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Love him or hate him, one thing is for certain: you’ve talked about Kanye West this year. He’s the arrogant buffoon who bullied a teen girl in front of millions. He’s the rap star who at the top of his game turned his back on hip-hop’s school of thought and made a techno-pop album where he sings. He’s remarkably annoying.
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Guess which book, according to the American Library Association, is the title most often requested to be removed from schools and libraries in the U.S.? Give up? For the third year in a row, it’s And Tango Makes Three, which is a guide to building your own bomb while smoking crack and attending orgies in the evenings. Oh wait, sorry, no: And Tango Makes Three is actually the heartwarming, award-winning, bestselling 2005 children’s book about two male penguins who hatch a baby chick. We’ll say that again: Since its publication in 2005, more people have asked for this book to be removed from a school or library than any other book in the entire Library of Congress. Oh, yeah, and the book is based on the true story of two male penguins called Roy and Silo who hatched an egg together at New York’s Central Park Zoo. Talk about going against nature! (Yes, penguins can be gay. Or, rather, bi.)
But here’s a bit of news to warm the cockles of your heart: the authors behind the book, Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell, who also happen to be a couple, now have a Tango of their own. Their daughter Gemma was born to a surrogate mother with sperm from one of the men (they left it up to chance which one). Which totally makes up for the devastating news that Silo has since taken up with a female penguin named Scrappy. (Something similar happened this summer to San Francisco’s gay penguins.) Hey, sometimes life imitates art — and other times, life imitates a crappy soap opera.
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What were you thinking about on September 16, 2008? Green business ideas probably weren’t at the top of the list… September 15 was the day that Lehman Brothers went belly up, and you were probably more focused on your portfolio and savings. As such, Tim Sanders’ book Saving the World at Work (released on — you guessed it — September 16) got buried under talk of a second Great Depression.
Sanders and publisher Doubleday decided to give the book another go, and relaunched it on September 16th of this year. I’m glad they did: while the title led me to believe I was going to be reading another “how to” book on greening the workplace (which is not a bad thing), Sanders goes well beyond tips on saving paper and electricity.
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You know all those questions that you really want to ask when you meet a lawyer at a cocktail party? But you restrain yourself because you figure it’s not polite to ask a complete stranger whether you could get sued if you broke someone’s penis during sex. Well, our friend Robin Epstein and her sister Amy Epstein Feldman have written a book to save you the embarrassment: So Sue Me, Jackass! Avoiding Legal Pitfalls That Can Come Back to Bite You at Work, at Home, and at Play. “At Play” being our favorite topic, of course — like, who gets to keep the ring in a broken engagement? Are you really “common law married” if you live together for seven years? Can you claim temporary insanity and get out of your marriage if you were drunk when you said “I do”? And why the hell do mattresses have tags that say “Do not remove under penalty of law”? Anyway, about that broken penis…
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It seems like everyone right now is talking about that new book Why Women Have Sex, by Cindy Meston and David Buss. Apparently lots of women reported having sex to keep the peace, to stave off boredom, to relieve a headache, or to get their husbands to take out the trash (oh, yeah, and occasionally because they’re in the mood, too). And everyone’s acting like it’s this huge deal that 100% of the women didn’t say that, 100% of the time, they have sex because they’re so turned on they can’t think straight. Sure, sometimes women have sex for fairly unsexy reasons…and sometimes they have sex for more, shall we say, honorable ones — which includes, but isn’t limited to, being so turned on they can’t think straight Here are 10 (and please, add your own reasons in the comments section below!):
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Green tech galore… here are this week’s finds.
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Laurie Sandell’s graphic memoir, The Impostor’s Daughter, just hit bookstores, and even if she wasn’t our good friend, we’d still tell you that it’s our number one pick for a beach read this summer. (By the way, “graphic memoir” = graphic novel-style memoir. The rest of the book is not nearly as dirty as the page we excerpted above. What can we say, we’re smut peddlers.) Anyway, the book chronicles Laurie’s search for the truth about her charming and brilliant con artist father — and how her relationship with him affected everything from her career as a celebrity journalist to her love life. (Paging unavailable men!) It’s hilarious, engrossing, honest, and smart — plus, look at all those pictures! You’ll race through it even if the wind is blowing sand in your face.
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Above, the covers for two erotica anthologies. When MILF Fantasies was released as an ebook by Ravenous Romance earlier this year, it barely sold. Young Studs was made available shortly after, and shot into Ravenous Romance’s top ten.
This would be nothing more than a curiosity of sales data, were it not for one essential fact: MILF Fantasies and Young Studs are the same book, just with different titles, and different covers.
Book sellers (and pretty much everyone else) are accustomed to the idea that if you want something to sell, you put a picture of a woman (preferably young and white) on the cover. Perhaps it’s time to reconsider that assumption–at the very least, when trying to sell erotica to straight women.
Erotica Cover Watch: Young Studs, ed. Cecilia Tan, pub. Ravenous Romance [eroticacoverwatch.wordpress.com]
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When you, as an adult, spend the majority of your time creating adorable G-rated worlds for kids, that hidden sexual side of you is bound to come out — and probably, shall we say, enthusiastically. (Anyone remember the movie S.O.B. in which squeaky clean Julie “Mary Poppins” Andrews rips her top off and exposes her boobies? No? Good. It’s scarring.) Well, in their spare time, four Pixar animators have been working on a series of cool art books, the second and most recent of which is “The Ancient Book of Sex and Science” (the first was the now sold-out “Ancient Book of War and Myth“).
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We’ve read — or at least skimmed — hundreds of books about sex in our ten years in the biz, and our shelves are stacked with tomes on everything from gays in the military to the science of seduction. Some educate us, some make us laugh, some make us blush, some make good door-stops — and then every now and then, a book just completely blows us away. Like Daniel Bergner’s The Other Side of Desire. It’s an engrossing, sensitive, intelligent exploration of various forms of lust and longing, and it is by turns shocking and moving — and occasionally even romantic. Bergner hangs his story on four main characters: a foot fetishist, a female sadist, a child sex offender, and an amputee “devotee.” We chatted with him about furries, the Craigslist killer, and the age-old nature vs. nurture debate.
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Andrew Rosetta (not his real name) was an escort in London for ten years, where he made thousands of pounds a week. He tells all in his new memoir, Whatever She Wants: True Confessions of a Male Escort. We had about ten million questions we wanted to ask him, but we limited ourselves to just these few…
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