The 35 impassioned stories included in this collection - of fortune tellers, tribal baboon hunters, a friendly Japanese family, and other notable characters - span a worldwide spectrum of themes, styles and settings, but all show how travel in its unexpected turns tests and teaches us, making us aware that we are resilient, that we are not alone, and that there is so much love and connection to be had if we open ourselves up. This collection affirms that if we follow the compass of the heart, we will always find our way. Whether you read the book on the road or in an armchair at home, these tales are sure to entertain, amuse and inform you, and resonate long after the book is finished. 'As you travel through these pages, may your mind be widened, your spirit enlivened, and your own path illuminated by these worldly word-journeys.' ---Don George With sparkling contributions from some of the most acclaimed names in contemporary fiction and travel writing plus some new voices from around the world, including: Ann Patchett, Francine Prose, TC Boyle, Karen Joy Fowler, Pico Iyer, Torre DeRoche, Blane Bachelor, Rebecca Dinerstein, Jan Morris, Elizabeth George, Jane Hamilton, Alexander McCall Smith, Keija Parssinen, Mridu Khullar Relph, Yulia Denisyuk, Emily Koch, Carissa Kasper, Jessica Silber, Candace Rose Rardon, Marilyn Abildskov, Shannon Leone Fowler, Robin Cherry, Robert Twigger, Porochista Khakpour, Natalie Baszile, Suzy Joinson, Anthony Sattin, LH McMillin, Bridget Crocker, Maggie Downs, Bishwanath Ghosh, Jeff Greenwald, James Dorsey and Tahir Shah. About Lonely Planet: Started in 1973, Lonely Planet has become the world's leading travel guide publisher with guidebooks to every destination on the planet, gift and lifestyle books and stationery, as well as an award-winning website, magazines, a suite of mobile and digital travel products, and a dedicated traveller community. Lonely Planet's mission is to enable curious travellers to experience the world and to truly get to the heart of the places they find themselves in. TripAdvisor Travelers' Choice Awards 2012, 2013, 2014, and 2015 winner in Favorite Travel Guide category 'Lonely Planet guides are, quite simply, like no other.' - New York Times 'Lonely Planet. It's on everyone's bookshelves; it's in every traveller's hands. It's on mobile phones. It's on the Internet. It's everywhere, and it's telling entire generations of people how to travel the world.' - Fairfax Media (Australia)

    Food and sex: two universal experiences that can easily become addictive and all consuming. You don't need to look far—The Food Network, billboards, TV spots, to name just a few—to witness firsthand the explosive combination of food and sex.In Sex and Bacon: Why I Love Things That Are Very, Very Bad for Me, Sarah Katherine Lewis is a seductress whose observations about the interplay between food and sex are unusually delightful, sometimes raunchy, and always absorbing. Sex and Bacon is a unique type of lovefest, and Lewis is not your run-of-the-mill food writer. A lusty eater who's spent the better part of her adult life as a sex worker, Lewis is as reckless as she is adventurous. She writes of eating whale and bone marrow as challenges she was incapable of resisting. With chapters that hone in on the categorically simple—fat, sugar, meat—Lewis infuses even the most quotidian meals and food memories with sensual observations and decadence worthy of savoring. Sex and Bacon is exuberant-a celebration that honors the rawness and base needs that are central to our experiences of both food and sex.

    Educated at the United Nations International School in Manhattan, she soon was earning a good living by stripping and working as a dominatrix at a sex dungeon. Akira has now built up a reputation for being of the most popular, hardworking, and extreme actors in the business, winning dozens of awards for her 330+ movies, including her #1 bestselling series �Asa Akira Is Insatiable”.In Insatiable, Akira recounts her extraordinary life in chapters that are hilarious, shocking, and touching. In a wry, conversational tone, she talks about her experiences shoplifting and doing drugs while in school, her relationship with other porn stars (she is married to one) and with the industry at large, and her beliefs about women and sexuality. Insatiable is filled with Akira’s unusual and often highly amusing anecdotes, including her visit to a New Hampshire sex shop run by a mother and son.In a world where porn is increasingly becoming part of the mainstream, Akira is one of very few articulate voices writing from the inside. She something important, controversial, and astonishingly interesting to say about sex and its central role in our lives and culture.

    Originally published by Art Unlimited (Amsterdam, 1991). 150 photos. Size D.

