She’s tried to work, pray, sex, sleep and smoke her problems away but she can’t escape the gloomy, grey clouds hovering over her head. Just wanting to be happy, she's blinded by love; Messiah only sees what she wants to see – always building up to be let down and ultimately crashing. She craves love and admiration but doesn’t love herself enough to know when it’s time to let go of an old flame. Directionless, she coasts along through life numb, until she meets Shyhiem, the man who will change her life forever. He’s everything she never knew she wanted, but everything that she absolutely needed. Without permission, Shyhiem marches into her life and turns everything upside down. He’s rude, cocky, angry and devastatingly handsome. To the world, he’s nothing but an ex-convict with a chip on his shoulder; but to Messiah, he’s an angel sent down from heaven who teaches her how to love again. When Messiah finds herself wasting time, daydreaming about when she’ll see or speak to him again, she knows she’s in trouble. Love wasn’t in the equation for her - especially since she still has feelings for her ex - and Shyhiem has a ghetto baby mother and two kids… Will their love prevail or will self-doubt, self-pity, and a sense of emptiness stop everything before it starts?

    

    

    No slow burn, no filler. This couple gets right to the point.Nova Bradford and Mikhail Luther have a long history. They've known each other since they were students at Blythe T. Young Magnet High School. Mikhail was the handsome high school jock with the pretty homecoming queen on his arm and Nova, well Nova was the ugly duckling no one cared about. After years of working on her self-confidence thanks to a friend and therapy, she finally decides albeit reluctantly, to embark on a school reunion cruise to tropical paradise where she will come face to face with her former classmates that taunted her every day.What she doesn't expect to find is Mikhail, alone and not the same young man from school. What follows seems unlikely, but it's also the thing they both need ...

    

    

    In her case, there's Nick Matthews, who's the town flirt and thinks she's the next notch on his bedpost. Then there's Ian Matthews, who's supposed to be the easygoing brother. Except there's nothing easygoing about his charm, or the way he looks at her, or the way he kisses her.And there's nothing easygoing about his secret...NickRose Newark thinks she landed the chance of a lifetime when she gets her first interior decorating solo project, and she can't wait to get started. All her excitement goes down the drain, however, when she meets her new client: Nick Matthews, aka the town's playboy.Aka the most potently charming man she's ever met.She's unfazed by that charm, of course--until she starts getting to know the man beneath the glamorous lifestyle. On paper, Nick has it easy and has it all. But the closer she gets to him, the more Rose finds out about his secrets: and they're secrets that make him all the more attractive--and all the more dangerous... Ara Tom Anderson has worked at Coolio's all his life, so selling the place and packing up feels like the best break he can get. Having no responsibilities for the first time ever seems like a solid plan--one that's broken when he finds himself responsible for the safety of Ara Matthews' one night.Things soon start unravelling when he keeps getting her out of trouble and starts realizing that maybe there's more to her than meets the eye. Ara has deep, dark secrets--and they're secrets that he soon finds himself entangled in, much as he finds himself entangled in her hot, brazen kisses...SamuelBeing the healer of four very powerful, very supernatural siblings might seem like the coolest job in the world--but for Natalie Hill, it's just a job, and one that's ending soon. Now she's down to the last person she's supposed to protect: Samuel Matthews, who never really needed help from her, considering he's already a cop and the town's greatest protector.But danger comes in many forms, and Samuel's beast nature is testament to that: a volatile creature that's a contrast to Samuel's usual calm self, one that fascinates her all the more. Natalie knows it's a mistake to get too close to him. But when tension forms and sexual attraction takes shape, it's too late to back out--and all she can do is try to fight for their lives...Adult Content.

    She's sweet as brown sugar with candied yams... Honey-coated complexion... Music camay... Let's hear it for the girl... She's from around the way... Sade is not your typical around the way California girl. Coming from a good family, in the rough part of Compton, the senseless murder of her mother at a young age leaves her family in shambles, and Sade forging a way as a woman without the gentle guidance that only a mother can provide. With her razor sharp tongue, and free spirit, Sade is trying hard to blaze her own trail, despite the wishes of her controlling father and bougie ex boyfriend. Q is the Robin Hood of Tree Top Piru. Under the hardened, heartless exterior that he puts up, is a man longing for the stable love he’s been missing from his baby mama Camari. With enemies lurking around every corner, and treacherous women always trying to claim his heart, a chance encounter on a doomed night sets him on the path to finding the sense of calm that he’s been longing for in his chaotic life. Is Q even capable of loving someone that needs to be loved? Or has his heart been entirely shut off from love because of the ways of the women in his past? Will shared experiences create unbreakable bonds between Q and Sade? Or will secrets, lies, and jealousy rip them apart before their love affair even begins? Get into the story of Q and Sade, two star crossed lovers from Compton. Romeo and Juliet ain’t got nothing on this real hood love story!

