Pop-up Pride and Prejudice

Random House has announced a paperback edition of its annotated version of Jane Austen's classic novel Pride and Prejudice. There have been explicated versions before, but perhaps none so exhaustive as this one. Linda Bree, writing for the Jane Austen Society of North America, called the hardcover "'The Most Annotated Pride and Prejudice' ever likely to be available. David Shapard’s edition presents a parallel text, with Austen’s novel on the left-hand page and Shapard’s annotations on the right—and often the notes come close to outpacing in length the novel page to which they apply." (See the full review here.)

You can read an excerpt here. Or listen to editor David Shapard in a recent appearance on National Public Radio.

Writers@Work

The University of Minnesota's Creative Writing Program is holding a week-long celebration of its 10th anniversary. Events (listed below) will include panel discussions, reading, an arts round table, and, of course, a party. All events are free and open to the public. Call 612/625-6366 for more information about any event.

Tuesday, April 10, 2007
Alternatives to Teaching, Post-MFA
12:30 pm Panel, 207A Lind Hall

Join MFA alumni who have focused on careers in arts administration, development, radio, magazine publishing and more!
Panelists: Wendy Fernstrum (Minnesota Center for the Book Arts), Kate Freeborn (New Moon Magazine for Girls), and Rob McGinley-Myers (Writer's Almanac)

Thursday, April 12, 2007
First Books
2:00 pm Panel, Arthur Upson Room Walter Library
Newly published authors and editors discuss the experience of publishing a first book, from the submission process to marketing and publicity.
Panelists: Alex Lemon, author of Mosquito (Tin House, 2006); Lauren Fox, author of Still Life With Husband (Random House, 2007); Laurie Lindeen, author of Petal Pusher (Simon and Schuster, 2007); Chris Fishbach, Managing Editor of Coffee House Press; Emily Cook, Publicity and Marketing Director at Milkweed Editions.

Thursday, April 12, 2007
Teaching After the MFA
4:00 pm Panel, Arthur Upson Room, Walter Library
Join MFA alumni to discuss landing the post-MFA teaching job, faculty life, etc.
Panelists: Alex Lemon (Macalester College, Visiting Professor), Brian Malloy (Emerson College, Lecturer), Shannon Olson (St. Cloud State University, Assistant Professor), and Michael Seward (MCTC, Instructor).

Friday, April 13, 2007
Art in the Community
4:00 pm Panel, Arthur Upson Room, Walter Library
Roundtable discussion with arts Chairs at the University of Minnesota and the Twin Cities community. What effect can artists have on community on and off campus? Can the arts make a difference? What does it mean to earn an artistic degree?

Celebration and Reading
7:00 pm, 4th Floor, Coffman Union
Please join the Creative Writing Program as we celebrate our 10-year 7:00 pm Celebration and reading at the Campus Club West Wing, Fourth Floor, Coffman Memorial Union.We will announce the Michael Dennis Browne Fellowship. Raffles, give-a-ways, readings, and more.

To Nippon and Beyond

Nominees for the 2007 Hugo Awards, honoring sci-fi's best, have been announced. To find out the winners, though, you have to go to Yokohama, site of this year's 65th World Science Fiction Convention, popularly known (if sci-fi fans can be said to be popular) as WorldCon.

Let the (March) Madness End

I haven't written about the Morning News' Tournament of Books since it was announced. Truth to tell, I haven't read most of the books competing. But as the brackets dwindle down to the finals today, there's some fun snarking worth a mention.

Yesterday's match-up was Gary Shteyngart's postSoviet farce Absurdistan and the one novel on the list which I have read, Kate Atkinson's Edinburgh picaresque crime novel One Good Turn. I'll spoil it for you and say that the judge, the beautifully named Rosencrans Baldwin, hated Baldwin's novel, calling it "ludicrous." He also hated Absurdistan ("The last time I threw a book that hard, it was Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. I was in a crappy motel room in Paris, and I tried to throw it out the window from the bed (the window was closed)."), but he still gave it the win.

The real fun, though, was in the commentary "from the booth." John Warner said it better than I could when he wrote, "Any detective novel is going to have more than its share of coincidences. In the architecture of the story, they aren’t coincidences, but merely events that haven’t yet been revealed to the reader. Perhaps the reveal is not always as well-timed or artful as one would wish, but it seems unfair to fault a detective novel for being a detective novel."

