Soft Skull: Soft Skull Nonfiction Subscription 2009! by New Author

Here's what's on our 2009 nonfiction list:

China Underground by Zachary Mexico, who started studying Chinese at age fifteen and traveled to China for the first time at age sixteen. He has studied at Columbia University and Qinghua University in Beijing. He plays in the rock group The Octagon and lives in New York City's Chinatown.

An engaging firsthand account of a young American writer's encounter with the new China and the young people who are pursuing their future there, China Underground introduces young western readers to their Chinese counterparts, highlighting an unfamiliar side of China: today's varied youth cultures, which are both fascinating and under-exposed. Readers are introduced to a wannabe rock star from the desert of Xinjiang, trying to make it big in Shanghai; a disillusioned journalist; a budding screenwriter; a vagabond ladies' man; a straight-A student at China's best university; a Chinese mafia kingpin; a punk band trying their best to stay relevant; a prostitute; the world's most polluted city; Beijing's drug-fueled club scene, and many others.

Journey to the End of Islam by Michael Muhammad Knight, who is the author of The Taqwacores, Impossible Man, Blue-Eyed Devil, Osama Van Halen, and The Five Percenters: Islam, Hip-Hop, and the Gods of New York, and is a frequent speaker at colleges and academic conferences. His work has led to him being hailed as both the Jack Kerouac and Hunter S. Thompson of American Islam, and has simultaneously been censored, boycotted, confiscated, and threatened with legal action. Here, Knight visits holy sites in Pakistan, Syria, Egypt, and Ethiopia, engaging both the puritanical Islam promoted by Saudi globalization and the heretical strands of popular folk Islam: shrines, magic, music, and drugs. The conflict of “global” and “local” Islam speaks to Knight’s own experience approaching the Islamic world as a uniquely American Muslim with his own sources: the modern mythologies of the Nation of Islam and Five Percenters, as well as the arguments of Progressive Muslim thinkers for feminism and reform. Knight’s travels culminate at Islam’s spiritual center, the holy city of Mecca, where he performs the hajj required of every Muslim.

I Wouldn't Start from Here: The 21st Century and Where It All Went Wrong by Andrew Mueller, with an Introduction by Robert Young Pelton. Mueller reported on the Taliban’s takeover of Afghanistan, the lifting of the siege of Bihac, the handover of Hong Kong, the invasion of Iraq, the wartime rock’n’roll scene of Sarajevo, an Elvis Presley festival in Tupelo and Ukraine’s efforts to launch Chernobyl as a tourist destination. He has ridden the Cresta Run, driven the proverbial Road to Damascus, been given a guided tour of Lebanon by Hizbollah, patrolled Basra with the Welsh Guards, Kabul with the Royal Anglian Regiment, and played the country songwriters’ open-mic night at the Bluebird Cafe in Nashville. Born in Australia, he has been based in London for the last twenty years.

Drawing on first-hand experiences, I Wouldn't Start from Here shows that for the most part, people get along just fine and that extremist minority groups are the major culprits. Given the mire in which Mueller finds himself, this is a surprisingly sunny book that gives an entertaining and eye-opening tour of the world’s moral basements, influential panjandrums (Al Gore, Gerry Adams, Bono, Paddy Ashdown), warlords and revolutionaries, and a sprinkling of peacemakers and do-gooders. Mueller also manages to get shot at a couple of times, locked up once, and taken on a guided tour by one of the world’s most infamous terrorist organizations.

Open Letters To America by Kevin Powell: Legendary feminist Gloria Steinem asserts that "as a charismatic speaker, leader, and a very good writer, Kevin Powell has the courage ... to be fully human, and this will bring the deepest revolution of all."

Kevin Powell is an activist, writer, public speaker, hiphop aficionado and, most recently, a 2008 Democratic candidate for Congress in Brooklyn, New York. A product of extreme poverty, welfare, fatherlessness, and a single mother-led household, he is a native of Jersey City, New Jersey, educated at New Jersey's Rutgers University. He is also author of Someday We'll All Be Free (Soft Skull Press) and No Sleep Till Brooklyn.

Open Letters To America is Powell’s celebration of the sudden, mass political engagement of America's youth, of Americans in general; his thoughts in the aftermath of Obama's magical and historical presidential campaign; and his open acknowledgment that if 21st century America is going to be the great world democracy it promises to be, it will be Generations X and Y that make it so. While other books will focus upon the significance of this period in American history, few will come from the perspective of someone so engaged in the political and community process and popular culture on so many levels.

People Like Us: Images from the Middle East by Joris Luyendijk, 2006 awardee of the Journalist of the Year prize by De Journalist, selected from the top forty most influential international journalists by the NVJ (the Dutch Association of Journalists). A bestseller in Holland, People Like Us tells the story of Luyendijk’s five years as an extremely young correspondent in the Middle East. Fluent in Arabic, he spoke with stone throwers and terrorists, taxi drivers and professors, victims and aggressors, and all of their families. This chronicles first-hand experiences of dictatorship, occupation, terror, and war, and casts light on a number of crises, from the Iraq War to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, to underage orphan trash-collectors in Cairo.

