. . Like Frida Kahlo's painting--impossible to look away from. --Kai Maristed, Los Angeles TimesAt the age of eighteen, Frida Kahlo's life was transformed when the bus in which she was riding was hit by a trolley car. Pierced through by a steel handrail and broken in many places, she entered a long period of convalescence during which she began to paint self-portraits.A vibrant series of prose poems, Beauty Is Convulsive is a passionate meditation on Frida Kahlo, one of the twentieth century's most compelling artists. Carole Maso brings together pieces from Kahlo's biography, her letters, medical documents, and her diaries to assemble a text that is as erotic, mysterious, and colorful as one of Kahlo's paintings.

    The first entry included here is dated 1918 and the last, three weeks before her death in 1941. Between these points of time unfolds the private world??—??the anguish, the triumph, the creative vision??—??of one of the great writers of the twentieth century. “A Writer’s Diary . . . is Virginia Woolf . . . The whole vibrates with the ups and downs of a passionate relationship . . . in the intensities, variations, alarms and excursions, panics and exaltations of her relationship to her art.”??—??New York Times Book ReviewEdited and with a Preface by Leonard Woolf.

    Dietz, the New York Times bestselling author of the America Rising novels, comes RED DRAGON, the third book in the Winds of War series following RED FLOOD. World War III is a few months month old. After attacking, and sinking the Destroyer USS Stacy Heath, the Chinese seize control of Nepal and Bhutan and push into India where the Allies manage to stop them. But for how long? Pakistan is attacking from the north--and China is preparing for the "big push” from the east. Worse yet, China’s Ministry of State Security has orders to assassinate the Dalai Lama, rather than run the risk that he will inspire a Buddhist rebellion in Tibet. As a team of assassins close in on the Dalai Lama, Green Beret Captain Jon Lee and his men are behind Chinese lines in Nepal, battling to rescue a downed fighter pilot before enemy troops can capture him.   The entire subcontinent is at risk if the assassins succeed…  And, if the region falls, hundreds of thousands of people will die--even as millions more are lost to the Axis.  Together with a self-centered army doctor named Wendy Kwan, and a team consisting of both green berets and Gurkhas, it will be Lee's responsibility to navigate treacherous terrain--and prevent Chinese Agent Fan Tong and his special ops team from changing the course of the war.

    At least his wife, his students, and his community thought so. But when he dies to save the life of a stranger, Steve is sent to an afterlife reserved for the truly heroic: Valhalla.But the Norse realm of the dead isn’t anything like he expected. Valhalla is a school, the Gods are teachers, and Steve’s fellow students are his competition in the great games.Then there are the women...Ila, the beautiful but stoic warrior. Molly, the cutie with her heart on her sleeve. Idun, the blonde Goddess bombshell with a soft spot for poetry. And Twyla, the dwarven bartender who’s always brewing up a sexy good time.Now, Steve must find where he belongs. But in a place where everyone is a hero, he’ll learn that his greatest fight is with himself.Join Steve in a HaremLit adventure filled with romance, sexy goddesses, self-doubt, creative uses of a dorm’s common shower, exploding houses, copious amounts of food and beer, dresses that get wet or come off very easily, and plenty of sexy times.Afterlives Valhalla is rated R for adult themes, graphic violence, undefined relationships/harem, and explicit scenes. Reader discretion is advised.

    A one-night stand with Natasha Peters has got her pregnant. Now he has two options: give up on his dream as a comedian and get a day job or abandon his responsibility and be a total dick. Only when Tash tells the full truth does a third possibility emerge...This story recounts the all too relatable experience of a fleeting sexual encounter and the hilarious mess it can create. It details all the things you think you know about safe sex and is inspired by the true story of a comedian in crisis.'The honesty shines through this funny, poignant page-turner. Finished it in one sitting. I just had to know!' — Dave Hughes'Simon is one of the top comedy writers out there.' — Jay Leno'This book will enable you to enter the mind of a comedian, but then you may have to call someone to help you get out.' — Akmal Saleh

    When Tri Con hires eight new pilots and assigns them to a pilot class, they find the ground school and flight simulator challenge more than expected. The class is a mix of former military pilots and civilians with varying experience, including a former female flight attendant. Who can survive The Pilot Class and meet the challenge of flying the line as a Tri Con first officer. Personal relationships, a married flight attendant with an abusive husband, a major airline accident, and the federal government are all obstacles that stand in the way of The Pilot Class.

