Spring 2000 Titles:
Click the links or book covers below for excerpts, book reviews, author biography information, and purchase details.

Click here for our list of Reading Group Guides.

Girl Reel A must-have for all film buffs, Girl Reel is a book about our relationship to popular culture- how media images both preview and rerun our own lives. By surveying images of women and lesbians in television and film over the seventies, eighties, and nineties, and chronicling the move of lesbian and gay issues from the margins to the mainstream, Bonnie Morris offers her own images of strong women, for a new generation of readers.

Captain Blackman Named among the most important works of fiction of the decade by The New York Times Book Review when published in 1972, Captain Blackman is the first book to be published in Coffee House Press’s Black Arts Movement Series. True to form, John A. Williams is exhaustive and accurate in his historical research of the significant role played by African Americans in the military. Captain Blackman is a U.S. soldier in Vietnam who becomes seriously wounded. As he drifts in and out of consciousness he hallucinates back in time as a soldier in each of America’s wars from 1775 to 1975.

Our Sometime Sister In her brilliant first novel Norah Labiner introduces Pearl Christomo, an elusive, forgetful, ambitious, and talented narrator, herself an aspiring novelist, who finds that the fictions she writes resemble her own life, and that her own life resembles nothing so much as a set piece from Hamlet. Complex and subtle, Labiner’s engrossing book is both a sly joke on and an homage to the coming of age / portrait of the artist genre.

Garden Primitives The stories in Garden Primitives range from still to explosive, the language from poetic and sensual to coarse. What is common among them is a passionate allegiance to both the heart and the intellect. Sosin’s characters are at once base and complex as we see the continuous motion of their inner lives, mingle and withdraw from the external world. Revealed are tangles of perception and rationalization, driven by desire and fear. Garden Primitives is interested in questions, in pain and pleasure, in beauty and sharp edges.

Summit Avenue How can you weave a life from fairy tales? Set in the Minneapolis and Saint Paul during the First World War, Mary Sharratt’s debut novel is the story of a young German immigrant experiencing her spiritual and sexual awakening.

The Annotated Here A retrospective of this challenging New York School / Language School poet’s life work in poetry, The Annotated Here features poems in sequences that meditate on words and sentences, as well as on themes found in existing texts of poems and paintings. Welish’s poems blur the lines between art criticism and lyrical meditations on language and reality.

Breakers "Breakers brings together several of this influential poet’s major, longer poems, and presents new work. Paul Violi has written poems in numerous nonpoetic forms: poems in the shape of an index of a book, a TV schedule, and the mooring plan of boats in a yachting marina are examples. He is also very funny and very serious, often at the same time. . . . We know by now that the postmoderns, whoever they are, level high and low culture, and can start a sentence on Mount Olympus and end on Canal Street". -Martin Stannard