When a breach birth leaves Paulo severely disabled, his father, the articulate, unsentimental Professor Frigerio, struggles to come to terms with his son’s condition. Face to face with his own limitations, Frigerio confronts the strange way society around him handles Paolo’s handicaps and observes his surprising gifts. In spare, deeply affecting episodes, the professor of language explores the nuanced boundaries between “normal” and “disabled” worlds. A remarkable memoir of fathering, winner of the 2001 Strega Prize, Italy’s most prestigious literary honor, Born Twice is noted Italian author Guiseppe Pontiggia’s American debut. Sometimes meditative, often humorous, and always probing, Pontiggia’s haunting characters linger and resound long after the book is done.

BASED ON THE HIT ANIME FILM! An unexplained series of suicides among skill users sends the Armed Detective Agency on a search for a man who may be connected. But when the same phenomenon descends upon Yokohama, they’ll have to fight for their lives if they want a chance to reach the truth and save the city from certain destruction!

Includes The Modern Ladies of Guanabacoa, Fabiola, In the Eye of the Hurricane and Broken Eggs.

James Whale was the most brilliant director of horror films Hollywood has ever seen, director of such classics as Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein (and indeed every horror film rated with four stars in Halliwell's Film Guide). But he was by no means a typical Hollywood product, both because he was English and because he was openly gay in the Hollywood of the 30s. Christopher Bram's moving and powerful novel portrays Whale in his last weeks of life in 1957, overwhelmed by images of his past, his working class childhood in Britain, Hollywood premieres in the 30s, friendships with Elsa Lanchester, Charles Laughton and Elizabeth Taylor. Consumed by the contrast between his past and his present obscurity, he conspires with his young gardener to provide his life with the dramatic ending it deserves.

Visual and performance artist Sandra de la Loza presents a wry commentary on the Chicano history of Los Angeles in this field guide to Downtown and East Los Angeles. Using the format of the photographic essay, she documents the exploits of the Pocho Research Society, an organization dedicated to commemorating sites in Los Angeles that are of importance to the Chicano community but that have been erased by urban development or neglect. Through the unauthorized acts of commemoration, the Pocho Research Society calls our attention to their absence from official narratives. The field guide also offers playful tours of the murals at Estrada Courts and the Fort No Moore Secret Museum, founded by the Pocho Research Society to preserve the history of the Fort Moore Pioneer Memorial (a history that includes accounts of the Lizard People, who lived in catacombs far beneath the monument). By drawing attention to these invisible monuments and lost histories, de la Loza asks her readers to consider the broader question of what constitutes a community's history.

A comprehensive examination of Chicano art in the early twentieth century, exploring the current tendency of experimentation and how the movement has shifted away from painting and political statements, and toward conceptual art, performance, film, photography, and media-based art; includes artist portfolios and a chronology of significant moments in Chicano history.

Poems.