Then her life was irreversibly transformed—and so was her philosophy. In this wholly unexpected personal account, the author of A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-first Century (2009) offers us a Vindication of Life as inspiring as it is heartbreaking. The story of Cristina and her little daughter, Eurydice, is a tale of redemption and self-reinvention. It is about expanding definitions of love--and it is about confronting death. Not least, it speaks to us of life’s sweeping ironies: Sometimes bad luck is the new good luck, and the realization of your worst fears may be the greatest gift you can receive.Biography: Nehring first acquired national attention through her fiery criticism in the pages of Harper's Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly and The New York Times Book Review. A "compassionate contrarian," she won many awards for her politically incorrect cultural and literary essays. Her first book, A Vindication of Love (Harper Collins, 2009) argues for a bolder, braver, wilder form of modern loving, drawing extensively on literary and historical analysis. It was published to wide acclaim and translated into several languages. Nehring also works as a travel writer for Condé Nast Traveler, and holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Los Angeles. She lives in Paris and Los Angeles.

    Writer, M.D. celebrates this rich tradition with a collection of fiction and nonfiction by today’s most beloved physician-writers, including,• Abraham Verghese, on the lost art of the physical exam• Pauline Chen, on the bond between a med student and her first cadaver• Atul Gawande, on the ethical dilemmas of a young surgical intern• Danielle Ofri, on the devastation of losing a patient• Ethan Canin, on love, poetry, and growing oldThese essays and stories illuminate the inner lives of men and women who deal with trauma, illness, mortality, and grief on a daily basis. Read together, they provide a candid, moving, one-of-a-kind glimpse behind the doctor’s mask.

    Through the introduction of MTV and the alternative rock revolution, it's been many things. Rude. Brilliant. Soulful. Snotty. Angry. Delirious. In the past two decades, genres have spawned like mad, from goth, indie rock, and gangsta rap to emo and the garage rock revival. This twentieth-anniversary tribute celebrates the passion and fury of the music, with original essays, quotes, and photographs by contributors who are as hopelessly obsessed with it as you are. SPIN: 20 Years of Alternative Music features: Alan Light on Beastie Boys, Ann Powers on U2, Charles Aaron on R.E.M., Dave Eggers on The Smiths + Morrissey, Marc Spitz on Goth, Simon Reynolds on Depeche Mode + Synth-pop, Dave Itzkoff on ’80s Teen Movies, Chuck Klosterman on Weezer, Will Hermes on Radiohead, Neil Strauss on Nine Inch Nails + Industrial, Sacha Jenkins on Public Enemy, Andy Greenwald on Emo, RJ Smith on Gangsta Rap, Jon Dolan on The White Stripes, Chris Norris on Nirvana, Doug Brod on Oasis + Britpop, Jim DeRogatis on Smashing Pumpkins, Laura Sinagra on Courtney Love, Ta-Nehisi Coates on Tupac

    These stories span characters and emotional states with canny details that touch the depths of your soul. Picturing the complexities of love, misery and mystery, the stories try to gnaw your heart like never before.• What does a flower teach us we often fail to see?• “The belly is an ungrateful wretch.” Is it true?• Ever wondered about the sparseness and illusions in life?• Does death put an end to true love?• Have all the ascetics won over their emotions?With the power of simple language, this book transports the readers to a world scarcely thought of in our bustling lives. The allegories maintain an intense rhythm of life prompting the readers to perceive things from a unique angle.“A whole bookful to make you think, cry, think again and move on.”

    Sex. Detox. Art. Recovery. Prostitution. Music. Street life. Poetry. Toxic love. And, those are just on the surface. The layers and complexities of Addictarium will shock and enthrall you... When wild-child, and south Florida escapee, Danielle Martino finds herself curled in a ball on the cold tile floors of her filthy rank bathroom in the tiny studio she rents with her fiancé and partner-in-crime, she knows it's time to quit abusing heroin. Severely impaired from shooting a bad batch of black tar heroin, and already partially blind from the infection that the muddy poison has caused, she is forced to hitch a greyhound bus to New York City, and to abandon her care-free, American-bohemian, drug infested life-style.Hailed by many as a beautiful, unique, honest, raw and poetic account of recovery, Addictarium takes readers on a compelling journey through the life and eyes of the narrator; a creative, nomadic, deep--but, incidentally broken--young woman, and underlines the contributing factors to what it's really like to suffer from addiction. With magnificent candor--and sometimes emotionally crippling descriptions--we witness Danielle's fight towards recovery from more than just heroin, as Addictarium brings the readers on a fascinating and harrowing, brutal tale of a young women's recovery from total and mass self-destruction. --Addictarium highlights in the starkest of lights, why it is so difficult for addicts to receive the recovery they seek, when they finally do decide to put the drug down.

