(City Lights Publications, 2009)
   
Description: While spending the last 25 years behind bars, award-winning journalist and death-row inmate Mumia Abu-Jamal has become a pioneering voice for the more than 3,000 prisoners living on state and federal death rows. In Jailhouse Lawyers: Prisoners Defending Prisoners v. the U.S.A, he presents the stories and reflections of fellow prisoners who have learned to use the court system to advocate for themselves and other prisoners—many of whom are uneducated or illiterate—and in some cases, win their freedom.

Jailhouse Lawyers includes a forward by Angela Y. Davis in which she calls Abu-Jamal “one of the most important public intellectuals of our time” and “has once more enlightened us, he has once more offered us new ways of thinking about law, democracy, and power.”

 (Grove/Atlantic, October 2009) 

 Description: Fresh off his National Book Award win, Sherman Alexie delivers a heartbreaking and hilarious collection of stories that explore the precarious balance between self-preservation and external responsibility in art, family, and the world at large.

      With unparalleled insight into the minds of artists, laborers, fathers, husbands, and sons, Alexie populates his stories with ordinary men on the brink of exceptional change. In a bicoastal journey through the consequences of both simple and monumental life choices, Alexie introduces us to these personal worlds as they transform beyond return. In the title story, a famous writer must decide how to care for his distant father who is slowly dying a “natural Indian death” from alcohol and diabetes, just as he learns that he himself may have a brain tumor. Alexie dissects a vintage-clothing store owner’s failing marriage and his subsequent courtship of a married photographer in various airports across the country; what happens when a politician’s son commits an unforgivable hate crime; and how a young boy learns his self-worth while writing for the obituary department of his local newspaper.
       Brazen, and wise, War Dances takes us to the heart of what it means to be human. The new beginnings, successes, mistakes, and regrets that make up our daily lives are laid bare in this wide-ranging and provocative new work that is Alexie at the height of his powers.

In War Dances, his fourth collection (which features a dozen poems along with its 11 stories), National Book Award winner Sherman Alexie enhances his stature as a multitalented writer and an astute observer of life among Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest. -BookPage  

(Front Street, September 2009)

Description: Ann is just short of fifteen when Mom is diagnosed with breast cancer. How can she tell the girls in ballet class that her mother had her breasts cut off? Her matter-of-fact sister, Jane, takes charge at home; her brother, Nick, calls from California; Dad helps when he can, as do friends, teachers, and relatives. Still, Ann is consumed with worry. Who's going to make sure that Mom drinks enough water, like the doctor said? Unless she is dancing or making pottery, Ann feels completely alone. She has a book that says, "Don't sweat the small stuff. And it's all small stuff." Even cancer?

(Celadon Press, February 2009)

Description:  Side Effects recounts the medical misadventures of Simon Apple from an eventful Midwestern youth through a series of events that have landed him on Death Row for the capital (and capitalistic) crime of threatening a major pharmaceutical conglomerate…not to mention the nation’s unbalanced balance of trade!

A rollicking ride that ranges from horrendous to hilarious, Side Effects is also a coming-of-age novel whose hapless hero is caught in an existential pickle barrel where biography itself is a collection of unintended consequences… a prescription for a splendid read where RX marks the spot.  (Ask your doctor!)
 
For more information please visit www.celadonpress.com/
 

(BOA Editions, November 2008)

Description: A collection of poems by Maya Bejerano, translated from the Hebrew, spanning 30 years of Bejerano's work.

The Hymns of Job and Other Poems is the first volume of Bejerano’s work to appear in English translation, thus bringing to the American reader a versatile and original poet.

(Rutgers University Press, 2009)

Description: In 1900, sixteen-year-old M. E. Ravage left his native Romania, setting off alone in steerage for America. Seventeen years after arriving on Ellis Island, Ravage, who passed through the Lower East Side on his way to Missouri, had mastered a new language well enough to write a vivid account of the ordeals and pleasures of departure and assimilation.  This new edition of Ravage's memoir, long out of print, includes a brief biography and introduction that place it within historical and literary contexts. An American in the Making contributes to a broader understanding of the global notion of "America" and remains timely in an era when massive immigration again challenges ideas of national identity.

(Hamilton Stone Editions, December 30, 2008)

Description: Some Place Quite Unknown is a novel written as a memoir about a woman of middle age suddenly thrown into a psychological crisis. It is a novel about stories - the different ways we tell them - by writing them, in psychoanalysis, in dreams - how we tell them to each other and keep them secret, how we forget them, remember them, use them, imagine them into fiction, use them to understand our lives and the lives of those close to us.

