As they struggle to survive in a barbarous fantasy land, a mother and daughter attempt to shake off the bonds of female slavery and escape to freedom. A first novel.

A highly opinionated, vibrantly illustrated wine guide from one of the country’s most celebrated—and unorthodox—sommeliers and winemakers. In this entertaining, informative, and thoroughly unconventional wine guide, award-winning sommelier, winemaker, and wine educator Andre Mack presents readers with the 99 bottles that have most impacted his life. Instead of just pairing wines with foods, Mack pairs practical information with personal stories, offering up recommendations alongside reflections on being one of the only African-Americans to ever work at the top level of the American wine industry. Mack’s 99 bottles range from highly accessible commercial wines to the most rarefied Bordeaux on the wine list at The French Laundry, and each bottle offers readers something to learn about wine. This window into Mack’s life combines a maverick’s perspective on the wine industry with an insider’s advice on navigating wine lists, purchasing wine, and drinking more diverse and interesting selections at home. 99 Bottles is a one-of-a-kind exploration of wine culture today from a true trailblazer.

Wine is one of the most celebrated and appreciated commodities around the world. Wine writers and scientists tell us much about varieties of wines, winegrowing estates, the commercial value and the biochemistry of wine, but seldom address the cultural, social, and historical conditions through which wine is produced and represented. This path-breaking collection of essays by leading anthropologists looks not only at the product but also beyond this to disclose important social and cultural issues that inform the production and consumption of wine. The authors show that wine offers a window onto a variety of cultural, social, political and economic issues throughout the world. The global scope of these essays demonstrates the ways in which wine changes as an object of study, commodity and symbol in different geographical and cultural contexts. This book is unique in covering the latest ethnography, theoretical and ethnohistorical research on wine throughout the globe. Four central themes emerge in this collection: terroir; power and place; commodification and politics; and technology and nature. The essays in each section offer broad frameworks for looking at current research with wine at the core.

“Those who enjoy the work of such popular feminist speculative fiction writers as Joanna Russ and Ursula K. Le Guin will find much to admire here.” —Publishers Weekly Winner of the IAFA Crawford, and the James Tiptree, Jr., and the Aurora awards, Black Wine beckons readers into a stark and richly realized world similar to yet very different from our own, to explore the many ways a woman can be cut off from her own history. How does a woman survive, maintain her sense of self in such a place? An amnesiac slave girl struggles to learn about her past—and secure a future outside the oppressive society that binds her. A female adventurer confronts danger as she searches for her lost mother. A wife struggles within a marriage to a man she does not want. A world of female characters whose emotional journeys are intimately intertwined, where identity and history, language and perception, sexuality and oppression, unite them in their search for meaning, human connection, and ultimately, freedom. “The careful braiding of self, places, and times insidiously pulls you in.—Elisabeth Vonarburg, author of The Silent City and The Maerlande Chronicles “Like its title, Black Wine is rare and darkly glowing with iridescence. A taut, spare, wonderful creation.” —Edmonton Journal “A tantalizing, distinctive, sexy, and beautifully rendered first novel.” —Kirkus Reviews

The Quercy Blanc - named for its white stone - is a wild and sparsely populated area of rural France, squeezed between the great wine trading port of Bordeaux and the fizzing city of the south, Toulouse. It's home to the goose and the grape, sumptuous foiegras, the mysterious black truffle and world famous Agen prunes. There are miles of walnut groves and, most important of all, acres of vines. The author introduces us to some colourful local characters, freezes from the kneecaps down whilst braving the famous winter truffle market in Lalbenque, throws herself with Gallic gusto into numerous fetes and uncovers traces of the luminaries who once called this place home. From Champollion, who translated the Rosetta stone, to the illustrious Eleanor of Aquitaine, whose marriage to Henry Plantagenet brought the area to the English crown.

Winner of the 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize "Coleman is a poet whose angry and extravagant music, so far beyond baroque, has been making itself heard across the divide between West Coast and East, establishment and margins, slams and seminars, across the too-American rift among races and genders, for two decades. She excels in public performance...but her poems do not require her physical presence: they perform themselves."--Marilyn Hacker, from the jury's citation for the 1999 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize

From the author of Chocolat, an intoxicating fairy tale of alchemy and love where wine is the magic elixir. Jay Mackintosh is a 37-year-old has-been writer from London. Fourteen years have passed since his first novel, Jackapple Joe, won the Prix Goncourt. His only happiness comes from dreaming about the golden summers of his boyhood that he spent in the company of an eccentric vintner who was the inspiration of Jay's debut novel, but who one day mysteriously vanished. Under the strange effects of a bottle of Joe's '75 Special, Jay decides to purchase a derelict yet promising château in Lansquenet-sous-Tannes. There, a ghost from his past waits to confront him, and his new neighbour, the reclusive Marise - haunted, lovely and dangerous - hides a terrible secret behind her closed shutters. Between them, there seems to be a mysterious chemistry. Or could it be magic? Joanne Harris's previous novel, Chocolat, was both a dazzling literary success and a commercial triumph. Chocolat, the major motion picture directed by Lasse Hallström (The Cider House Rules), was released in December 2000, starring Juliette Binoche, Johnny Depp, Dame Judy Dench, Alfred Molina, and Lena Olin.