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Wilde Stories 2008: The Best of the Year's Gay Speculative Fiction by Berman, Steve As such literary movements as interstitial and slipstream gain momentum, more and more authors interweave their traditional stories with gay themes as coming out, homophobia, and self-as-other, with a bit of the strange and weird. Named after one of the founding fathers of gay speculative fiction, Wilde Stories is a new annual anthology that offers readers the best of such stories from the prior year. Editor Steve Berman, a finalist for both the Lambda Literary and Andre Norton Awards, has collected an engaging selection of the fantastical, the strange, and the scary from such notable authors as Victor J. Banis, Hal Duncan and Lee Thomas.

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This Land Is Their Land: Reports from a Divided Nation by Ehrenreich, Barbara America in the 'aughts--hilariously skewered, brilliantly dissected, and darkly diagnosed by the bestselling social critic hailed as "the soul mate"* of Jonathan Swift Barbara Ehrenreich's first book of satirical commentary, "The Worst Years of Our Lives," about the Reagan era, was received with bestselling acclaim. The one problem was the title: couldn't some prophetic fact-checker have seen that the worst years of our lives--far worse--were still to come? Here they are, the 2000s, and in "This Land Is Their Land," Ehrenreich subjects them to the most biting and incisive satire of her career. Taking the measure of what we are left with after the cruelest decade in memory, Ehrenreich finds lurid extremes all around. While members of the moneyed elite can buy congressmen, many in the working class can barely buy lunch. While a wealthy minority obsessively consumes cosmetic surgery, the poor often go without health care for their children. And while the corporate C-suites are now nests of criminality, the less fortunate are fed a diet of morality, marriage, and abstinence. Ehrenreich's antidotes are as sardonic as they are spot-on: pet insurance for your kids; Salvation Army fashions for those who can no longer afford Wal-Mart; and boundless rage against those who have given us a nation scarred by deepening inequality, corroded by distrust, and shamed by its official cruelty. Full of wit and generosity, these reports from a divided nation show once again that Ehrenreich is, as Molly Ivins said, "good for the soul."--*"The Times" (London)

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Branded T by Blumenstein, Rosalyne This is a true story about a teenage runaway, her contact with suicide, gender identity issues, drug addiction, and the sex industry. This is also an account of how recovery opens the door to a healing process and alters the subjugators, one day at a time.