    There’s Tuyen, a lesbian avant-garde artist and the daughter of Vietnamese parents who’ve never recovered from losing one of their children in the crush to board a boat out of Vietnam in the 1970s. Tuyen defines herself in opposition to just about everything her family believes in and strives for. She’s in love with her best friend Carla, a biracial bicycle courier, who’s still reeling from the loss of her mother to suicide eighteen years earlier and who must now deal with her brother Jamal’s latest acts of delinquency. Oku is a jazz-loving poet who, unbeknownst to his Jamaican-born parents, has dropped out of university. He is in constant conflict with his narrow-minded and verbally abusive father and tormented by his unrequited love for Jackie, a gorgeous black woman who runs a hip clothing shop on Queen Street West and dates only white men. Like each of her friends, Jackie feels alienated from her parents, former hipsters from Nova Scotia who never made it out of subsidized housing after their lives became entangled with desire and disappointment. The four characters try to make a life for themselves in the city, supporting one another through their family struggles.There’s a fifth main character, Quy, the child who Tuyen’s parents lost in Vietnam. In his first-person narrative, Quy describes how he survived in various refugee camps, then in the Thai underworld. After years of being hardened, he has finally made his way to Toronto and will soon be reunited with his family – whether to love them or hurt them, it’s not clear. His story builds to a breathless crescendo in an ending that will both shock and satisfy readers. What We All Long For is a gripping and, at times, heart-rending story about identity, longing and loss in a cosmopolitan city. No other writer has presented such a powerful and richly textured portrait of present-day Toronto. Rinaldo Walcott writes in The Globe and Mail: “… every great city has its literary moments, and contemporary Toronto has been longing for one. We can now say with certainty that we no longer have to long for a novel that speaks this city’s uniqueness: Dionne Brand has given us exactly that.” Donna Bailey Nurse writes in the National Post: “What We All Long For is a watershed novel. From now on, Canadian writers will be pressed to portray contemporary Toronto in all its multiracial colour and polyphonic sound.” But What We All Long For is not only about a particular city. It’s about the universal experience of being human. As Walcott puts it, “Brand makes us see ourselves differently and anew. She translates our desires and experiences into a language, an art that allows us to voice that which we live, but could not utter or bring to voice until she did so for us.”

    His provocative presence provides the frame for a study of female fate and male privilege, of the geometries of human relationships, and of the struggle to live morally in the intersecting spaces of our internal and external worlds.With its examination of the possibility that art can both save and destroy us, Rachel Cusk's Second Place is deeply affirming of the human soul, while grappling with its darkest demons.

    Told from multiple perspectives, set against the backdrop of the vibrant multilingual Jaipur Literature Festival, diverse stories of lost love and regret, self-doubt, and new beginnings come together in a narrative that is as varied as India itself.Partly a love letter to the greatest literary show on earth, partly a satire about the glittery set that throngs this literary venue year on year, and partly an ode to the millions of aspiring writers who wander the earth with unsubmitted manuscripts in their bags, Jaipur Journals is a light-footed romp that showcases in full form Gokhale's unsparing eye for the pretensions and the pathos of that loneliest tribe of them all: the writers.

