Project Runway meets the book shelf with our Fits to a T T-Shirt Re-Design Contest. We’ll use Generation T: 108 Ways to Transform a T-Shirt (Workman, $15.95) as our guide, and then let you strut your fashion creation down our runway. Bring your own T-Shirt (one you won’t mind cutting up). Prizes for the best runway-worthy looks, kids 10 and older.

Teresa Giudice is the beautiful, brassy star of Bravo’s hit television series The Real Housewives of New Jersey. The mother of four children under the age of nine, she is often asked for the secret to her fabulous figure. Teresa’s cookbook, Skinny Italian, reveals the answer: the surprisingly healthy family recipes that her mother brought to America from Italy. Packed with tips for choosing and preparing fresh ingredients—not to mention several helpings of juicy gossip—Skinny Italian shows home cooks the simplicity of the recipes that keep Teresa looking delizioso.

As Teresa writes, “The Americanization of Italian food has given it a bad rap for being unhealthy.” Real Italian recipes call for olive oil rather than vegetable oil, butter rather than heavy cream, vegetable-based rather than creamy sauces, and fresh rather than processed cheese. Along with dozens of flavorful recipes, Skinny Italian is bursting with Teresa’s feisty advice on matters ranging from which fiber sources are most gentle on your stomach to why you should worship the Blessed Virgin…olive oil, the most essential ingredient for “getting in and staying in your skin-tight jeans forever.” Nutritional information for each recipe is provided in an index.

The book is narrated in Teresa’s warm, tell-it-like-it-is style and illustrated with color photographs of her food, family, and friends. Fans of The Real Housewives of New Jersey will love this behind-the-scenes look at life in the Giudice household.

About the Author

Teresa Giudice is a star of Bravo’s hit television series The Real Housewives of New Jersey. She is married to “Juicy” Joe Giudice, with whom she has four beautiful daughters: Gia (age 9), Gabriella (age 5), Milania (age 3), and Audriana (7 months).

Matanzas - the name means literally 'slaughters' - is the Cuban city nearest the United States. Known at the heyday of the nineteenth-century sugar boom as the “Athens of Cuba,” it is renowned for its art, its music, and its rich African heritage. It is also the place where Latin American baseball began. Yet most Americans have never heard of it. Miguel Bretos' fascinating history of his hometown, Matanzas: The Cuba Nobody Knows (University of Florida Press, $27.50) remedies this oversight. After forty years he returned to his homeland 'with the longing of an exile, the anticipation of a child, the curiosity of a visitor, the resentment of a victim, and - hopefully - the objectivity of a scholar'. Bretos unfolds the Matanzas story from the aboriginal Tainos to the coming of revolution with solid research, wit, clarity, and the kind of vivid detail that can come only from an insider. But he also deftly inserts Matanzas into a larger picture. More than local history, this original work is Cuban history from a local perspective.