So Absurdistan passes on to the final match, against Cormac McCarthy's Oprah-chosen, post-apocalyptic father/son novel The Road. All sixteen of the judges plus a special guest weigh in for the decision. I won't tell you how it comes out. You'll have to read it for yourself.

Murakami Takes the Prize

Haruki Murakami's collection of short stories Blind Willow, Sleeping Woman has won this year's Kiriyama Book Prize for fiction. The $30,000 prize is given annually "to recognize outstanding books about the Pacific Rim and South Asia." While I doubt Murakami needs the money, anything that brings attention to this great writer is OK by me. "Blind Willow" brings together twenty-four of Murakami's short stories from the past two decades. Most of the stories are not available elsewhere in English.

And if you've already a Murakami fan, his next novel After Dark comes out on May 8.

The winner of the Kiriyama for nonfiction is Three Cups of Tea : One Man's Mission to Promote Peace -- One School at a Time by Greg Mortensen. It tells the story of a mountain climber who repays the hospitality of a Pakistani village by returning to build and run schools for girls.

On The Road Again

You can't pin that Oprah down. On the heels of Sidney Poitier's "spiritual autobiography" The Measure of a Man, daytime's queen has chosen something completely different for her next book club selection: Cormac McCarthy's postapocalyptic novel The Road.

Of the reclusive novelist's latest outing, Powells.com said, "McCarthy takes such B-movie plot devices as an apocalyptic future, cannibalism, and scenes that could have been cut straight from Night of the Living Dead or The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to craft an existential moral debate about what it means to be alive in a dead world. ...The Road, like many of McCarthy's novels, features homeless males on the move. Only instead of horses, the unnamed father and son have an old grocery cart with one wobbly wheel, loaded with canned goods and dirty blankets. And their journey makes All the Pretty Horses look like a trip to Club Med."

Who knew Oprah's viewers were such survivalists? Next up, Martha Stewart visits Oprah to talk about making a fallout shelter out of an old bathtub, origami paper, and Meyer lemons. Stay tuned.

Harry Three Ways

When it was first announced, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows had no cover, just an ugly, ugly black placeholder. Perhaps that was just a ploy so that today Scholastic could trumpet the actual cover and get fans all riled up trying to decode its hidden meanings. (The full cover, front and back, is below.) Why is the sky orange? Who is the skeleton man reaching for our hero? Why is this all apparently taking place on the stage of a slightly bedraggled Roman amphitheatre? (Wait, I'm the only one asking that last question.)



It's a mystery, and one sure to get the Potter forums buzzing. And whatever my reservations about the US cover, I'll say this for it: it's better than the UK version (or more correctly the anywhere-other-than-the-US version) by a long shot.



Holy cow.

And to remind you: You can get your copy of HP&tDH right away on July 21. We're taking advance orders for the seventh and final Harry Potter title. Our price is $20.99, down from the list price of $34.95. Stop in today and reserve your copy.--David E

UPDATE: A co-worker pointed me towards the non-US "adult" version of the latest Harry Potter opus. It's not bawdy, it's just supposed to be less juvenile than the other cover, more appropriate for reading on the bus, I guess.

Moomin Madness

I am not a whimsical person. So when I saw the headline for Jeff Vandermeer's column on comic books, I almost passed it by. Until, that is, I saw that entrancing word: "Moomin."

For those of you who grew up benighted and bereft, I'll explain here that the Moomins are the creation of Finnish author Tove Jannson. They are plump, white, happy trolls, inhabitants of Moominvalley along with friends including Snufkin (my personal favorite), Little My, and the Snork Maiden. They're utterly charming. They face all manner of trials (not least comet, flood and storm), but never lose sight of the happiness of just being together. Yeah, they sound treacly and awful, but I promise you they're not.

But to return our story... In addition to the nine Moomin novels, Tove Jannson also wrote and drew a Moomin comic strip in the mid-fifties. Some of these comics are now collected in Moomin: The Complete Tove Jansson Comic Strip - Book One, the first of an anticipated five-volume set of the works. If you like the spare line drawings in the books, you'll love the comic strips.

