Julian Pines Abbey. From 1965-2000, women come and stay or come and go, in a quiet experiment to remake religious and communal life. No tradition is safe from revision - not the tradition that says God is male, or that women can't be priests, or that nuns must be celibate.

With a vision both generous and uncompromising, And Then They Were Nuns tells the story of the women who, as Sister Anne says, come for all the wrong reasons and - if they stay - stumble on good ones, while they struggle (sometimes hilariously) with love, sex, community, snakes, neighbors, outhouses, poverty, goats, sanity, sobriety, sisterhood, compost, and the life of the spirit.

The author, Susan J. Leonardi, followed 16 years of Catholic education, (including time spent as a postulant in a California convent that was, she emphasizes, nothing like Julian Pines Abbey), with eight years of teaching in Catholic high schools. She currently teaches literature and writing at the University of Maryland and is the author of two works of non-fiction, Dangerous by Degrees and The Diva's Mouth (with Rebecca A. Pope).

Take the trip of a lifetime with Carline, a home economist and woman-of-size, Tucker, a bus driver, and Mel, a retiree, as they journey from Massachusetts to Texas to unload an old city bus. In the process, these friends also leave behind their preconceived notions about one other, drop their inhibitions and become fully who they were meant to be.

Read an excerpt from Venus of Chalk.

Read what others said about Susan Stinson and Venus of Chalk:

"I am an enormous fan of Susan Stinson's work, and, as a fan, consider it my duty to help more and more people know about its wonders: I can think of no-one who writes with more love, passion, and precision about the pleasures of the body and the pleasures of the soul, and that nebulous (often neglected) intersection of body and soul. She writes extraordinary love stories, with intelligence and generosity and a wild imagination."

Elizabeth McCracken, author The Giant's House (National Book Award finalist)

Alice Sebold, author The Lovely Bones

Alison Smith, author Name All the Animals

Marilyn Wann, author FAT!SO

Sondra Solovay, Esq., author, Tipping the Scales of Justice: Fighting Weight-Based Discrimination

Alison Bechdel, creator Dykes To Watch Out For

Lesléa Newman, author Heather Has Two Mommies

From National Public Radio ("a charming, authentic re-creation of bawdy life in Elizabethan London") to Gay Community News ("a celebration of rebellious womanhood"), the critics -- and readers--agree that Moll is a winner. If you haven't read this delightful lesbian romp, don't miss it!

Jana Williams' debut novel is a lively foray into the world of women recruits at the U.S. Navy bootcamp outside of Baltimore in the early 1970s. Scuttlebutt — military slang for gossip or news..."deftly bypasses all that is clich‚ about 'baby boots' and captures instead the astonishingly deep emotional demands of their experience." (Library Journal)

"Take a wry, reflective 17-year-old, add the Sex Pistols, Sisterhood Is Powerful and a generous handful of safety pins, and you'll have Sprecher's delightful portrait of the artist as a young, punk lesbian." (Publishers Weekly). On the wrong side of political correctness, this is a "down-to-earth love story" by an author with a startingly sweet,unique voice." (Kirkus)

While Alice works hard to maintain the split between the two halves of her life, Phoebe appears in the fissure. She has stories she wants to tell, part of her desire to become human, and needs Alice to write them down. Alice herself is an inveterate storyteller. And the tales are wonderful: about Jo-Jo, the drag queen with a thousand faces; Blanche, the Southern millworker who is attracted and terrified by interracial love; and Carla, the artist who creates universes in small boxes.

Alice and Phoebe are on opposite sides of a revolving circle, yin and yang slowly turning as Phoebe descends to earth and Alice flies high enough to hear the music of the spheres. As their stories increasingly intertwine, one takes up where the other leaves off.

These three, along with a tantalizing array of minor characters, are thrown together in San Francisco, each in search of someone to tell his or her--or in the case of Sydney, his and her--secrets to. When fate gathers them at the home of Ella Weissman, a feminist therapist whose house is her significant other, the intertwined tale of their loves, fears, and confusions sinuously unfolds.

Caroline is continually shocked by exposure to her own "tales of the city." Sydney feels compelled, once and for all, to pick a gender. Patti wants to be sexually attractive without giving in to everyone else's desire...and its negative effects.

Written as a mixture of chilling comedy and neogothic, Bruised Fruit is Anna Livia's fifth novel. Her two short story collections, Incidents Invo lving Mirth and Incidents Involving Warmth, have been Lammy finalists. The author lives in Berkeley, California with her lover and their soon-to-be -born twins.

These two women, thrown together by chance, torn apart by the destruction in wartime Europe, struggle to find each other again across a chaotic continent. The soldier is as fearless with her heart as with her ideals; the Polish refugee, who has survived years of desperation and danger, has the cunning of a wolf.

In their attempts to reunite they are hindered, helped, and loved by many women. There's Nell Tulliver, international war correspondent--hard-boiled, soft-hearted, and well-connected; Captain Corinne West, a competent and proper officer, unduly influenced by love as she bends military rules; and Sibylle Benard, a French prostitute and German collaborator--a woman who got by as best she could by relying on the available men--now falling in love with a woman.

The Wolf Ticket is a first novel of great skill and imagination, tautly written and powerful.

Drawing on her experience as an adult literacy tutor, Judith Frank's first novel traces the difficult and sometimes hilarious connection between two butches of different generations - a middle-class, thirty-something adult literacy teacher and her older, working-class student. With a disparate group of adult learners as the backdrop, Frank examines, with warmth and wit, the relationship between education and gender, class, and racial identity.

With Crybaby Butch, Judith Frank creates a deeply human, bravely unsentimental story while at the same time investigating the meaning of butch identity as it reinvents itself from one generation to the next. ~ Carol Anshaw

Fearless and unflinching, Crybaby Butch rigorously explores butch/femme dynamics over two generations. Judy Frank's debut novel is searing and memorable. ~ Claire Messud

Judith Frank is a winner of the Astraea Foundation's Emerging Lesbian Writer's Fund prize in fiction. A professor of English at Amherst College, she lives and writes in western Massachusetts. For more information on Judy Frank, check out her website.

With Falling to Earth, Elizabeth Brownrigg's first novel.

The sinews and bones of wide-flung Celtic civilizations of Europe were casualties of that war, a holocaust that modern scholars call the Inquisition, that feminist scholars name the Burning Times - a war waged primarily against women, whose positions in matrilineal or matriarchal and historically polytheistic cultures opposed - by their existence - the strictly hierarchical, unabashedly sexist construct of the conquering Roman Catholic Church.

Where are their stories, the people of the Burning Times? Author Jess Wells, in her new novel, The Mandrake Broom, gives voice to some of them: healers, wise women, bold men, people of conscience and true science who lived ordinary or extraordinary lives, who died nobly or ignonimously, slaughtered by armies of god or felled by the plagues resulting from the Churchs vast ignorance and disastrous pogroms to rid Europe of witches, their consorts, and their familiars the cats.