    Never has she met a man like him, and though neither of them knows what the future holds, Aniqa is sure of one thing: Je’Marcus must go. A man always wants that old thang back, though, and when Je’Marcus makes good on his promise to love her to death, Aniqa’s locked in the fight of her life, chasing the kind of love only a boss can give. Linc is a hitta in every sense of the word, and he’ll go to war against anyone that comes for the Carmichael throne, but when he uncovers the ultimate betrayal in his tight-knit circle, he questions whether he should remain loyal to the one person he looks up to—who just might be the biggest snake of them all. No one knocks Linc off his square—he’s the solution before people even realize there’s a problem, but when Aniqa captures his heart like no woman before her, Linc finds himself feeling something he’s spent his whole life running away from—love. Linc’s mind says, “Lord, please save her for me,” but can he make his next move his best and capture Aniqa’s heart? Beautiful is a sophistoratchet beauty that’s always on ten—if you’re knuckin’ then she’s buckin! Fiercely protective of Aniqa, her A-1 from way back, Beautiful’s a rider for hers. They say blood is thicker than water, but when Beautiful rolls up on some shocking news about “family,” will she choose to ride with her family or stay down for her bestie? Aniqa’s still crushin’ while Linc wants to love her down, but will she give in and let Linc put some BOSS up in her life?

    A brilliant display of erudition, wit, and wisdom, his exploration of how great European writers from Homer to Virginia Woolf depicted reality has taught generations how to read Western literature. This new expanded edition includes a substantial essay in introduction by Edward Said as well as an essay, never before translated into English, in which Auerbach responds to his critics.A German Jew, Auerbach was forced out of his professorship at the University of Marburg in 1935. He left for Turkey, where he taught at the state university in Istanbul. There he wrote "Mimesis," publishing it in German after the end of the war. Displaced as he was, Auerbach produced a work of great erudition that contains no footnotes, basing his arguments instead on searching, illuminating readings of key passages from his primary texts. His aim was to show how from antiquity to the twentieth century literature progressed toward ever more naturalistic and democratic forms of representation. This essentially optimistic view of European history now appears as a defensive--and impassioned--response to the inhumanity he saw in the Third Reich. Ranging over works in Greek, Latin, Spanish, French, Italian, German, and English, Auerbach used his remarkable skills in philology and comparative literature to refute any narrow form of nationalism or chauvinism, in his own day and ours. For many readers, both inside and outside the academy, "Mimesis" is among the finest works of literary criticism ever written.

    This unique collection seeks to shed light on that injustice and subjugation, as well as the hard-won literary progress made, putting some of America’s most cherished voices in a conversation in one magnificent volume that presents reading as an act of resistance. Organized into three sections, the Peril, the Power, and Pleasure, and with an array of contributors both classic and contemporary, Black Ink presents the brilliant diversity of black thought in America while solidifying the importance of these writers within the greater context of the American literary tradition. At times haunting and other times profoundly humorous, this unprecedented anthology guides you through the remarkable experiences of some of America’s greatest writers and their lifelong pursuits of literacy and literature. The foreword was written by Nikki Giovanni. Contributors include: Frederick Douglass, Solomon Northup, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Maya Angelou, Martin Luther King, Jr., Toni Morrison, Walter Dean Myers, Stokely Carmichael [Kwame Ture], Alice Walker, Jamaica Kincaid, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Terry McMillan, Junot Diaz, Edwidge Danticat, Colson Whitehead, Marlon James, Roxane Gay, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Colson Whitehead. The anthology features a bonus in-depth interview with President Barack Obama.

    His work on the fantastic is indeed about a historical phenomenon that we recognize, about specific works that we may read, but it is also about the use and abuse of generic theory.As an essay in fictional poetics, The Fantastic is consciously structuralist in its approach to the generic subject. Todorov seeks linguistic bases for the structural features he notes in a variety of fantastic texts, including Potocki's The Sargasso Manuscript, Nerval's Aur lia, Balzac's The Magic Skin, the Arabian Nights, Cazotte's Le Diable Amoureux, Kafka's The Metamorphosis, and tales by E. T. A. Hoffman, Charles Perrault, Guy de Maupassant, Nicolai Gogol, and Edgar A. Poe.

    The masterly essay on Tolstoy's view of history, in which Sir Isaiah underlines a fundamental distinction between those people (foxes) who are fascinated by the infinite variety of things and those (hedgehogs) who relate everything to a central, all-embracing system.

    With winning directness, Jackie Kay captures her characters' greatest joy and greatest vulnerability, exposing the moments of tenderness, of shock, of bravery and of stupidity that accompany the search for love, the discovery of love and, most of all, love's loss. Jackie Kay's characters sing from the page - Daily Telegraph. So immediately engaging that it reads as though she is speaking to you at a bus stop - Irish Times. Jackie Kay's new book reveals her gift for capturing a voice ...at the heart of it is a faith in stories themselves: a belief that the most desolate history can be lent coherence if you tell it right - Times Literary Supplement. Kay's humour and optimism are transcendent - Sunday Herald.

    It is also the only up-to-date survey of literary theory that devotes extensive treatment to Queer Theory and Postcolonial and Race Studies. How to Interpret Literature, Second Edition, is ideal as either a stand-alone text or in conjunction with an anthology of primary readings such as Robert Dale Parker's Critical Theory: A Reader for Literary and Cultural Studies.DISTINCTIVE FEATURES* Uses a conversational and engaging tone that speaks directly to today's students* Covers a variety of theoretical schools--including New Criticism, Structuralism, Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Marxism--weaving connections among chapters to show how these different movements respond to and build on each other* Offers a rich assortment of pedagogical features (charts, text boxes that address frequently asked questions, photos, and a bibliography)