And if anyone's interested, I'll show you my Moomin mug and Moomin pencil box, souvenirs of a long-ago trip to Japan, where they know good cartoons and keep the Moomin flame alive.--David E

Mouse (Back) in the House

When last we saw Michael "Mouse" Tolliver, in Sure of You, the sixth novel of Armistead Maupin's beloved Tales of the City series of novels, he was living with HIV. But lest anyone worry, Maupin is happy to reassure everyone that Michael Tolliver lives. That's also the title of his latest novel, which he insists is not a seventh TotC book, although reports are that characters from the earlier novels do make their appearances in this book as well.

Michael Tolliver Lives will be released on June 1. Publishers Weekly gives the forthcoming book a rave, saying "Maupin introduces a dazzling variety of real-life reference points, but the story belongs to Mouse, whose chartings of the transgressive, multigendered sex trends of San Francisco are every bit as lovable as Mouse's original wet jockey shorts contest in the very first Tales, back in 1978."

I, for one, can't wait for another installment.--David E

Prose, Perfected

Some days I don't know what I'm going to post here. Other days, there's something so good I wouldn't dare ignore it. Today is one of the latter kind of days. The Guardian's book page has posted a podcast, of an interview with James Salter. (The paper's been big on Salter this year: they've posted an original short story by Salter, as well as Richard Ford's love letter of an article on the man himself. It begins "It is an article of faith among readers of fiction that James Salter writes American sentences better than anybody writing today.")

I've been meaning to post something about James Salter for a while now. Not only did he write one of my favorite books (Light Years), but I'm reading There & Then, a collection of his travel writings. OK, I'll admit I've been a little envious of all the time he seems have have spent swanning around the south of France or skiing in Aspen. But he's still a great writer. To wit, this passage from There & Then:

There was a women I knew who used to ski every day, all season long, whatever the weather, whatever the conditions. She was born to it you might say--her father had been a racer on the Austrian team. Tall and sleek, she was married and had two small children; I often saw them on the slopes. Of course, she skied wonderfully, a natural. If you were too busy to ski, disinclined, or away, you knew she was there nevertheless. It was a kind of pact. One didn't know the terms, but they could be guessed at--her father had been killed while skiing, caught in an avalanche. She was being faithful to that, somehow. Other aspects of her life were in turmoil.

That's classic Salter. The mythologizing ("you knew she was there nevertheless"), the mix of intimacy and distance ("you might say... One didn't know..."), the dash-splice. Even when his topics rankle me a little, I love the style. Only Evan S Connell comes close.

James Salter. Read the man already, would you?--David E

Until November...

Principal shooting on the movie adaptation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's book Love in the Time of Cholera has wrapped up in Columbia. (See a report here.) The fan forums are still quiet, at least until preview screenings begin.

In the meantime, you can always track what Hollywood thinks of the movie's fortunes by watching its stock. That's right, the Hollywood Exchange follows "trading" in movies, directors, and actors. The adptation's stock (symbol: CHLRA) is down at the moment, but trending up again. Expect more movement as the preview screenings begin. Or better yet, spend the months before the November release reading the book itself.--David E

What do Steven King and Eusebius of Caesaria have in common?

My favorite blog has posted an article about what's on the shelves of the world's libraries. Compiled by the Online Computer Library Center the list details the thousand most common holdings in 53,000 libraries in 96 countries. You can browse the list at de.licio.us.

I can't decide if I'm surprised about this: "The Joy of Cooking ranked 269 on the OCLC Top 1000 list. Joy of Sex did not make the Top 1000 list, or come anywhere close."

I know I'm bummed about this: "Jim Davis' Garfield is number 15 on the list. (Four of the 5 top works by living authors are cartoons!)"

And in answer to the question in the title of this item, neither Eusebius nor King made the cut at all. Eusebius' Ecclesiastical History was unlucky number 1001, and Stephen King didn't even come that close.--David E

Inside the Dragon's Lair

The Guardian has posted its third excerpt from Anna Politkovskaya's forthcoming book A Russian Diary (to be published May 22). Politkovskaya was a crusading Russian investigative journalist who was gunned down on the stairs of her Moscow apartment building in October 2006. Today, radio stations around the world are broadcasting her reports from Chechnya to focus attention on the ongoing conflict there, despite Politskaya's unsolved murder. (See more on the killing here and more on the broadcasts here.)