    Twenty-one-year-old Ivy Spellman has always played by the rules – get good grades, stay out of trouble, and avoid bad boys at all costs. But when she takes a temp assignment at a multi-billion dollar drug company, she can’t help but become intrigued with the sexy and ultra-demanding CEO, Cullen Sharpe. Cullen Sharpe is used to getting what he wants, and his dark and damaged desires are locked on Ivy. Her good girl innocent routine is enough to drive him over the edge, and after Ivy makes a mistake at work, he senses an opening to teach the shy temp the pleasures and seductions of being bad... …as well as the punishment that goes along with it. Soon the two of them are locked in a game of mystery, seduction, and raging desire that knows no bounds. But as Ivy is pushed beyond her sexual limits, she begins to crave more from the dark billionaire. However, Cullen guards his secrets and his heart for reasons that run deep. And if those reasons were to ever be revealed, it just might destroy them both…

    During your annual physical, a well-paid receptionist forwards your chart to an international human trafficking ring. A clear violation of the HIPAA Laws, but who cares? Money is a great incentive. Consider what happens after they take you, ship you off, and sell you at auction? Can you imagine your new life? Can you imagine a life as owned property?Avril Gillios doesn't have to imagine it; she has to live it. The question is, can she survive it?The Trafficking Consortium Copyright (c) Richard Verry 2016A brutal erotic suspense thriller about Avril Gillios, a young woman in her mid-twenties, who get’s caught up in an international organized crime ring specializing in human trafficking. The thousand-year old organization call themselves ‘The Consortium.’ Their affluent and influential members can order or acquire anyone, men and women alike, to satisfy their unique needs and desires. From organ acquisition; to perverse sexual satisfaction; or feasting upon their prey, they seemingly operate above the law all across the globe.Told from Avril’s point of view, the story describes how this criminal organization targets her, kidnaps her right off the streets of NYC and sells her to the highest bidder; marking the beginning of a new life, forever barred from returning to the only life she ever knew.She must navigate the perilous events that threaten her life to survive her ordeal and attempt escape. Sold to a sadistic monster, her captivity is relatively comfortable. Locked in a luxurious suite with all the trimmings included in the most elegant high-end luxury apartments enjoyed by the upper one-percenters, a cage is still a cage.She endures brutal beatings and violent ravishments as her new owner trains her to be compliant to his demands and needs. Along the way, she discovers that her sadistic owner loves her, in his own way.Confused and bewildered, she must figure out how to navigate the ever narrowing serpentine path to escape the growing threat to her life. Her captor eventually gives her an impossible choice, one that takes away all doubt of what he intends to do with her. However, he requires that she select the path that her life will take. Failing to choose is the same as choosing a horrific, slow, and painful death.Will she choose life or death?

    Miss S is smart, sassy, sexually frustrated and broke. With the rent money due, she spots an ad for a student job with a difference - in the massage parlour at the bottom of her road. Suddenly she can earn money doing something she is good at and get all the sex she needs. Offered a job on the spot by Mrs B, an ex-working girl herself, Miss S quickly gets to grips with the rest of the girls. They include: Bella the house 'Domme', Carrie the resident shrink, Tina the house snitch, and Suzie the amateur porn star. That's not to mention the cast of clients: Mr Suck it Bitch, Mr Gay, Mr Pacemaker, Mr Councillor and Mr Willy Whacker... Confessions of a Working Girl is the true and intimate diary of Miss S's extraordinary first year in a brothel and reveals exactly what a Gemini half hour really involves... Miss S started working as a paid companion when she was a student, working in a brothel. Witty, intelligent and ambitious, Miss S knows how to achieve what she wants in a job that she loves... and that she's very, very good at. She now works independently in London.

    Veteran journalist Pete Hamill never covered just politics. Or just sports. Or just the entertainment business, the mob, foreign affairs, social issues, the art world, or New York City. He has in fact written about all these subjects, and many more, in his years as a contributor to such national magazines as Esquire, Vanity Fair, and New York, and as a columnist at the New York Post, the New York Daily News, the Village Voice, and other newspapers. Seasoned by more than thirty years as a New York newspaperman, Hamill wrote on an extraordinarily wide variety of topics in powerful language that is personal, tough-minded, clearheaded, always provocative. Piecework is a rich and varied collection of Hamill's best writing, on such diverse subjects as what television and crack have in common, why winning isn't everything, stickball, Nicaragua, Donald Trump, why American immigration policy toward Mexico is all wrong, Brooklyn's Seventh Avenue, and Frank Sinatra, not to mention Octavio Paz, what it's like to realize you're middle-aged, Northern Ireland, New York City then and now, how Mike Tyson spent his time in prison, and much more. This collection proves him once again to be among the last of a dying breed: the old-school generalist, who writes about anything and everything, guided only by passionate and boundless curiosity. Piecework is Hamill at his very best.

