The consequences of media saturation are the basis for an urban nightmare in Lullaby, Chuck Palahniuk's darkly comic and often dazzling thriller. Assigned to write a series of feature articles investigating SIDS, troubled newspaper reporter Carl Streator begins to notice a pattern among the cases he encounters: each child was read the same poem prior to his or her death. His research and a tip from a necrophilic paramedic lead him to Helen Hoover Boyle, a real estate agent who sells "distressed" (demonized) homes, assured of their instant turnover. Boyle and Streator have both lost children to "crib death," and she confirms Streator's suspicions: the poem is an ancient lullaby or "culling song" that is lethal if spoken--or even thought--in a victim's direction. The misanthropic Streator, now armed with a deadly and uncontrollably catchy tune, goes on a minor killing spree until he recognizes his crimes and the song's devastating potential. Lullaby then turns into something of a road trip narrative, with Streator, Boyle, her empty-headed Wiccan secretary Mona, and Mona's vigilante boyfriend Oyster setting out across the U.S. to track down and destroy all copies of the poem.
In his previous works, including the cult favorite Fight Club, Palahniuk has demonstrated a fondness for making statements about the condition of humanity, and he uses Lullaby like a blunt object to repeatedly overstate his generally dim view. Such dogmatic venom undermines the persuasiveness of his thesis about mass communication and free will, but thankfully, Palahniuk offers some respite here by allowing for sympathy and love, as well as through his razor-sharp humor, such as his mock listings for Helen's possessed properties: "six bedrooms, four baths, pine-paneled entryway, and blood running down the kitchen walls...." At such moments, Lullaby casts a powerful spell. --Ross Doll

Split novel, Craig heads to Antartica and Dean writes a novel through E-Mail's.

Top notch!

Luna's second novel is a crisply written, incisive story about a violent, troubled young woman struggling to rebuild her life and come to terms with her crime after being released from a California prison. As the novel opens, protagonist Melody Booth has just finished a three-year sentence for her role in a brutal murder engineered by her brother, Gary, but life seems promising when her mother takes her in to help her get back on her feet. Booth immediately makes a series of bad decisions, though, beginning with her career choice: she takes a marginal job delivering portable toilets. On the personal side, her first mistake is getting involved with her brother's friend, Chick Rodriguez, a drug runner and heavy user, and before long Melody is drinking, carousing and slipping back into her old "bad girl" ways. Her downward spiral bottoms out when Chick disappears and she tracks him down at the San Francisco house of his dealer, only to arrive just in time to get in trouble with the law again when he overdoses. Luna spends a good portion of the novel delving into Melody's refusal to visit her imprisoned brother, and while many of those passages are effective, the siblings' ultimate meeting proves to be anticlimactic. But the remaining material leading up to Melody's downfall is solid, despite the ongoing presence of several prison-novel clich‚s. Overall, Luna has done a service by telling a familiar story from a woman's perspective, and this novel represents a sound follow-up to her success with Brave New Girl.

An excellent choice to supplement life-drawing instruction in the classroom. Technical information on anatomy, proportion, lighting, weight distribution, and foreshortening is discussed. Beyond this, however, Sheppard shows how to render various figure types and how to capture the figure in motion. The use of a variety of media gives the book an added dimension. Two hundred drawings done in a classical style illustrate the points. They are often accompanied by diagrams to explain the underlying form. The text is informative and written in a way that gives the feeling of having an instructor at hand.

Set in New York in the 80s and 90s, UPSTATE tells the story of two young lovers, Antonio and Natasha, torn apart by tragedy and struggling to survive against all odds. When a horrific tragedy sends Antonio to jail, their worlds turn upside down.

Antonio struggles to stay alive on the inside; Natasha battles society on the outside. Over the course of 10 years, they share an intimate correspondence as their lives change dramatically and they often have only each other to turn to. Will fate bring them back together, or will they remain forever apart?

Keith has done artwork for AGAINST ME!, SUBMISSION HOLD, HeartattaCk magazine and others. This 280 page paperback book compiles excerpts from issues #1-10, and essentially all the material from #11-16. Artwork and stories from 1995 to the present day.