Grace (Eventually) Available Today

Anne Lamott's new book Grace (Eventually) goes on sale today.

By all accounts, Lamott's latest outing continues to mix the holy and the humorous. (A typical quote from her work thus far: "You can safely assume that you've created God in your own image when it turns out that God hates all the same people you do.") Read a short excerpt of Grace (Eventually) at PBS' Religion & Ethics Weekly.

The End is Just Beginning

Joshua Ferris' new book Then We Came to the End got a great review in the New York Times Book Review this weekend. It's a rave; they call the book "expansive, great-hearted and acidly funny." The NYTRB also posted the book's first chapter online.

There's also a posting at Gawker.com in which Ferris takes a swipe at fellow author darlings Johnathan Safran Foer (Everything Is Iluminated) and Foer's wife Nicole Krauss (History of Love). If you fancy a tempest in a teapot, this is a fun one.

Kelly Link Online

We now have Kelly Link’s first book of short stories, Stranger Things Happen, in stock alongside her more recent Magic for Beginners (the one The Independent describes as “weird, funny, sad, scary, moving, hip, ingeniously executed and brilliantly written stuff”).

Stranger Things Happen is also available online for free. Yes, the book we’re offering for the discounted price of $14.35 is also online for nothing whatsoever.

We are telling you this because:

1) The stories are astounding and everyone should read them.

2) In your gratitude for having learned about this here, you might later purchase Magic for Beginners from us.

3) Your love of the stories in Stranger Things Happen may compete with a hatred of reading books on a computer screen, or an unwillingness to print out the whole manuscript yourself. In either case, we’ve still got it in stock.

Because March is Small Press Month, it also behooves us to mention that Stranger Things Happen was published by Small Beer Press.--Will

Saint Who?

In honor of teatotalers and abstainers everywhere, I post this link to NPR's interview with Michael Lerner, author of Dry Manhattan, a history of the dark impulses behind Prohibition in New York City. Turns out, it wasn't just a move against alcohol.

And in the interest of balance, I'll point out two titles on our shelves: Eric Bogosian's Drinking in America and Curiosities of Wine : Clinking, Drinking and the Extras That Surround the Bottles.

It's a Lulu of a Blook

The Lulu Blooker Prize nominees for 2007 have been announced. A "blook" in the organization's parlance, is "book with content that was developed in a significant way from material originally presented on a blog, webcomic or other website."

Last year's winner was the blog-turned-book Julie and Julia, Julie Powell's account of a year spent working through the recipes of Julia Child's classic cookbook Mastering the Art of French Cooking.

This year's shortlist includes titles from establishment blogger Markos Moulitsas (Daily Kos); store favorite My Secret, a collection of confessional postcards from around the world; a book based on a soldier's blog from Iraq; and even a book that arose from a series of photos on Flickr.

A glimpse of the publishing future or more broadband navelgazing? You be the judge.

Black Swan Green in Stereo

Author and blogger Ian Hocking has posted an interview with David Mitchell, author of Black Swan Green. The book is the April selection for our not-so-traditional book club, Books and Bars.

I'll admit I haven't listened to this one yet. I'm still trying to get through my backlog of New York Times Book Review podcasts.--David E

What's in this bag?

Everyone who's ever misplaced the car keys will be heartened by the news that an unknown publishing house employee recently left a manuscript of Jeanette Winterson's forthcoming novel The Stone Gods in a London subway station.

Everyone who hates spoilers will be glad to hear that the budding book was returned safely to its rightful home.

Lights... Camera... Option!

Bestselling author Jonathan Lethem, author of The Disappointment Artist and Other Essays; Gun, With Occasional Music; and Motherless Brooklyn, is offering the movie rights to his new novel You Don't Love Me Yet (to be released today) for no money down. Interested parties are invited to send their proposals to the author. The lucky winner will be chosen on May 15. Details are here.

As we've seen in last month's posting about author Christopher Moore, the business of options is not at all straightforward--or all that efficient. Lethem's unusual move is only the latest in an ongoing rethink of the traditional system of options sales. (See his article in Harpers magazine here.) The author has long been giving away options to his work via his webpage, offering short stories and song lyrics for filmmakers, dramatists, and musicians to adapt.

