Author: Wendy Shortman

In Culture is Our Weapon, Damian Platt and Patrick Neate provide an inside look into violent communities within Brazil, and the growing social movements that are helping the residents reclaim their culture.

The Ooligan Press at Portland State will be celebrating the release of the second edition of Classroom Publishing: A Practical Guide for Teachers. The first edition was released in 1992 and was co-authored by Laurie King and Dennis Stovall. Stovall later founded the Ooligan Press in 2001.

Suzanne Young was originally thinking about writing a novel on ninja cheerleaders. Instead, she came up with a story about spying cheerleaders that catch cheating boyfriends in the act.

If you watch enough Law and Order or Dexter, you know that serial killers usually have a pattern when it comes to choosing their victims. In the novel Victim Six, however, there’s no clear method to the madness, thus making the killer even more terrifying than your average serial murderer.

In Chris Bohjalian’s newest novel, Secrets of Eden, the author of 12 other thriller books adds to his repertoire with a book about hidden secrets and acts of faith.

In Raj Patel’s newest book, the author, activist and academic talks about why the economy is in such bad shape and what steps we can take to improve it.

What makes a planet a planet? In Alan Boyle’s new book The Case for Pluto: How a Little Planet Made a Big Difference, the author addresses the heated debate in the scientific world as to how scientists determine the status of unknown objects in the universe. Boyle makes the case for one of the most controversial planets, or whatever you’d like to call it.

“For 40 years, I’ve been a sportscaster, and I’ve never seen a team as good as this,” said Scott Lynn, author of the new book Thornridge, which is about a basketball team in an Illinois suburb.

From the history of ass mooning to literary references about flatulence, Daniel Nester’s How to be Inappropriate is a tantalizing and sidesplitting ode to things we don’t dare talk about in public. The book is partly memoir and partly other genres, written by a quirky teacher that enjoys the presence of impropriety in all aspects of life.

Imagine a combination of Twilight, Queen of the Damned and an episode of CSI, and you might get the gist of the Maker’s Song book series. This Twilight-on-steroids story features a vampire who can resist the urge to kill long enough to have sex with a human and, as a rock star, has enough charm to seduce a human FBI agent who is investigating him for a series of murders.

In his new book, Tinsel: A Search for America’s Christmas Present, Hank Stuever sheds light on the meaning of Christmas through the story of three different families right in the center of it all. It is the first book of its kind to give a journalistic perspective on the holiday where Americans spend $500 billion, even during a recession.