The Rabbit Temple in Yonghe enshrines a deity based on an historic figure that is believed to take care of homosexuals
BY Ho Yi
On an overcast weekday afternoon, two men in their 20s walked into an unassuming temple nestled in an apartment building in Yonghe City (永和市). "We've been here before. We know the way," they told the priest's assistant, and proceeded to the altar on the second floor. A few minutes later, another young man went downstairs to have his fortune told by Lu Wei-ming (盧威明), a Taoist priest, or fashi (法師). Lu established and tends this shrine, known as the Rabbit Temple (兔兒廟), which is devoted to the rabbit deity (兔兒神) - the patron god of homosexuals.

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Bill Bryson usually travels alone, but this year he joined the judges at the Wanderlust Guide awards and found out what he has been missing
By Bill Bryson
Anyone who has read my books will know that I don't tend to use guides when I am traveling. It's not a pride thing but it is certainly a fact. Many of the places I go, especially in the UK where they have such helpful, reliable, non-profit-seeking tourist offices you don't really need a guide. You just get a map, a few leaflets and a book and you're off. Translators usually aren't required either. If you speak English, you can get by virtually anywhere, as there are now depressingly few places where you won't be understood.

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Robert Seyfarth and Dorothy Cheney spent 14 years observing moremi baboons in Botswana and led ground-breaking experiments on the primates' thought and language capabilities

By NICHOLAS WADE
Royal is a cantankerous old male baboon whose troop of some 80 members lives in the Moremi Game Reserve in Botswana. A perplexing event is about to disturb his day.

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Football brought these couples together. Now they are marrying in 'the god of football's' shrine
The "passion for Diego" - Argentine football legend Diego Armando Maradona - will soon take two Mexican couples to the altar of a church devoted to the player in Buenos Aires, as part of an international movement that worships the former player as "the god of football."

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The godfather of the airport novel, aka the P.T. Barnum of the book business and the Thrill Peddler, debuts in this biography as the man who invented sex
By Janet Maslin
Here is a specimen of Harold Robbins' infamous prose style, beloved by any teenager who ever had a copy of The Carpetbaggers and a flashlight: "Little did she realize that, while the relationship would satisfy many of her wildest fantasies - traveling the world, socializing with the rich and famous, enjoying a gilded lifestyle of yachts, champagne and caviar - the dream would turn into a depraved nightmare of orgies and drugs, and ultimately a broken marriage."

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'The Almost Moon' opens with murder, but no detective story is this; it's an explanation of a traumatic childhood that led a woman to smother her mother
By Gail Caldwell
And you thought the premise of The Lovely Bones was tough to take. In Alice Sebold's first novel, a runaway bestseller in 2002, she made her fetching, 14-year-old narrator omniscient in every sense: The girl had been murdered in a corn field by a serial killer, and for the duration of the story got to spy on her family, postmortem, from a pretty good seat in heaven. But the novel's dark center was also what made it bearable. If Sebold began with the unthinkable - the killing of a child - she also created a supple and merciful perspective that outlived the cruelty of its central premise.

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FICTION

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