So dust off your camera and sharpen your pencil. You could just be the lucky director who brings Lethem's new novel to the screen.

---

UPDATE: NPR has posted an interview with Lethem about his option sale.

The Other March Madness

If basketball leaves you cold, check out The Morning News' Tournament of Books. A slate of recent literary fiction goes head to head, judged by a raft authors, editors, and general webgeeks. The winner advances, until at last only the champion remains. You can read the judge's decision, then read further commentary "from the booth," and even post your own thoughts on the match.

It's much better than that NCAA whatsit they've got going on.

Loose Spoons? We Got Your Book Right Here

In other prize news, The Bookseller has announced its shortlist of 2006's oddest UK book titles. Sadly, most of these titles are not yet available in the US.

• How Green Were the Nazis? edited by Franz-Josef Bruggemeier, Mark Cioc and Thomas Zeller
  
• D. Di Mascio’s Delicious Ice Cream: D. Di Mascio of Coventry: An Ice Cream Company of Repute, with an Interesting and Varied Fleet of Ice Cream Vans by Roger De Boer, Harvey Francis Pitcher, and Alan Wilkinson
  
• The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification by Julian Montague
  
• Tattooed Mountain Women and Spoon Boxes of Daghestan by Robert Chenciner, Gabib Ismailov, Magomedkhan Magomedkhanov and Alex Binnie
  
• Proceedings of the Eighteenth International Seaweed Symposium edited by Robert J Anderson, Juliet A Brodie, Edvar Onsoyen and Alan T Critchley
  
• Better Never To Have Been: The Harm of Coming Into Existence by David Benatar

I'm rooting for the seaweed myself, but word on the street is that you don't want to cross the ice cream guys. Coventry's a tough town.--David E

Red Carpet

The National Book Critics Circle awards have been announced. They are

• Fiction: The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai
  
• Nonfiction: Rough Crossings: Britain, the Slaves and the American Revolution by Simon Schama
  
• Biography: James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon by Julie Phillips
• Memoir/Autobiography: The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million by Daniel Mendelsohn
  
• Poetry: Tom Thomson in Purgatory by Troy Jollimore
  
• Criticism: Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences by Lawrence Weschler

Black Men Reading

Black Men Reading is a book club and discussion group dedicated to both literacy and the love of reading. Focusing on titles and topics of particular interest to African-Americans, the group meets weekly to encourage conversation on important social topics.

"We have to create a place where the images we want and need to see are being nurtured," says founder and facilitator Ezra Hyland, a University of Minnesota Teaching Specialist. "To me, two or three men discussing a book is as powerful an image as 10 young Black men running up and down a basketball court."

Black Men Reading is currently discussing Deconstructing Tyrone : A New Look at Black Masculinity in the Hip-hop Generation by Natalie Hopkinson. Named for the title character of Erykah Badu's 1997 song of the same name, Deconstructing Tyrone explores the lives of post-hiphop black men in America.

The group meets Wednesday evenings, 6pm to 8pm at the NorthPoint Health & Wellness Center (1313 Penn Ave N, in Minneapolis). For more information, call 612/302-4692.

Pelham-Grenville, not Parental Guidance

We recently acquired a large collection of vintage PG Wodehouse books. Most of the 175 or so books date from the 1920s and 1930s, but there are also many newer editions. Prices start at $5.99.

PG Wodehouse was a prolific author. ("I know I was writing stories when I was five. I don't know what I did before that . . . just loafed, I suppose.") He's best known for his character Jeeves, unflappable and unfailingly helpful butler to the foppish Bertie Wooster. The Jeeves and Wooster novels and short stories are outwardly simple tales, brimming with farce and satire.

They also include some great epigrams. If you want to burn time online, try this random Wodehouse quote page. Hit refresh for a new quote. You can easily spend hours here, so beware.

Weird and Wonderful and Available Now 2

Oh the things on the shelves. In the hope of finding suitable homes for some of the hidden gems in the stacks, I continue this irregular feature dedicated to the strange and strangely interesting stuff we stock. (I promise these are all real books in our store.)