All My Bones Shake by Robert Jensen, associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin School of Journalism, where he teaches courses in media law, ethics, and politics. Jensen writes for both the alternative and mainstream popular media, with opinion and analytic pieces on politics, power, and race appearing in papers across the country. He has appeared on-air at FOX, MSNBC, and CNN, and numerous community and commercial radio stations in Los Angeles, New York, Berkeley, and Houston. A life-long activist for women's rights, racial equality, and global justice, Jensen reveals in this book the emotional journey that brought him back to the church after an entire adulthood of religious indifference. Drawing on the Old and New Testaments, contemporary philosophy, common sense, personal intuition, and progressive politics, Jensen offers a full defense of his conclusion, holding its consistency up to the best of religious and secular teachings. Both political and spiritual, radical and universal, public and very personal, Jensen's warmhearted text is a passionate testament to the potential of religion to offer sanity and stability in the face of our culture's growing turmoil.

Hos, Hookers, Call-Girls, and Rent Boys: Sex Workers and Prostitutes writing on Life, Love, Money and Sex Edited by David Henry Sterry and R. J. Martin, Jr.

Sterry’s previous occupations include lawn care specialist, soda jerk, soccer coach, chicken fryer, industrial sex technician, “chicken,” actor, stand-up comedian, barker, limo driver, building inspector, telephone solicitation technician, book doctor, presentation doctor, conflict resolution specialist, and marriage counselor. He is the author of over 10 books, has made over 300 media appearances, and was a finalist for the Henry Miller Award, which recognizes outstanding sex scenes in contemporary fiction.

Martin, has been a barker at San Francisco’s infamous Condor nightclub—the first venue in the United States to feature topless, and later, bottomless entertainment—which led to employment in North Beach sex clubs as a barker, panderer, thief, con artist, and business manager for a few independent businesswomen; a 20-year battle with heroin addiction, and then, facing a lengthy prison sentence, Martin entered treatment in 1996 and turned his life around. In 2004, the Mayor of San Francisco presented Mr. Martin with a Certificate of Honor, recognizing the impact his work has had on the City. That same year, Martin also graduated San Francisco State University with a degree in English.

This anthology was inspired initially by a weekly writers' workshop for participants who, as Sterry explains, "had one thing in common: They'd all sold sex for money." Discovering an overwhelming response to the workshop, Sterry and his wife extended their reach to sex workers, street hustlers, PhDs, some preferring anonymity and others preferring the public to see them. Contributors include art-porn priestess Annie Sprinkle, who provides "40 Reasons Why Whores Are My Heroes;" Tracy Quan, author of Diary of a Manhattan Call Girl; and young women participating in the inaugural National Summit of Commercially Sexually Exploited Youth. An antidote to the sensationalism of recent political scandals and television shows like “Secret Diary of a Call Girl,” this offers an honest, stunning, and, at times, painful picture of modern sex work in America.

Live Nude Elf by Reverend Jen—who has a B.F.A. in painting from the School of Visual Arts in NYC, and has since experienced no financial success whatsoever—is a performer, painter, playwright, columnist, underground movie star, ASS Magazine founder, Troll Museum curator, and Patron Saint of the Uncool. Voted Village Voice’s Best Do-It-Yourself "Go Girl” in 2002, she’s had her handmade books and illustrated books displayed in The Whitney Museum of American Art, The Warhol Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art Library. The Rev. lives in New York City’s Lower East Side with her Chihuahua, Reverend Jen Junior, a dog-clothes model. Live Nude Elf chronicles her two-year career as a thirtysomething sex columnist for nerve.com; a sort of elvish-speaking, Lower East Side version of Sex and the City's Carrie Bradshaw. The columns each detail a different "sexperiment" that ranges from harrowing (working as a live nude girl at "Wiggles") to embarrassing (attending fellatio school) to transcendent (reaching a mystical state through tantric sex). Along the way there is transvestitism, female ejaculation, opium smoking, and heartbreak.

Watching the Door: Drinking Up, Getting Down, and Cheating Death in 1970s Belfast by Kevin Myers, a writer, broadcaster and novelist. In the 1980s, he covered the Lebanese Civil War, and in the 1990s, the Bosnian War. He is now a columnist on the Irish Independent. Part unofficial history, part personal memoir, Watching The Door is raw, provocative, and, darkly funny, offering an unbridled account of sex, death, and violence in Northern Ireland by one of its most dynamic witnesses.

And the bonus (oh yes, there’s always a bonus with Soft Skull):
Impossible Man by Michael Muhammad Knight, author of Blue-Eyed Devil, The Taqwacores, and the forthcoming Osama Van Halen, The Five Percenters: Islam, Hip-Hop, and the Gods of New York, and Journey to the End of Islam, an account of international pilgrimage. His works have been censored, boycotted, confiscated, and threatened with legal action.