Across the Creek, a collection of affectionate reminiscences, adds to the common lore about William Faulkner and his community. Jim Faulkner recounts stories abounding in folklore, humor, family history, and fictionalized history, and these offer an insider's view of the Faulkner family's life in the small southern town of Oxford, Mississippi. A sense of adventure and misadventure colors these personal accounts. “Aunt Tee and Her Two Monuments” explains the mystery of why the town has two Confederate statues. “Roasting Black Buster” tells how Faulkner's hired man mistakenly killed the prize bull for a family barbecue. “The Picture of John and Brother Will” recounts how Phil Mullen happened to take his well-known snapshot of the famous Faulkner brother novelists—John and William—one of the few pictures ever taken of them together. Here in this entertaining book are more family stories about a major American author whose life, family, and writing have generated continuing appeal and ever-renewed appreciation.

Winner of the 2003 Lambda Literary Award for Fiction Anthology Showcasing the work of literary giants like Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Alice Walker, and writers whom readers may be surprised to learn were "in the life," Black Like Us is the most comprehensive collection of fiction by African American lesbian, gay, and bisexual writers ever published. From the Harlem Renaissance to the Great Migration of the Depression era, from the postwar civil rights, feminist, and gay liberation movements, to the unabashedly complex sexual explorations of the present day, Black Like Us accomplishes a sweeping survey of 20th century literature.

A revelatory examination of AIDS mourning at the intersection of black and queer studies. His world view colored by growing up in 1980s Ethiopia, where death governed time and temperament, Dagmawi Woubshet offers a startlingly fresh interpretation of melancholy and mourning during the early years of the AIDS epidemic in The Calendar of Loss. When society denies a patient's disease and then forbids survivors mourning rites, how does a child bear witness to a parent's death or a lover grieve for his beloved? Looking at a range of high and popular works of grief—including elegies, eulogies, epistles to the dead, funerals, and obituaries—Woubshet identifies a unique expression of mourning that emerged in the 1980s and early 1990s in direct response to the AIDS catastrophe. What Woubshet dubs a "poetics of compounding loss" expresses what it was like for queer mourners to grapple with the death of lovers and friends in rapid succession while also coming to terms with the fact of their own imminent mortality. The time, consolation, and closure that allow the bereaved to get through loss were for the mourners in this book painfully thwarted, since with each passing friend, and with mounting numbers of the dead, they were provided with yet more evidence of the certain fatality of the virus inside them. Ultimately, the book argues, these disprized mourners turned to their sorrow as a necessary vehicle of survival, placing open grief at the center of art and protest, insisting that lives could be saved through the very speech acts precipitated by death. An innovative and moving study, The Calendar of Loss illuminates how AIDS mourning confounds and traverses how we have come to think about loss and grief, insisting that the bereaved can confront death in the face of shame and stigma in eloquent ways that also imply a fierce political sensibility and a longing for justice.

My, My by D. W. Smith [--------------------------------------------]

Eleven gay black poets exploring the diversity of gay black life in our time. Meditative and lyrical, celebratory and angry - verse that takes on black homophobia, desire, friendship and family.

Domestic animals have lived with humans for thousands of years and remain essential to the everyday lives of people throughout the world. In this book, Natasha Fijn examines the process of animal domestication in a study that blends biological and social anthropology, ethology and ethnography. She examines the social behavior of humans and animals in a contemporary Mongolian herding society. After living with Mongolian herding families, Dr Fijn has observed through firsthand experience both sides of the human-animal relationship. Examining their reciprocal social behavior and communication with one another, she demonstrates how herd animals influence Mongolian herders' lives and how the animals themselves are active partners in the domestication process.