The stated purpose of this cookbook is to show people how to cook good meals on a budget, but the title is misleading. Food blogger turned author Amy McCoy, head of the Rhode Island Slow Food Network, advises her readers to buy humanely raised meat and then exhorts them to "always be on the lookout for 99 cents/lb. chicken"-impossible; free-range chicken is never that cheap.

There's lots to love in the latest gleeful offering from the pen of BUSTs genius cartoonist-in-residence Esther Pearl Watson. Purportedly based on a real teenager's 1989 diary found in a Las Vegas truck-stop restroom, Watson's comic strip, Unlovable, narrates the exploits of hapless high-schooler Tammy Pierce as she navigates the glories and humiliations of small-town adolescence with unbeatably clueless bravado.

The narrative of this wistful English love story jumps back and forth in time between the mid-20th century and the present day, alternating between the perspectives of the two main protagonists, Lexie and Elina.

Nothing is sweeter than desire. All other delights are second. These lines, written by one of Sappho's admirers, are quoted by Leila J. Rupp in the beginning of her fascinating new book about the history of same-sex female attraction.

Neuroses and dark desires flood A Friend of the Family, Lauren Grodstein's story of a man's midlife crisis and the wreckage that follows.