Gabriel remembered how good she’d felt in his arms when they’d been lovers. The feel of her wildly beating pulse, her scent, her warmth. He’d left his mark on her slender throat more than once. Though he smiled and made small talk, his attention remained with the woman he’d never expected to see again. Angie is now a cop, and the bad boy is back to change her life forever. Only mature readers should download this book.

    The story of the most controversial Test series in cricket's history.

    With the elegance and verve for which he is well known, Stephen Greenblatt, author of the best-selling Will in the World, shows that Shakespeare was strikingly averse to such absolutes and constantly probed the possibility of freedom from them. Again and again, Shakespeare confounds the designs and pretensions of kings, generals, and churchmen. His aversion to absolutes even leads him to probe the exalted and seemingly limitless passions of his lovers.Greenblatt explores this rich theme by addressing four of Shakespeare’s preoccupations across all the genres in which he worked. He first considers the idea of beauty in Shakespeare’s works, specifically his challenge to the cult of featureless perfection and his interest in distinguishing marks. He then turns to Shakespeare’s interest in murderous hatred, most famously embodied in Shylock but seen also in the character Bernardine in Measure for Measure. Next Greenblatt considers the idea of Shakespearean authority—that is, Shakespeare’s deep sense of the ethical ambiguity of power, including his own. Ultimately, Greenblatt takes up Shakespearean autonomy, in particular the freedom of artists, guided by distinctive forms of perception, to live by their own laws and to claim that their creations are singularly unconstrained.A book that could only have been written by Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespeare’s Freedom is a wholly original and eloquent meditation by the most acclaimed and influential Shakespearean of our time.

    Joe took toy soldiers to a whole new level by giving them the ability to pose via moveable parts, as well as interchangeable clothing and accessories, the business of creating pop sculpture icons for the mass market was off and running. Superheroes came next, followed by TV show and movie characters, most notably those from Star Wars. Today, action figures exist for sports stars, rock stars, even presidents.With today's blockbuster success of animated films, action figures and collectibles have become a behemoth industry--with a growing need for skilled artists who can bring these characters to life. So how do you get started?The trio of veteran industry insiders who authored this book take you on an incredibly thorough journey that begins with drawing conceptual drafts and continues through rough sculpting and honing the final product. Along the way, you'll learn how to research your character, shape casts from a variety of materials including wax and resin, make accessories, articulate characters so that they are poseable, paint them, and ultimately convince an art director to buy and manufacture them. Whether you want to make small PVC toys, collectible statues, or larger high-end collectibles, Pop Sculpture offers step-by-step demos and words of wisdom from the pros.

    His life, too, is the stuff of legend, from his survival of the siege of Leningrad in early childhood to his expulsion from the Soviet Union and his achievements as a Nobel Prize winner and America’s poet laureate.In this penetrating biography, Brodsky’s life and work are illuminated by his great friend, the late poet and literary scholar Lev Loseff. Drawing on a wide range of source materials, some previously unpublished, and extensive interviews with writers and critics, Loseff carefully reconstructs Brodsky’s personal history while offering deft and sensitive commentary on the philosophical, religious, and mythological sources that influenced the poet’s work. Published to great acclaim in Russia and now available in English for the first time, this is literary biography of the first order, and sets the groundwork for any books on Brodsky that might follow.

    Boyd adds another counterintuitive and provocative thesis to his corpus. While conservative scholars and pastors have struggled for years to show that the Bible is without errors, Boyd considers this a fool's errand. Instead, he says, we should embrace the mistakes and contradictions in Scripture, for they show that God chose to use fallible humans to communicate timeless truths. Just as God ultimately came to save humanity in the form of a human, God chose to impart truth through the imperfect medium of human writing. Instead of the Bible's imperfections being a reason to attack its veracity, these "problems" actually support the trustworthiness of Christian Scripture. Inspired Imperfection is required reading for anyone who's questioned the Bible because of its contradictions.

    This "Columbia Critical Guide" starts with extracts from Melville's own letters and essays and from early reviews of "Moby-Dick" that set the terms for later critical evaluations. Subsequent chapters deal with the "Melville Revival" of the 1920s and the novel's central place in the establishment, growth, and reassessment of American Studies in the 1940s and 1950s. The final chapters examine postmodern New Americanist readings of the text, and how these provide new models for thinking about American culture.

    The food served in Le Bernardin's beautiful dining room is as subtle and refined as any in the world, and because fish and shellfish are often best turned out quickly and simply, the recipes in this book can be reproduced by any home cook.Maguy Le Coze traces the origins of Le Bernardin's simplicity to her late brother, Gilbert, the restaurant's legendary cofounder and first chef. Today, Chef Eric Ripert carries on Gilbert's simplistic tradition with dishes such as Poached Halibut on Marinated Vegetables, Pan-Roasted Grouper with Wild Mushrooms and Artichokes, and Grilled Salmon with Mushroom Vinaigrette. And, of course, there are the desserts for which Le Bernardin is also so well known--from Chocolate Millefeuille to Honeyed Pear and Almond Cream Tarts.Essential to the experience of dining at Le Bernardin and to the Le Bernardin Cookbook are the dynamic and charming personalities of Maguy Le Coze and Eric Ripert, whose lively dialogue and colorful anecdotes shine from these pages as brightly as the recipes themselves.