    What followed was a whirlwind childhood spent among art and artists in the heyday of Abstract Expressionism. Gabrielle grew up in a home full of the most celebrated artists of the day: Rothko, de Kooning, Tinguely, Giacometti, and Christo, among others.Poignant and candid, Unstill Life is a daughter’s memoir of the art world and a larger-than-life father known to the world as Mr. Modern Art. Selz offers a unique window into the glamour and destruction of the times: the gallery openings, wild parties and affairs that defined one of the most celebrated periods in American art history. Like the art he loved, Selz’s father was vibrant and freewheeling, but his enthusiasm for both women and art took its toll on family life. When her father left MoMA and his family to direct his own museum in California, marrying four more times, Selz’s mother, the writer Thalia Selz, moved with her children into the utopian artist community Westbeth. Her parents continued a tumultuous affair that would last forty years.Weaving her family narrative into the larger story of twentieth-century art and culture, Selz paints an unforgettable portrait of a charismatic man, the generation of modern artists he championed and the daughter whose life he shaped.

    This chronicle of life in the skin trade follows the meteoric rise of Stacey Keith, a girl scarcely out of her teens whose eye-popping assets launch her from wet T-shirt contests to the catwalks of Houston, strip bar capital of the world. Almost overnight, she is discovered by a famous porn star, who Svengalis her onto the pages of Playboy, Penthouse, and dozens of other men’s magazines. While strutting her stuff onstage and across the country, Stacey makes the fateful decision to head to Hollywood. She’s got everything a girl could want: fame, attention, endless piles of cash...but no idea what awaits her. With Internet porn overtaking men’s magazines, everyone from her Mafia-boss road manager to her smarmy talent agent pressures Stacey to do more than just flash her flesh. Uber-boob filmmaker Russ Meyer verbally abuses her; rocker Don Henley tries to use her. Yet through it all, from the warped misogyny of Playboy to the S&M dungeons of the Pacific Palisades, Stacey’s dark, self-deprecating humor will leave you laughing, crying and rooting for her at every step of the way.

    writes with humor, dripping Southern charm that you can’t miss.” (The Greenville Examiner). A collection of short stories from the author of Sean of the South, and Lyla. Columnist, humorist, and novelist, Sean Dietrich, is known for his commentary on life in the American South. In his newest work, Small Towns, Labradors, Barbecue, Biscuits, Beer, and Bibles, he delivers a set of quirky tales filled with smiles and a hefty dose of heart.

    He is this century's most ardent advocate of First Amendment rights, a man whose landmark Supreme Court cases are studied by every law student in America. He is the founder and publisher of Hustler magazine, a journal often described as tasteless, crude, scatological, and gynecologically explicit - to which he would reply, "Good!" For Flynt, tastelessness is "a necessary tool in challenging preconceived notions in a world where people are afraid to discuss their attitudes, prejudices, and misconceptions." Born in the hills of Kentucky, in the poorest county in America, Flynt became a teenage runaway, an underage recruit in both the army and the navy, a bootlegger, a scam artist, a bar owner, the proprietor of a string of go-go clubs, an evangelical Christian, an atheist, and eventually a millionaire pornographer and publisher. A prodigious sexual athlete, Flynt was shot down in his prime by an assailant's bullet and paralyzed from the waist down. Wheelchair bound and racked by years of searing pain, he became a pain-medicine junkie and habitue of America's courtrooms. Persecuted by the self-righteous Charles Keating, prosecuted by ambitious district attorneys, sued by moral crusaders like Jerry Falwell, and hounded by the government, Flynt forged a blazing trail through the American legal system. Remarkably, Larry Flynt has never told his story before. This highly personal and reflective account will surprise everyone, offend a few, and entertain many.

    Fight Monsters. Gain Power. Become King. When Kit Jones inherits a house from a long-lost relative, he thinks he’s hit the jackpot – until a mysterious orb in the attic transports him to a far-away land of islands, tropical forests, dangerous creatures, and harpies. But these aren’t your typical harpies – they’re smoking hot, white-winged and know how to defend themselves. Thrown head first into battle, Kit must learn how to fight, command his new abilities, and tame the desires of the beautiful harpies if he wants to have any hope of not only surviving, but leading his girls to victory against a vicious enemy seeking to wipe the harpies from existence. Warning: Harpy Core features explicit sexuality, hot harpies, savage creatures, giant monsters, melee combat, winged flight, fallen kingdoms, assassination attempts, deadly jungles, a sun-splashed archipelago, magical orbs, hidden temples, and a whole lot of bad guys getting speared in the face. If that doesn’t sound like your kind of thing, steer clear.

    The book gives readers a whole new set of subjects to see through her sophisticated, sardonic eyes. Sandra Bernhard is the author of Confessions of a Pretty Lady.

    In poetic, nuanced prose she charts how unchecked risk-taking eventually gave way to a course of self-destruction. But as she recounts crossing over the very boundaries that she set for her own safety, she never plays the victim. In fact, the glory of this memoir is Melissa’s ability to illuminate the strange and powerful truths that she learned as she found her way out of a hell of her own making. Rest assured; the reader will emerge from the journey more or less unscathed.