How Sassy Changed My Life: A Love Letter to the Greatest Teen Magazine of All Time
Edited by Kara Jesella and Marisa Meltzer

Publisher's Comments
For a generation of teenage girls, Sassy magazine was nothing short of revolutionary — so much so that its audience, which stretched from tweens to twentysomething women, remains obsessed with it to this day and back issues are sold for hefty sums on the Internet. For its brief but brilliant run from 1988 to 1994, Sassy was the arbiter of all that was hip and cool, inspiring a dogged devotion from its readers while almost single-handedly bringing the idea of girl culture to the mainstream. In the process, Sassy changed the face of teen magazines in the United States, paved the way for the unedited voice of blogs, and influenced the current crop of smart women's zines, such as Bust and Bitch, that currently hold sway.

How Sassy Changed My Life presents for the first time the inside story of the magazine's rise and fall while celebrating its unique vision and lasting impact. Through interviews with the staff, columnists, and favorite personalities we are brought behind the scenes from its launch to its final issue and witness its unique fusion of feminism and femininity, its frank commentary on taboo topics like teen sex and suicide, its battles with advertisers and the religious right, and the ascension of its writers from anonymous staffers to celebrities in their own right.

Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life
Barbara Kingsolver

Publisher's Comments
Bestselling author Barbara Kingsolver returns with her first nonfiction narrative that will open your eyes in a hundred new ways to an old truth: You are what you eat.

Hang on for the ride: With characteristic poetry and pluck, Barbara Kingsolver and her family sweep readers along on their journey away from the industrial-food pipeline to a rural life in which they vow to buy only food raised in their own neighborhood, grow it themselves, or learn to live without it. Their good-humored search yields surprising discoveries about turkey sex life and overly zealous zucchini plants, en route to a food culture that's better for the neighborhood and also better on the table. Part memoir, part journalistic investigation, Animal, Vegetable, Miracle makes a passionate case for putting the kitchen back at the center of family life and diversified farms at the center of the American diet.

Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith
Anne Lamott

Publisher's Comments
The world, community, the family, the human heart: these are the beautiful and complicated arenas in which our lives unfold. Wherever you look, there?s trouble and wonder, pain and beauty, restoration and darkness — sometimes all at once.
Yet amid the confusion, if you look carefully, in nature or in the kitchen, in ordinariness or in mystery, beyond the emotion muck we all slog through, you’ll find it eventually: a path, some light to see by, moments of insight, courage, or buoyancy. In other words, grace.

Anne Lamott knows and lives by this belief, most of the time. In Grace (Eventually), her brilliant new collection, she recounts the missteps, detours, and roadblocks in her walk of faith.

It's been an erratic journey, and some days go better than others. "I wish grace and healing were more abracadabra kinds of things," she writes. "Also, that delicate silver bells would ring to announce grace’s arrival. But no, it's clog and slog and scotch, on the floor, in the silence, in the dark."

In Grace (Eventually), Lamott describes how she copes. The challenges seem alternately inconsequential and insurmountable — the anger engendered by an obstinate carpet salesman or president; the engulfing envy at friend's professional success; the bewilderment at discovering that a child has grown up or that a friend wants to die on his own terms — and they are also universal.

Wise and irreverent, poignant and funny, Grace (Eventually) is a primer in faith, as we come to discover what it means to be fully human and alive.

Full Frontal Feminism: A Young Woman's Guide to Why Feminism Matters
Jessica Valenti

Publisher's Comments
Feminism isn't dead. It just isn't very cool anymore. Enter Full Frontal Feminism, a book that embodies the forward-looking messages that author Jessica Valenti propagates on her popular website, Feministing.com.

Covering a range of topics, including pop culture, health, reproductive rights, violence, education, and relationships, Valenti provides young women a primer on why feminism matters.

Valenti knows better than anyone that young women need a smart-ass book that deals with real-life issues in a style they can relate to. No rehashing the same old issues. No belaboring where today's young women have gone wrong. Feminism should be something young women feel comfortable with, something they can own. Full Frontal Feminism sends out a message to readers: Yeah, you're feminists, and that's actually pretty frigging cool.

Open House: Of Family, Friends, Food, Piano Lessons and the Search for a Room of My Own
Patricia J. Williams

Publisher's Comments
Open House strings together a delightful array of observations, reminiscences, anecdotes and commentaries by renowned columnist Patricia J. Williams. Written with her trademark wit and insight, she relates stories about the many facets of her life -- as a lawyer, scholar, writer, African-American, descendant of slaves, mother, and single, fifty-something woman -- always aware of the ironies inherent in situations when her many identities don't conform to societal expectations. She tells us of her great aunt Mary, who crossed the color line one day, while boarding a train; about her best white friend, who believes that the only thing standing between the author and an eligible husband is a makeover; about the day she and her family learned how to eat watermelon without fear of racial judgment; and about why she worships Oprah. She also tackles serious subjects, such as cloning and the legacy of slavery and privacy issues in the cyberage, all with her characteristic sparkling humor and originality. Always provocative, never didactic, Open House is an entertaining journey through the rooms of Pat Williams's imagination.