     Attacked and nearly killed, I am still standing. I’m a fighter. A survivor. This baby in my belly is going to have a mother who is much stronger than she ever imagined she could be. But what about Aiden? He has been shot for trying to protect me. He’s lying in a hospital room. Everything is going to be okay, right? But what if it’s not? WARNING: This is a HOT, modern-day, dark erotic romance with a bad boy alpha billionaire for fans of EL James. It contains light bondage, NO CHEATING, No Cliffhanger and a Happily Ever After, for now.

    Algren tells us all we need to know about passion, heaven, hell. And a city. - From the introduction by Studs TerkelNelson Algren (1909 - 1981) won the National Book Award in 1950 for The Man with the Golden Arm. His other works include Walk on the Wild Side, and Conversations with Nelson Algren, the last available from the University of Chicago Press.David Schmittgens teaches English at New Trier High School in Northfield, Illinois.Bill Savage is a senior lecturer at Northwestern University and coeditor of the 50th Anniversary Critical Edition of The Man with the Golden Arm.Cover photograph: Robert McCullogh

    Fat red tomatoes sliced thin and salted. Lemonade and long dreamy days. The treasures of the season are gone much too soon -- but they're captured here, in loving sensuous prose that's both personal and universal, for you to find any time of year.Experience the most evocative tribute to the meaning of the season, a season whose magical feeling stays with us even in winter. Where does that feeling come from? What is summer made of? The smell of cut grass behind the gasoline of a lawnmower. A crown you've made of flowers. Blackberry bush prickers. First hot dog off the grill. Stargazing and sleeping with the windows open. This essay brims with a searching honesty and insight about what this season has meant in our pasts and what it might mean in our lives ahead.Release yourself into the sky and feel, Nina MacLaughlin writes, for a moment: there's time.If summer is the season of your life, if the months between Memorial Day and Labor Day hold your favorite memories, you'll love Summer Solstice .

    This reader offers students and scholars a plethora of his speeches, interviews, correspondence, one-act plays, and other materials, as well as lengthy selections from all of Frost's books of verse. Though many have been drawn to his seemingly old-fashioned simplicity, this wide-ranging reader in fact reveals that Frost's work was often dark or ironic in tone—and always subtle and complex.

    Jerry’s Stahl’s perverse, yet often touching tales, many of which first appeared in publications ranging from Playboy to the Pushcart Prize to Best Erotic Fiction, plumb the depths of eccentric romance, sex-starved adolescence, mid-life crisis, and family dysfunction. From a teenager’s tryst with a recently widowed middle-aged woman on an airplane, to a dissatisfied dentist’s attempt to find freedom on the road with a much younger woman, all the way to an intensely erotic love affair between an ex-junkie and an ex-circus midget with a sexual obsession with vegetables, this collection never fails to arouse and surprise. With a disarmingly immediate prose style, Stahl finds great eroticism, humor, and humanity in the wildest of encounters.

    Fiction writer and essayist Charles D'Ambrosio inspects manufactured homes in Washington state; tours the rooms of Hell House, a Pentecostal "haunted house" in Texas; visits the dormitories and hallways of a Russian orphanage in Svrstroy; and explored the textual space of family letters, at once expansive and claustrophobic. In these spaces, or the people who inhabit them, he unearths a kind of optimism, however guarded. He introduces us to a defender of gray whales; the creator of Biosquat, a utopian experiment in Austin, Texas; and a younger version of himself, searching for "culture" in Seattle in 1974. He analyzes the nuances of Mary Kay Letourneau's trial and contemplates the persistence of rain and of memory.

    Millions of loyal listeners tune in every week to hear his unique blend of news and views. Now the man who brought us "The Rest Of The Story" brings us the humor behind the headlines in this hilarious collection of truth-is-funnier-than-fiction stories. Told in Paul Harvey's unique, inimitable, and unforgettable style, here are stories that will tickle you, touch you-and just plain make you laugh out loud, such as . . .the jogger who quit running because the wind kept putting out his cigarette, the man who fell into a tree stump and had to be rescued by forest rangers, the nude sunbather on the hotel roof who accidentally stretched out over the dining room skylight, the woman karate expert who stopped a purse snatcher cold--by hitting him over the head with her umbrella, the man who resigned himself to deafness for twenty years--until he discovered his hearing aid was in the wrong ear. From wacky want ads to riotous run-ins with the law, from embarrassing moments at home and work to the frank and funny things kids say, "Paul Harvey's For What It's Worth" celebrates human eccentricity in all its infinitely amusing variety.

    Showcasing some of his most honest and personal writing, this compilation contains stories of love and redemption, sex and parties, tales of heartbreak and squinting in the morning sun. Things don’t always turn out the way we expect. But with the right attitude and some good friends, you can always find your way to the next adventure.

    Culled from tapes made by Bukowski at his Los Angeles home in 1968 for biographer and rock critic Barry Miles, long before the author had begun regular public readings. Bukowski was so shy he insisted that he record alone. He reads both poetry and prose, gets thoroughly drunk during the recording, and bitches about his life, his landlord, and his neighbours.

    Matt Taibbi's serialized book, co-authored with a national drug dealer.