The Dark Wet is the first collection of short stories by Jess Huon. Rich, lyrical and deeply felt, it explores the struggle towards a sense of self and belonging, expressed in three sequences of stories: that of Jed Harp, his lover Danny Hess, and his poet sister Alexandra; of Bell and Oliver, a couple moving between Melbourne and San Francisco; and of a young woman confronting religion and sex in a Christian community in India. Drawing on a rich range of settings, from the lush Top End of Australia, to the mountains of India, and vibrant urban centres, The Dark Wet is a brutally honest portrayal of lives grasping at fluidity and transgression, and the possibility of redemption and change.

In such stunning novels of crime and character as Die Upon a Kiss, Sold Down the River, and A Free Man of Color, Benjamin January tracked down killers through the sensuous, atmospheric, dangerously beautiful world of Old New Orleans. Now, in this new novel by bestselling author Barbara Hambly, he follows a trail of murder from illicit back alleys to glittering mansions to a dark place where the oldest and deadliest secrets lie buried . . . Wet Grave It’s 1835 and the relentless glare of the late July sun has slowed New Orleans to a standstill. When Hesione LeGros--once a corsair’s jeweled mistress, now a raddled hag--is found slashed to death in a shanty on the fringe of New Orleans’s most lawless quarter, there are few to care. But one of them is Benjamin January, musician and teacher. He well recalls her blazing ebony beauty when she appeared, exquisitely gowned and handy with a stiletto, at a demimonde banquet years ago. Who would want to kill this woman now--Hessy, they said, would turn a trick for a bottle of rum--had some quarrelsome “customer” decided to do away with her? Or could it be one of the sexual predators who roamed the dark and seedy streets? Or--as Benjamin comes to suspect--was her killer someone she knew, someone whose careful search of her shack suggests a cold-blooded crime? Someone whose boot left a chillingly distinctive print . . . His inquiries at taverns, markets, and slave dances reveal little about “Hellfire Hessy” since her glory days in Barataria Bay, once the lair of gentlemen pirates. Then the murder is swept from his mind by the delivery of a crate filled with contraband rifles--and yet another telltale boot print left by its claimant. When a murder swiftly follows, Ben and Rose Vitrac, the woman he loves, fear the workings of a serpentine mind and a treacherous plot: one only they can hope to thwart in time. All too soon they are fugitives of color in the stormy bayous and marshes of slave-stealer country, headed for smugglers’ haunts and sinister plantations, where one false step could be their last toward a...Wet Grave.

In this hilarious tale of blame, compassion, and forgiveness, a very embarrassed bear is reminded that accidents can happen--but with the support of good friends, life goes on. Reuben the bear's got donuts for everyone in his scout troop, but his friends are all staring at something else: there's a wet spot on Reuben's pants, and it's in a specific area. "WHO WET MY PANTS?" he shouts, and a blame game starts. His buddies try to reassure him there was no crime. Just an accident. It could happen to anyone! But as all the clues begin to point in Reuben's own direction as the culprit, Reuben must come to terms with the truth. Who Wet My Pants? isn't a potty-training book. It's a witty and wise story about embarrassment and anger, empathy and acceptance, and ultimately...forgiveness.

Taking aim at the mostly male bastion of art theory and criticism, Mira Schor brings a maverick perspective and provocative voice to the issues of contemporary painting, gender representation, and feminist art. Writing from her dual perspective of a practicing painter and art critic, Schor's writing has been widely read over the past fifteen years in Artforum, Art Journal, Heresies, and M/E/A/N/I/N/G, a journal she coedited. Collected here, these essays challenge established hierarchies of the art world of the 1980s and 1990s and document the intellectual and artistic development that have marked Schor's own progress as a critic. Bridging the gap between art practice, artwork, and critical theory, Wet includes some of Schor's most influential essays that have made a significant contribution to debates over essentialism. Articles range from discussions of contemporary women artists Ida Applebroog, Mary Kelly, and the Guerrilla Girls, to "Figure/Ground," an examination of utopian modernism's fear of the "goo" of painting and femininity. From the provocative "Representations of the Penis," which suggests novel readings of familiar images of masculinity and introduces new ones, to "Appropriated Sexuality," a trenchant analysis of David Salle's depiction of women, Wet is a fascinating and informative collection. Complemented by over twenty illustrations, the essays in Wet reveal Schor's remarkable ability to see and to make others see art in a radically new light.

Poetry. LGBT Studies. Latino/Latina Studies. "Lucas de Lima's stunning book affected me so profoundly at all the stages of reading it, encountering it before it was a book and afterwards, when it was. In the work of this extraordinary writer, the fragment is not an activity of form. It's an activity of evisceration." Bhanu Kapil "These poems lurch from the murky waters of our collective unconscious and side-swipe us with a lyric invocation of the dark forces of... what? Nature? History? The alien life- force that drives planetary evolution? A primal being raises itself from the swamp of human consciousness, animated by the archaic and archetypal Sobek, the Egyptian god in crocodile form. The two voices that alternate in this narrative of trauma the quotidian voice of the poet and a ritual voice of invocation queer the story in the most profound way. Together with de Lima we call forth the god who will transform the narrative. As queers, we are the incarnation of countless shamans, medicine men, magicians and priests. The poet places himself in this tradition through his invocation." AA Bronson"