky: 10 percent; miscellaneous cool kids, hustlers, and actual crazy people: 5 percent."

White gets gigs as a freelance writer, goes to the grocery store where his Russian neighbors ask him questions because they think he's from the old country; and encounters Sara Gilbert at the Laundromat, Leonard Maltin at the movies, and Ben Affleck driving a Rolls-Royce so ridiculously conspicuous he might as well be driving Chitty-Chitty, Bang-Bang.

What began as weekly diaries emailed to out-of-state family and friends evolved into a blog called "Dave White Knows" and in 2003 became a monthly column in Instinct called "Exile in Guyville." Alyson Books now presents White's blogs in expanded form with loads of new material that will be even more irritating to the Instinct readers who didn't like his column. "They requested more fashion and skin-care features in its place, which makes me kind of proud."

Choir Boy

Charlie Anders

Publisher's Comments
Choir Boy combines off-kilter humor and its own brand of modern day magic in a rollicking, bittersweet story about growing up different. Twelve year old Berry wants nothing more than to remain a choir boy. Choral music and the prospect of divinity thrill him. His fellow humans-from his feuding parents to the teenage transsexual prostitute who befriends him-always let him down. So in an effort to prevent his approaching puberty and exile from the choir, Berry injures himself, then convinces a clinic to give him testosterone inhibiting drugs. But there's a catch - the drugs come with a hefty dose of female hormones. Suddenly Berry finds himself with a set of B-cups and a lot of explaining to do. In the resulting uproar that overtakes the church and town, Berry faces what is both monstrous and silly about humanity and falls in love in the process. Choir Boy is both a journey across genders and a wildly inventive romp alongside an outcast who refuses to grow up gracefully. Abounding with bewitching religious symbolism, self-mutilation, bizarre suburban torture, drugs, class-based violence and hidden meanings, Choir Boy unmasks the very adult world most children live in. A fantastical coming of age fable in the tradition of Geek Love, Charlie Anders's first novel reminds us just how much power and horror there is in following one's true heart.