As you may have noticed last Friday, we've got a ton of books to give away to people who want them

Well, I've got one thing to add to the pot: New Kids On The Block: Five Brothers and a Million Sisters, the Authorized Biography.

It's been taking up space on a corner of my desk since October, and I'm more than willing to part with it, so long as it goes to a good home.

Yes folks, you can complete your collection of odd paraphernalia related to the premier boy band of the early '90s that became overshadowed by the success of a member's younger brother, then joined together with one of the premier boy bands of the mid '90s to helm a successful nostalgia tour in the early '00s.

...Yeah, those New Kids have had one hell of a ride.

In any case, I want this thing off of my desk, and we want to clear out space for more books. 

If you're interested in taking home a grab-bag of books ("bag" being a euphemistic term here, as our budget doesn't allow for us to be tossing away valuable bags, willy-nilly), send me an email giving me your name and the approximate time you plan on coming by to pick up your grab-pile.

Remember, our office address is 3280 E. Hemisphere Loop, just off Valencia Road between Country Club and Palo Verde Roads, and we're open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m.

Take our books. Please.

Folks, it's that time again: we've got too damn many books, and we want to share them with you, the loyal Tucson Weekly readership.

We've got somewhere in the neighborhood of 25 books taking up valuable shelf space at Weekly World Central, and we want to give them away to you.

Starting Monday (and don't worry, we'll make a post reminding you about this then, too), we'll be giving away books to people willing to brave the drive down to the Tucson Weekly Offices, at 3280 E. Hemisphere Loop, off of Valencia Road, between Palo Verde and Country Club Roads.

The only hitch is that I need you to email me your name and when you plan on coming down to pick up your books - that way, our lovely and charming front desk mistress will be able to let me know when you've arrived.

So please, come take our books off of our hands. Please.

Jade Beall, co-founder of Fed By Threads latest project celebrates the changes made to a mother's body after pregnancy. More than 50 mothers were photographed for the project. The book will also include written experiences of the photography subjects regarding their changing bodies.

Beall's project is already receiving a lot of well-deserved attention, having been featured on Huffington Post Live as well as on the Today Show.

To learn more about her project, or to contribute, head to A Beautiful Body Project — though be warned, the images there are not safe for work.

Everyone has stories—it's just that some are compelling enough to write a book about.

Susan Enholm, who taught in the LEARN (Literacy, Education and Resource Network) Program at Pima County Adult Probation, decided to self-publish a book about her students' life experiences titled A Snowball's Chance.

At Pima County Adult Probation, many of the students were high school dropouts or had felony records—or both. The LEARN program was a chance for those students to eventually earn a GED.

Enholm hoped that publishing these stories might help save other people ,who were also going through some of the same hard times. She took some of her students and ask them questions about their history of drug use, legal troubles and so on.

Enholm said that while most of the students were willing to use their real name, some wished to go by another name for privacy concerns.

"I wanted a mixed group and I wanted different ethnic backgrounds—female and male, different races," Enholm said. "I didn't get the mix as I would have if I had 12 (stories), but I couldn't keep going on because I didn't know what I was doing with this, so that's why I stopped at eight."

Enholm said that a lot of her students' problems came from parents who had engaged in drug use and other behaviors.

While some of the students went on to Pima Community College, not all have made that leap, for various reasons. In one case, Enholm heard back from a student that he didn't know how to go to college because no one in his family had ever gone before.

Ultimately, the students' futures are left in their hands.

"You try hard," Enholm says, "but in the end it's up to them."

Dana Buckley is an award-winning photographer from New York who has always been drawn to the desert. In her new book, Living Desert, Buckley explores the beauty of the desert of the Tucson area and parts of California through her photography. She features photographs of cacti, agaves, aloe and shrubs and much more.

Most of her photos were taken up close with a macro lens or a zoom lens using a Canon 5D Mark III during the fall and winter.

“It was perfect weather,” Buckley said.

The idea of humans being modeled after a greater creator, destined to move on to another spiritual plane isn’t exactly new. But, what if Earth is taken out of the picture? Well, not the idea of Earth, so much as the reality.