    Burroughs' attempt to redefine a complacent society's notion of sanity and normalcy and to reinvent their own lives through jazz, drugs, and law-breaking.

     Checks off all the boxes on the “you should run far away” checklist. Best friend’s new stepbrother. Broody. Hot as sin. Mysterious past. Pissed off at the world. Everyone says he’s trouble. Parker even has the leather jacket for crying out loud. I can’t take my eyes off him, though. When he’s in the room, I can feel his gaze on me at all times, heating me from within. All I wanted to do was come home for the holidays and spend Christmas with friends and family, before I had to go out in the real world and put my degrees to use. We’re polar opposites. There’s no way it would ever work between us. But, the first time he touches me, and electricity blooms across my skin, I know one thing… All I want for Christmas is him.

    Everybody else is just doing it wrong. At least that's what the developers said. The Forbidden Arcana series follows the mage Jericho as he discovers the secret to unlocking magic in the VRMMO Forbidden Arcana and becomes the most powerful mage in the game world! But that’s the start of his problems as each new magic discovered comes with new problems. Join Jericho as he acquires sexy familiars, battles rival players, slays powerful monsters, and navigates the chaotic struggles that come with being the number one mage! Forbidden Arcana is a fun fantasy soft LitRPG / Gamelit and contains elf strippers, seductive fairies, foul language, violence, twosomes threesomes foursomes and moresomes, and completely over the top love making. You've been warned.

    She just needs change, and a direction. She's found it in Matthew Harper. He's smart, financially stable, drop-dead sexy, and has no baggage. There's just one problem, he's 18 years younger, and he's full of surprises. But what unfolds between them is something neither would have guessed,an unexpected romance about coming to terms, coming of age, and fighting for the love of your life.

    Yet John Williams's quietly powerful tale of a Midwestern college professor, William Stoner, whose life becomes a parable of solitude and anguish eventually found an admiring audience in America and especially in Europe. The New York Times called Stoner "a perfect novel," and a host of writers and critics, including Colum McCann, Julian Barnes, Bret Easton Ellis, Ian McEwan, Emma Straub, Ruth Rendell, C. P. Snow, and Irving Howe, praised its artistry. The New Yorker deemed it "a masterly portrait of a truly virtuous and dedicated man."The Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel traces the life of Stoner's author, John Williams. Acclaimed biographer Charles J. Shields follows the whole arc of Williams's life, which in many ways paralleled that of his titular character, from their shared working-class backgrounds to their undistinguished careers in the halls of academia. Shields vividly recounts Williams's development as an author, whose other works include the novels Butcher's Crossing and Augustus (for the latter, Williams shared the 1972 National Book Award). Shields also reveals the astonishing afterlife of Stoner, which garnered new fans with each American reissue, and then became a bestseller all over Europe after Dutch publisher Lebowski brought out a translation in 2013. Since then, Stoner has been published in twenty-one countries and has sold over a million copies.

    Combing through her stories, poems, articles, reviews, correspondence, and even her rare journalism and song lyrics, editor Barry Day has selected and arranged passages that describe her life and its preoccupations-urban living, the theater and cinema, the battle of the sexes, and death by dissipation. Best known for her scathing pieces for the New Yorker and her membership in the Algonquin Round Table ("The greatest collection of unsaleable wit in America."), Parker filled her work with a unique mix of fearlessness, melancholy, savvy, and hope. In Dorothy Parker, the irrepressible writer addresses: her early career writing for magazines; her championing of social causes such as integration; and the obsession with suicide that became another drama ("Scratch an actor...and you'll find an actress."), literature ("This is not a novel to be tossed aside lightly. It should be thrown with great force.") and much more.

    What is it about the British and food? We just don't get it, do we? Britain is notorious worldwide for its bad food and increasingly corpulent population, but it's a habit we just can't seem to kick. Welcome to the country where recipe and diet books feature constantly in top 10 bestseller lists, but where the average meal takes only eight minutes to prepare and people spend more time watching celebrity chefs cooking on TV than doing any cooking themselves, the country where a dining room table is increasingly becoming an optional item of furniture. Welcome to the nation that is almost pathologically obsessed with the safety and provenance of food but which relies on factory-prepared ready meals for sustenance, eating four times more of them than any other country in Europe, the country that never has its greasy fingers out of a packet of crisps, consuming more than the rest of Europe put together. Welcome to the affluent land where children eat food that is more nutritionally impoverished than their counterparts in South African townships, the country where hospitals can sell fast-food burgers, but not home-baked cake, the G8 state where even the Prime Minister refuses to eat broccoli. Award-winning investigative food journalist Joanna Blythman takes us on an amusing, perceptive and subversive journey through Britain's contemporary food landscape, and traces the roots of our contemporary food troubles in deeply engrained ideas about class, modernity and progress.