The Book We're Talking About This Week

Monday, May 7, 2012 The Book We're Talking About This Week "In One Person" by John Irving Simon & Schuster, $28.00 Publishes on May 8, 2012 What is it about? At age 13, timid and naive Billy realizes that he develops crushes "on the wrong people:" his stepfather and his tall, masculine librarian, Miss Frost are among them. His infatuations and subsequent isolation don't subside as he gets older and eventually travels to Vienna and New York, where he dates a much older male poet while working to become a fiction writer. While the protagonist in this book faces his bisexuality with apprehension, the language is far from meek -- Irving's token sturdiness adds an interesting new perspective to the topic of gender. Why are we talking about it? With all of the recent talk about chick lit and the ways in which books are marketed based on the author's gender, we found it intriguing that this male literary author has released a novel with a less-than-serious cover: The photo is akin to a steamy romance paperback, and the text is in a shiny purple script. The epigraph reeled us in, too. Appropriately, it's from Shakespeare, who also used language to re-imagine gender roles: "Thus play I, in one person, many people/ And none contented." Who wrote it? John Irving is the author of such bestselling books as "A Prayer For Owen Meany," "The World According to Garp" and "The Cider House Rules," for which he won an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. Who will read it? Click here to read the rest of this article More in HuffPost Books The 11 Most Awesome Supervillain Superpowers PHOTOS: The Faces Behind Your Favorite Comic Books PHOTOS: Behind The Scenes Of 'Animal House' PHOTOS: Hidden Gardens Of Paris WATCH: 'SNL' Takes On 'Fifty Shades Grey' BLOG POSTS Matt Greenfield: Is It Time to Stop Using the Word 'Textbook'? Charging $162 for a textbook may or may not be morally acceptable, but I am pretty confident that it will soon cease to be commercially sustainable. Lev Raphael: S**t People Say to Writers Have you been published? What do you write? Oh. Do you have, like, a real job? Ernest Callenbach: Epistle to the Ecotopians Since I wrote Ecotopia, I have become less confident of humans' political ability to act on commonsense, shared values. Our era has become one of spectacular polarization, with folly multiplying on every hand. Mike Lux: Romneynomics Former Romney partner in Bain Capital -- Edward Conard -- is out with a new book on economics. Conard believes that growing concentration of wealth is not just a good thing, but a fantastically great thing. The only problem our economy has, he suggests, is that we need a lot more of it. Ellen Kanner: Meatless Monday: Ripe Delights For Jonathan Lovekin, ripe is "the jewel-like color and light reflecting off a golden caramelized quince. For Paulette Phlipot, it's "the teensy little hairs on a raspberry." Lovekin and Phlipot, both food photographers, celebrate the physical beauty of produce in their new books -- different books that share the same title: Ripe.

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