Carolyn Gervais, author of the new book I Dreamed I Was Human, started her spiritual journey young—really young.

“I was really little, like five years old, trying to find out how I got here and why I was here. It felt really complicated and chaotic and unsafe because there is just so much going on that a child doesn’t understand,” Gervais said.

She kept asking big questions but no one could answer in a way that satisfied her. They told her God didn’t want us to figure it out. That wasn’t quite good enough.

“I was determined for the rest of my life to search for those answers,” Gervais said, “And I did.”

When she became pregnant at 17, Gervais decided it was time to focus on finding answers. She read books—lots of books—eventually finding Eastern philosophy to be the best fit for her.

“I never took anything I read as complete truth because I realized through all my studies that we see things through our filters, through our perceptions, through our beliefs.”

During her research, Gervais would hold on to themes that she found in multiple sources, and meditate on them.

“What I realized after years is that none of it is real, but all of it is real to the five senses,” Gervais said. “What is creation? It’s not something we see, because whatever is created by the creating force—whatever you want to call that—is energy. Energy cannot die, it cannot decay, it cannot do anything like that except change the way it expresses, which means possibly going into another form. I realized that really, if that’s the case, then this is all an illusion that we keep imagining.”

That means Earth, the entire “reality.” From the trees to the Internet, everything.

“We are all aspects of that one soul that God created as a reflection of himself. And I’m not talking about religion here, I’m talking about spirituality as an energy. From that, we were given free will to create whatever we want to create. Whatever kind of life, world, whatever e wanted to create. As that one soul, we decided with our free will to create a physical world that we call real, but that can only be created in thought," Gervais said, adding "It’s only a dream of what’s real. It’s only a thought that we are envisioning as real. That’s what this life is all about."

So, if this isn’t real, what is?

“What I’ve been trying to do my whole life is see beyond that dream and see who I really am which is that energy,” Gervais said. “I wrote the book in order to express that we look at life and crate our life through our perceptions and our beliefs.

For more on Gervais’ meditations and visit her personal website or the book’s website. I Dreamed I Was Human is available for purchase through Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

Whether you're a hopeless romantic or a history buff, "Finding Frances...Love Letters from a Flight Lieutenant" by Catherine Harris, is sure to spark your interest.

Known as "English Cathy" to most, Harris described her first book as a "labor of love," inspired by her Uncle, Eric Hutchin, a flight lieutenant, who fell in love with 17-year-old Frances McKenzie during World War II.

Hutchin came to America during to train at Falcon Field in Mesa, Ariz., where he met McKenzie, according to Harris. After moving to Tucson in the 1980s, Harris said she thought it would be a good idea to meet McKenzie, having known of her since she was a little girl. Ten years ago, McKenzie gave Harris all of the love letters Hutchin had sent to her during the war.

"I couldn't just put them in a box," Harris said. "You know, I thought, well I should really write a book about this, because it was quite a story."

You might not remember Jonah Lehrer. After all, it's only been ten months or so since he was publicly discredited for recycling his own material, making up quotes and plagarizing others in the midst of a burst of fame as the young, smart guy who creates a strawman declaring that people think one way, when in fact they should really think another. It was a pretty bad situation, not really helped by Lehrer later lying to a Los Angeles magazine writer and taking $20,000 to speak in front of a foundation for journalists in which he bizarrely blamed his own superior intelligence for his downfall.

All the while, you'd hope that Lehrer would at least seem sorry (he doesn't) or have the good sense to disappear from writing for a living for awhile (he isn't).

So, Simon and Schuster have apparently purchased a new book by Lehrer, subtly titled The Book of Love. Daniel Engber of Slate saw the book proposal and it sounds like Lehrer's general pop-science bullshit, but hey, guess what? A significant section of the proposal has remarkable similarity to an essay written by someone else. Quelle surprise!:

There are moments in the proposal...where Lehrer’s language seems caught in a cycle of reappropriation and re-use. A chapter on the secret to having a happy marriage, for example, comes close to copying a recent essay on the same subject by Adam Gopnik, Lehrer’s one-time colleague at The New Yorker. Gopnik wrote:

In 1838, when Darwin was first thinking of marriage, he made an irresistible series of notes on the subject—a scientific-seeming list of marriage pros and cons. … In favor of marriage, he included the acquisition of a “constant companion and friend in old age” and, memorably and conclusively, decided that a wife would be “better than a dog, anyhow.”