(Feiwel and Friends, March 2009)

Description: From Fran Manushkin, the acclaimed author of over two dozen books for children, and Tracy Dockray, a rising star in the children’s book world, comes a fun and witty tribute to the body part we all under-appreciate! The Tushy Book—written in snappy, upbeat rhyme—points out just how wonderful it is to have a tushy!

The Tushy Book is a celebration of this squeezably soft body part, with humor and warmth that readers of all ages will relate to. "We all have tushies, but readers will also all have smiles after finishing this book."--Kirkus Reviews

(Peepal Tree Press, 2009)
   
Description: Whether set in the Jamaican past or the Miami present, whether dealing wittily with sexual errantry, or inventively with manifestations of the uncanny, Geoffrey Philp's second collection displays again the gold stamp of the born story-teller...There is great variety here - a lively mash-up of genres and styles...but throughout them all there runs the signature of an engaging personal voice.

(Bloomsbury, July 2009)

Description: In this intelligent, eye-opening work of narrative journalism, Elizabeth Royte does for water what Eric Schlosser did for fast food: she finds the people, machines, economies and cultural trends that bring it from nature to our supermarkets. Along the way, she investigates the questions we must inevitably answer: Who owns our water? What happens when a bottled-water company stakes a claim on your town’s source? Should we have to pay for water? Is the stuff coming from the tap completely safe? And, if so, how many chemicals are dumped in to make it potable? What’s the environmental footprint of making, transporting and disposing of all those plastic bottles?

A riveting chronicle of one of the greatest marketing coups of the 20th century as well as a powerful environmental wake-up call, Bottlemania is essential reading for anyone who shells out $2 to quench their daily thirst. -Progressive Book Club

The Black Ancestor
(Imago Press - December 2009)

Description: When Leodine, a young white girl living in the Belgian Congo, discovers that her great-grandmother was African, she feels tainted and somehow unclean. New dilemmas arise in her life. Should she continue to befriend Yolande, the mulatto girl at her school? Or will her white friends begin to suspect she and Yolande share a common ancestry? With the onset of puberty, more problems arise: what will happen if she marries and has children? Amid much internal confusion, Leodine embarks on a journey, both physical and metaphysical, in search of her true identity. The Black Ancestor is part of Russo's award-winning African trilogy, which also includes Eclipse over Lake Tanganyika and Mixed Blood.

Boundaries of Exile/Conditions of Hope
(Confrontation Press, October 2009)

Description:Courses in Exile Writing and Exile Literature have become commonplace, for the world is well aware of the ever-present advent of this condition. While the names of the experience change, the essence of the condition remains. Boundaries of Exile, Conditions of Hope presents the fiction, poems and essays of Albert Russo and Martin Tucker in its treatment of the substantial, though more elusive, feelings of inner exile. It deals with the forced exits and observable impacts of physical exile on the writers who have endured such experiences, but it concentrates on the conditions of inner exile. Such conditions stem, of course, from outer/physical/ political/social causes, but the psychic condition of loss and the awareness of, and triumph over, loss is what matters in the content and context of this book. Exile once experienced is not a transient affair but a constant vessel in the stream of the heart. Identity after exile is never the same as identity prior to its arrival.
 

(Ahsahta press, September 2008)

Description: Stephanie Strickland’s new book comes with an interactive CD containing two digital poems, “The Ballad of Sand and Harry Soot” and “slippingglimpse.” Within the book, these poems appear as print sequences, one of which won the Boston Review prize.

“Strickland is one of contemporary poetry’s polymaths: her poetry displays an astonishing command of scientific knowledge…technical know-how, especially in the realm of electronic poetics, and unusual verbal virtuosity. The pièce de résistance in Zone : Zero is the interactive generative Flash poem ‘slippingglimpse,’ in which text and video, made by using motion capture coding, combine so as to create a genuinely new and distinctive eco-poetry. Readers/viewers will find themselves totally mesmerized.” - Marjorie Perloff

(St. Martin's Griffin, July 2009)

Description: Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez is responsible for opening up a whole new market of hungry readers with The Dirty Girls Social Club. In Dirty Girls on Top, she deftly recaptures what was so winning about the five sucias and creates an unstoppable plot full of rich new loves, losses, friendship and entanglements. Valdes-Rodriguez is an award-winning print and broadcast journalist. She was named one of today’s most influential Hispanics by Time magazine.