Time: Summer, 1990. Place: Yucca Valley, CA. Scott Faraday, sixteen, is fun loving, in a small town rock band, and out - but only to a select few. Isolated in his high desert town Scott doesn't know anyone else who's gay. When Ryan St. Charles, a troubled seventeen-year old, moves to town, everything changes. Ryan is brash and hot headed, the complete opposite of Scott's demeanor. In fact, Ryan has just severed a long-term relationship with a man, but still considers himself straight. As Scott and Ryan's unusual friendship develops, Scott begins to suspect Ryan might be covering up that he's gay. When Scott comes out to Ryan, their friendship is transmuted and it becomes Scott's first intimate relationship. Tightly focused on these two characters, Desert Sons follows the ups and downs of a young adult gay relationship. Filled with first-time wonder, teenage angst and the swirl of emotions that can only be expressed by youth, readers are pulled headlong into a highly charged drama.

In Desert Daughters, Desert Sons, professor Rachel Wheeler argues that a new reading of the texts of the Christian desert tradition is needed to present the (often) anonymous women who inhabit the texts. Though these women may have been included by storytellers to provide a foil to the exemplary men in the stories' foreground, Wheeler demonstrates how women's persistence in places they were not welcome witnesses to truths about where wisdom may be sought and found. In this book, Wheeler allows these women's stories to critique the desert impulse that can create a spiritual life devoid of social relationships and responsibility.

Desert Sons by Rebecca York\Ann Voss Peterson\Patricia Rosemoor released on Apr 12, 2005 is available now for purchase.

Traditional Indian pāṇḍitya (scholarship) has a long and distinguished history but is now practically extinct. Its decline is remarkably recent—traditional pāṇḍitya flourished as recently as 150 years ago. The decline is also paradoxical, having occurred precipitously following a broad and remarkable flowering of the tradition between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries. The important questions this decline poses are the subject of much ongoing work. The intellectual history of the period is still under construction, and the present book represents a major contribution to the project. A notable impediment has been the lack of critical biographies of significant thinkers in this tradition. The importance of personal and social context for reconstructing intellectual histories is widely understood. In the classical Indian intellectual tradition, however, authors systematically exclude such context, making intellectual biography something of a rarity—very rare in English and sparse even in the regional languages. This book contains translations from the original Kannaḍa of the biographies of Garaḷapurī Śāstri, Śrīkaṇṭha Śāstri, and Kuṇigala Rāmaśāstri of nineteenth-century Mysore, all representing the highest echelons of traditional pāṇḍitya at this critical period of transition. Their fields are literature, grammar, and logic, respectively. The biographies focus on the personal lives of these scholars and their many contexts. These biographies are almost contemporaneous accounts, reflecting firsthand knowledge. The translations are accompanied by copious footnotes as well as appendices drawn from the relevant primary sources.

Alternating poems compare and contrast the conflicted feelings of Ishmael, son of the Biblical patriarch Abraham, and Sam, a teenager in New York City, as they try to come to terms with being abandoned by their fathers and with the love they feel for their younger stepbrothers.

In the early 1830s, after decades of relative peace, northern Mexicans and the Indians whom they called "the barbarians" descended into a terrifying cycle of violence. For the next fifteen years, owing in part to changes unleashed by American expansion, Indian warriors launched devastating attacks across ten Mexican states. Raids and counter-raids claimed thousands of lives, ruined much of northern Mexico's economy, depopulated its countryside, and left man-made "deserts" in place of thriving settlements. Just as important, this vast interethnic war informed and emboldened U.S. arguments in favor of seizing Mexican territory while leaving northern Mexicans too divided, exhausted, and distracted to resist the American invasion and subsequent occupation. Exploring Mexican, American, and Indian sources ranging from diplomatic correspondence and congressional debates to captivity narratives and plains Indians' pictorial calendars, "War of a Thousand Deserts" recovers the surprising and previously unrecognized ways in which economic, cultural, and political developments within native communities affected nineteenth-century nation-states. In the process this ambitious book offers a rich and often harrowing new narrative of the era when the United States seized half of Mexico's national territory.