Here’s Lehrer’s version, from the proposal:

In July 1838, Charles Darwin considered the possibility of marriage in his scientific notebook. His thoughts quickly took the shape of a list, a balance sheet of reasons to “marry” and “not marry.” The pros of wedlock were straightforward: Darwin cited the possibility of children (“if it please God”), the health benefits of attachment and the pleasure of having a “constant companion (& friend in old age).” A wife, he wrote, was probably “better than a dog anyhow.”

There are three other examples, and this is only ONE PASSAGE OF THE BOOK PROPOSAL. Lehrer seems to be a serial plagiarizer, needing some sort of intervention beyond simple public disgrace, but wouldn't Simon and Schuster Google every single line of the proposal looking to avoid this sort of embarrassment? Lehrer can't help himself (or won't), but that doesn't mean anyone should offer to pay him ever again without fully expecting the same result. There are plenty of smart people out there willing to pontificate in print, throwing together quotes from half-understood research studies without stooping to plagiarism. They might not be as well-known as Lehrer, but at least you might be able to believe for a few moments that a new author might have some integrity.

Send Kore Press your poetry! Your prose! Your fiction! Join 55 emerging writers whose careers were launched after publishing with Kore Press, and send in your manuscripts.

A prize of $1,000 and a chapbook publication is given annually by Kore Press. Kate Bernheimer, author of novels, stories, children's books, and essays, will be the judge for this Short Fiction Award. Tin House, author of The Complete Tales of Lucy Gold, calls Bernheimer "One of the living masters of the fairy tale."

Both the Open Submissions period and Short Fiction award deadlines have almost arrived. Please submit tonight by midnight. Kore's editors provide brief and thorough critiques, and each submission is treated with the utmost respect. Visit www.korepress.org for submissions guidelines and fees.

Local author Michael Frissore, from Oro Valley, has published a collection of strange short stories dating back to the '90s.

Puppet Shows is a collection of thirteen short stories which Frissore called his "babies," which he has written throughout his writing career. The oldest of the stories, "Dinner at Wither Port," was written 20 years ago while Frissore was still in college.

The story is about two brothers who inherited the fictional Wither Port Mental Clinic and are careless with the place and its patients. It tells of an annual honorary dinner held for a State Medical Board representative, in which the two brothers drink, one shoots clinic patients with a tranquilizer gun and the waiters at the dinner dress in ninja suits and speak offensive mock-Chinese.

Like "Dinner at Wither Port," the rest of the stories in the collection don't make much sense, yet they're funny and absurd enough to keep you hooked. Frissore said while some stories just came to him, it took him a while to find a direction for others while trying to limit the story's absurdity.

"It's somewhat surprising that I would have a limit to absurdity based on these stories," Frissore said, "but there is, you know, something of a limit there."

Despite Bradley Sands, author of Sorry I Ruined Your Orgy, calling the short story collection "absurdism at its best," Frissore said he doesn't think of himself as a philosopher. His sense of humor just happens to lend itself to absurdism, he added.

Frissore does however agree with absurdism, the philosophical belief that everything the universe is meaningless and irrational, in a sense.

"It's [the universe] not meaningless but it doesn't necessarily have to have the meaning that everyone kind of sees it as," Frissore said. "But certainly, irrational, I agree with."

A husband, father of two and full-time credentialing specialist at the University of Arizona Health Network, Frissore said his writing career has definitely slowed down. Because most of these stories were written before his children were born, most of the work he put in was in finding a publisher.

"I think every writer would love to be able to do it [be a writer] full-time but there's very few who can make that happen," Frissore said. "I would love to have more time to do it than I do but financially ... I need the nine to five job to kind of balance the writing career."

The book can be found in print for $8.99 and as an eBook for $6.99.