    Considered an early masterpiece of the genre, the Canadian cult comic has been out of print for decades. The new edition includes an introduction by Canadian comics master and Lemony Snicket collaborator Seth (Palookaville; It's a Good Life, If You Don't Weaken).Cryptic and disturbing, like Dave Gibbons (Watchmen) illustrating a film by Ozu, The Cage spurns narrative for atmosphere, guiding us through a series of disarrayed rooms and desolate landscapes, tracking a stuttering and circling time and a sequence of objects: headphones, inky stains, bedsheets. It's not about where we're going but how – if – we get there.

    Drawing on intimate personal experience, A History of My Brief Body is a meditation on grief, joy, love, and sex at the intersection of indigeneity and queerness.Billy-Ray Belcourt’s debut memoir opens with a tender letter to his kokum and memories of his early life in the hamlet of Joussard, Alberta, and on the Driftpile First Nation. Piece by piece, Billy-Ray’s writings invite us to unpack and explore the big and broken world he inhabits every day, in all its complexity and contradiction: a legacy of colonial violence and the joy that flourishes in spite of it; first loves and first loves lost; sexual exploration and intimacy; the act of writing as a survival instinct and a way to grieve.What emerges is not only a profound meditation on memory, gender, anger, shame, and ecstasy, but also the outline of a way forward. With startling honesty, and in a voice distinctly and assuredly his own, Belcourt situates his life experiences within a constellation of seminal queer texts, among which this book is sure to earn its place.Eye-opening, intensely emotional, and excessively quotable, A History of My Brief Body demonstrates over and over again the power of words to both devastate and console us. Lambda Literary Award, Finalist / "A Best Book of 2020" ―Kirkus Reviews, Book Riot, CBC, Globe and Mail, Largehearted Boy."Stunning... Happiness, this beautiful book says, is the ultimate act of resistance." ―Michelle Hart, O, The Oprah Magazine

    Henry Award in 1961, the stories have been anthologized over a hundred times, made into three films, translated into thirteen languages, and - most important - once read, they abide in the hearts of their readers.

    Collects the best of Anne Sexton's memoirs and prose reflections on her development as a poet

    I step into the shower and almost faint, an image of taking the day by the throat and bashing its head against the wall floating in my mind.Thirty-year-old Millie just can't pull it together. Misanthropic and morose, she spends her days killing time at a thankless temp job until she can return home to her empty apartment, where she oscillates wildly between self-recrimination and mild delusion, fixating on all the little ways she might change her life. Then she watches TV until she drops off to sleep, and the cycle begins again.When the possibility of a full-time job offer arises, it seems to bring the better life she's envisioning - one that involves nicer clothes, fresh produce, maybe even financial independence - within reach. But with it also comes the paralyzing realization, lurking just beneath the surface, of just how hollow that vision has become. Darkly hilarious and devastating, The New Me is a dizzying descent into the mind of a young woman trapped in the funhouse of American consumer culture.

    Thumbing back through the pages again, slower this time, I found it. It was about an inch thickness in… Mom’s handwriting… pages of it.When a woman linked to the supernatural, discovers her adoptive mother’s journal holds a cryptic mystery, she and her closest friends race to uncover a secret matriarchal society safeguarded by mystical unseen forces. What if Cancer wasn’t just an illness or evil sickness that took our loved ones? What if it’s something bigger—a sacrifice or choice to keep humanity safe—to keep the balance?Ottawa, the capital of Canada, is considered the 3rd cleanest city in the world and rated the 2nd highest quality of living of any big city in the Americas, but unless you’re Canadian you probably wouldn’t know any of that stuff. And it’s all very nice and well, but boring as hell.... That’s what four unsuspecting girlfriends thought, until their good friend Lynn Westlake came home to visit, and they found themselves in the biggest mystery and adventure of their normal boring lives.The Guard is the first book in the N. L. Westaway urban fantasy/paranormal mystery trilogy. If you appreciate brilliant urban fantasy or paranormal mysteries involving everyday people, you’ll love this entertaining three-part trilogy. Note; it is recommended that you read the books in order as the mystery is in three parts, and not individual stories per book.