Today, it's all about the subtitles:

They Had No Choice: Racing Pigeons at War

All Russia Is Burning: A Cultural History of Fire and Arson in Late Imperial Russia

The Bear Hunter's Century: Profiles from the Golden Age of Bear Hunting

Book with a Beer Chaser

There's still time for you to get ready for next week's installment of our lubricated reading group Books & Bars. Join us Tuesday night (the 13th) at Bryant Lake Bowl (map) for conversation and a beverage with some very interesting folks. Doors open at 6:00pm for socializing; discussion begins in earnest at 7:00pm.

This month's book is People's Act of Love by James Meek. This powerful novel was long-listed for the 2005 Man Booker Prize, and tells the story of a Russian prison camp escapee who makes his way to a remote Siberian village as he recounts his fantastical adventures as imparted to the megalomaniac captain of a Czech regiment and a self-reliant widowed mother.

Books & Bars is not your typical book club. We provide a unique atmosphere for a lively discussion of interesting authors, fun people, good food and drinks. You're welcome even if you haven't read the book.

Mutanabi Street

Booksellers on Baghdad's Mutanabi Street were recently hit by a suicide bomber. This is only the latest in a string of attacks on the area, but it strikes at the cultural heart of Iraq. The International Herald Tribune said of the street: "The book market along Mutanabi Street was a throwback to the Baghdad of old, the days of students browsing for texts, turbaned clerics hunting down religious tomes and cafe intellectuals debating politics over backgammon."

There are some good reports on the street available online. Here's an optimistic NPR story from December, 2003 and a much less cheerful one from The Washington Post in September, 2006.

While it won't directly help the folks on Mutanabi Street, there is a group called Books for Baghdad which accepts donations of textbooks, calculators, computer, medical school supplies, and other types of school supplies. (You can also read an article about the group here.)

An Insider's Perspective

Moira Manion, a former employee at the Borders store in Minneapolis' Block E, gives a view from inside the soon-to-be-closed store on "Marketplace." You can listen or read the transcript. It's not happy news for anyone who dreams of chucking it all in and working in a bookstore.

Small But Lively

March is Small Press Month. Since almost 80% of all books published in 2005 were by "small' independent presses, you're missing out if you only pick off the bestseller lists. High on the list of recommended titles is United States V. George Bush by Elizabeth de la Vega. If you keep track of our events page, you know that we hosted this author in the store just last month.

Based on the Novel

The movie version of Jumpa Lahiri's wonderful novel The Namesake opens on Friday. Directed by Mira Nair (who also directed Monsoon Wedding and the fantastic if less-known Salaam Bombay!), the film tells the story of American-born Gogol Ganguli (Kai Penn), and his attempts to blend his Indian heritage and his US present. A large cast of Bollywood actors rounds out the Ganguli clan. And keep your eyes peeled when you see the film: author Lahiri makes a cameo as "Aunt Jhumpa."

Early reviews (and here) are favorable. "Jhumpa Lahiri's wildly popular novel about two generations of a Bengali family receives a loving, deeply felt screen translation that should appease fans of the book while making many new converts," says Scott Foundas in Variety.

Rollergirl Signing Postponed

The recent storm has stranded the intrepid Melissa Joulwan out of town. It seems she won't be able to make her scheduled appearance tonight with the Minnesota Rollergirls. We'll send signed bookplates to everyone who purchases a book at the event tonight.

Cash in the Attic?

If the news that a first edition of the Book of Mormon, found recently in a barn in upstate New York, will soon be sold at auction for an expected $70,000 to $90,000 doesn't have you combing your bookshelf for hidden gems, I don't know what will.

So it's worth mentioning that we're always buying books for the store. If you've got stacks of books around the house (and, really, who doesn't?), consider bringing them in. We'll look them over, and while we can't take everything, we'll be happy to buy what we can. (See our book-buying policies for more information.) We'll pay cash immediately, or you can take store credit for your books. You can use your credit right away or keep it for up to a year, so you can mull over your choices before you decide.

I'm not saying you'll make enough to retire on, but you can always hope.

Flaking Out

You may have heard: We had a little bit of a storm here in Minneapolis. Our local weather has me thinking...

All the News

We're now a distribution point for Lavender, Minnesota's largest gay and lesbian news magazine.

According to the magazine's website, "Minneapolis boasts the second-highest percentage of GLBT population in the nation, and among large metro areas, the 2000 Census ranks Minneapolis as having the third-largest concentration of gay and lesbian couples."