A powerful argument against the World Trade Organization and the movement toward globalization in general. Contains contributions from some of the leaders in the movement, including Walden Bello, the Environmental Research Foundation, Deborah James, and Paul Hawken. Softcover.

"So, I figured, what the hell." That's Julia's response to just about anything, including marriage, pregnancy and cheating on her husband—not necessarily in that order. In this wry, brutally honest debut novel, Guterson slashes into the happy homilies of chick lit, revealing the underside of happily ever after. Part-time middle-school teacher Julia is nearing 40 and married to more-or-less satisfactory Jim, a Seattle sports writer, with whom she has a 15-year-old son, Chad. For years, she's been pining away for her first love, Ray, and when she sees him at a wedding—"looking for all the world like a sun-drenched god"—she promptly follows him into the bathroom. Soon she's pregnant, and she can't be sure whether the father is Jim or Ray. Meanwhile, clueless Jim is distracted by a painfully obvious crush on his young, beautiful officemate Patricia, which prevents him from taking the moral high ground. What distinguishes this book from its genre counterparts is author Guterson's unabashed willingness to let Julia voice the sort of thoughts that are publicly eschewed, and these glimpses into the mind of her tell-it-like-it-is narrator make for some liberating, laugh-out– loud passages. There are also moments of heartbreak and kindness—particularly in Julia's relationship with Chad—which are all the more potent for their understatement.

Molly Jong-Fast's Normal Girl is striking-and as funny as it as real. Inspired by her own experiences growing up in the decadent, fast-paced netherworld of New York City's jet set, Jong-Fast's debut novel is a hilarious, hard-edged walk past the velvet rope.

At just nineteen, Miranda Woke seems to have it all. Her parents are famous socialites, she's already been written up on Page Six sixteen times, she's on all the right invitation lists, and drugs and alcohol are never in short supply. But while her image screams "It girl," she'd rather be a normal girl, and the A-list feels even more uncomfortable than her Manolo Blahnik shoes. In fact, she's become the "living embodiment of an awkward phase" with "more issues than Harper's Bazaar." Neither Xanax nor Deepak Chopra tapes help. And now that her junkie party has trashed her parents' house, she has to liquidate her trust fund to pay Mom's decorator for a quick fix. But worst of all, Miranda thinks she just murdered her own boyfriend.

What New York City finance was to Wolfe in the 1980s and Southern real estate in the '90s, the college campus is in this sprawling, lurid novel: a flashpoint for cultural standards and the setting for a modern parable. At elite Dupont (a fictional school based on Wolfe's research at places like Stanford and Michigan), the author unspools a standard college story with a 21st-century twist—jocks, geeks, prudes and partiers are up to their usual exploits, only now with looser sexual mores and with the aid of cell phones. Wolfe begins, as he might say, with a "bango": two frat boys tangle with the bodyguard of a politician they've caught in a sex act. We then race through plots involving students' candy-colored interactions with each other and inside their own heads: Charlotte, a cipher and prodigy from a conservative Southern family whose initiation into dorm life Wolfe milks to much dramatic advantage; Jojo, a white basketball player struggling with race, academic guilt and job security; Hoyt, a BMOC frat boy with rage issues; Adam, a student reporter cowed by alpha males. As in Wolfe's other novels, characters typically fall into two categories: superior types felled by their own vanity and underdogs forced to rely on wiles. But what in Bonfire of the Vanities were powerful competing archetypes playing out cultural battles here seem simply thin and binary types. Wolfe's promising setup never leads to a deeper contemplation of race, sex or general hierarchies. Instead, there is a virtual recitation of facts, albeit colorful ones, with little social insight beyond the broadly obvious. (Athletes getting a free pass? The sheltered receiving rude awakenings?) Boasting casual sex and machismo-fueled violence, the novel seems intent on shocking, but little here will surprise even those well past their term-paper years. Wolfe's adrenalized prose remains on display—e.g., a basketball game seen from inside a player's head—and he weaves a story that comes alive with cinematic vividness. But, like a particular kind of survey course, readers are likely to breeze through these pages—yet find themselves with little to show for it.