Since his debut in 1951 as The Catcher in the Rye, Holden Caulfield has been synonymous with "cynical adolescent." Holden narrates the story of a couple of days in his sixteen-year-old life, just after he's been expelled from prep school, in a slang that sounds edgy even today and keeps this novel on banned book lists. It begins,

"If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy childhood was like, and how my parents were occupied and all before they had me, and all that David Copperfield kind of crap, but I don't feel like going into it, if you want to know the truth. In the first place, that stuff bores me, and in the second place, my parents would have about two hemorrhages apiece if I told anything pretty personal about them."

His constant wry observations about what he encounters, from teachers to phonies (the two of course are not mutually exclusive) capture the essence of the eternal teenage experience of alienation.

Book contains these nine stories: "A Perfect Day for Bananafish", Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut", "Just Before the War With the Eskimos", "The Laughing Man", "Down at the Dinghy", "For Esme...With Love and Squalor", "Pretty Mouth and Green My Eyes", "De Daumier-Smith's Blue Period" and "Teddy"

A little sea princess, longing to be human, trades her mermaid's tail for legs, hoping to win the love of a prince and earn an immortal soul for herself.

I wish for this book to catapult you out of bed and smack into the center of one of your dreams, or lure you back to bed, where you will lie helplessly laughing at all your mistakes and frozen moments.

I wish for this book to free the part of your soul that longs to write epic novels, recite Yeats by heart, play a musical instrument by magic, or perform in a play about your life that you create and design. Most of all, I want this book to give you a boost up over the fence that prevents you from moving forward and inward.

Suggests a variety of activities designed to develop one's creativity, and tells how to live creatively free and develop a more positive and open outlook on life.

This book is your traveling pleasure companion. I want to remind you to seek out pleasure and lightly scoop it up!

It is also a guide to finding pleasure in all of the difficult places: during illness, at the periodontist, facing our aging and mortality...

I share my explorations into pleasure, and the places I get lost.

Let's magnify our pleasures together, no matter what else is happening in our lives.

These pages will inspire readers, no matter what their circumstances may be, to build their own special worlds.

Living juicy is: jumping for joy on the inside. Sark gives us the juice to nourish our creative souls with this map and miniature guidebook. Weekly topics include "procrastinating," "energizing," "adventuring," and "shouting." Each affirmation a day is designed to stop those dry and cracked feelings and give us those sweet, wild moments we crave.

This book is my glowing invitation to you — to live a rich, succulent life! I explore love, sexuality, romance, money, fat, fear and creativity. It's a little bit like reading my diary — with permission. Succulence is powerFull! and so are we as women.

Soyfoods have been a staple in Asian cooking for millennia, but until recently only a few Westerners took much interest in cooking with them. Now deemed a "miracle food," soy may help prevent cancer, lower cholesterol, reduce heart disease, prevent osteoporosis, and relieve the symptoms of menopause. Award-winning natural foods cookbook author and food writer Lorna Sass shares her decade of soyfood cookery research in The New Soy Cookbook, pairing soyfoods with ingredients and seasonings of cuisines from around the world. Beautifully laid out and illustrated, the book includes more than 40 recipes using soymilk, tofu, tempeh, soy sauce, and miso. The recipes reveal influences from all over, highlighting the cuisines of China, Italy, Thailand, Indonesia, and France, reflecting a delicious fusion of East and West.

Red Lentil Soup with Indian Spices, Tempeh Braised in Coconut Milk with Lemongrass, Curried Tofu with Spinach and Tomatoes, Sage-scented Cornmeal Scones, Pumpkin Tart with Pecan Crust, Codfish and Clam Chowder, and Black Soybean Salsa with Swordfish Strips are only a sampling of the tempting recipes you will find in Sass's lovely compendium. With only a few desserts, Sass focuses more on savory dishes using no meat, very little dairy, some seafood, and somewhat unusual ingredients such as quinoa, shiitake mushrooms, mesclun, kabocha squash, and broccoli rabe. With mouthwatering photographs, The New Soy Cookbook would make a handsome addition to any inspired cook's bookshelf. —Gretel Hakanson

Best known for his syndicated sexual advice column, "Savage Love," Dan Savage shares his own story in The Kid, a hilarious account of his efforts—along with his partner—to adopt a child. (Whoops, make that his boyfriend; Savage can't stand the "genderless" P-word: "Straight people and press organs that want to acknowledge gay relationships while at the same time pushing the two-penises stuff as far out of their minds as possible love 'partner.' I hated it.") Savage doesn't give an inch on the sexuality issue; it's hard to imagine that a homophobic reader would even pick up The Kid, but if it happened, Savage's unapologetic presentation of his life would quickly scare that reader off. Which isn't to say that he paints a rosy picture of homosexual cohabitation: the very first scene finds Dan's boyfriend, Terry, locking himself in the bathroom after a fight over the music on the car stereo. The misadventures continue through each step of the open-adoption process, in which Dan and Terry get to know their baby's birth mother, and the first few weeks of parenthood. The Kid is a wonderful, charming account of real "family values" that proves love knows no limits.

Welcome to the hot new wave of writing about sex: Savage Love. Columnist Dan Savage has hand-picked over 300 letters from six years worth of "Savage Love," a no-holds-barred syndicated sex-advice column which runs in 16 papers in the United States and Canada, including The Village Voice and the San Francisco Weekly. An original and funny thinker, thrashing around in the playground of human sexuality, Savage advises on a wide range of titillating topics: * What is the best seduction music? * How do I come out to my fundamentalist parents? * What is so wonderful about intercourse, anyway? Forget Anka Radakovich and Isadora Altman. Tune in to Dan Savage as he answers these questions and much more in his own uniquely irreverent and sexually spunky style.