She felt it was a random kidnapping and so she fully expected to end up as a meal but she had no idea that she was... chosen. She was chosen by handsome Vampire Prince Lucien but Mara had no idea why. Is it for her blood? For her fertility? Information? Mara was about to discover the real answer was more important than she could have ever imagined... This is an epic vampire romance novel full of mystery, mythology, action and sensuality. Please only read if 18+ due to some scenes of an adult nature.

    Fangoria has called Wilde “one of the finest purveyors of erotically charged horror fiction around.”Each story is accompanied by seductive, haunting, full color artworks and illustrations created by some of the most imaginative artists in the genre: Clive Barker, Nick Percival, Steve McGinnis, Daniele Serra, Eric Gross, Tara Bush, Vincent Sammy, & Ben Baldwin.

    Kink explores the many dazzling facets of obsession--intellectual, emotional, and sexual--created and refracted by the ever-changing dynamics of a three-way relationship between a man and two women.

    In a body of work spanning over a half-century, he was variously a draughtsman, a printmaker, a sculptor and a painter. This short book is both a biography and a guide to his art. It focuses on the extraordinary works that Henri Matisse made during the last period of his life - the large-scale cut-outs on coloured paper, including his famous Blue Nudes, The Snail and Large Composition with Masks.

    However, unlike Kinsey’s books, which were almost unreadably dense and data-driven, Who’s Been Sleeping in Your Head? features narrative accounts of sexual fantasies and the author’s own insightful interpretations of how those fantasies affect our lives. Kahr reveals the astonishing truth behind secrecy, shame and taboo, and demonstrates how sex fantasies exert a more powerful influence on our emotions, behavior, and relationships than we ever imagined. Kahr’s insights are liberating. He tells us the story of Margaret, who, in mining early sexual abuse for arousing and satisfying sexual fantasies: “succeeded brilliantly in turning a childhood trauma into an adult triumph.” He explains how he helped a young man who couldn’t get turned on by his beautiful girlfriend but only by dominatrix-themed porn, and how numerous men and women used fantasy to become more intimate with their partners-or to be unfaithful or even cruel to them instead. Ultimately, by unmasking the myths and destroying the guilt and ignorance surrounding sexual fantasy, Kahr offers readers a chance to lead richer and less conflicted lives.

    J. Harvey? Blur or Oasis? Dylan or Keats? And how many friendships have ridden on the answer? Such questions aren't merely the stuff of fanzines and idle talk; they inform our most passionate arguments, distill our most deeply held values, make meaning of our ever-changing culture. In Performing Rites, one of the most influential writers on popular music asks what we talk about when we talk about music. What's good, what's bad? What's high, what's low? Why do such distinctions matter? Instead of dismissing emotional response and personal taste as inaccessible to the academic critic, Simon Frith takes these forms of engagement as his subject--and discloses their place at the very center of the aesthetics that structure our culture and color our lives.Taking up hundreds of songs and writers, Frith insists on acts of evaluation of popular music as music. Ranging through and beyond the twentieth century, Performing Rites puts the Pet Shop Boys and Puccini, rhythm and lyric, voice and technology, into a dialogue about the undeniable impact of popular aesthetics on our lives. How we nod our heads or tap our feet, grin or grimace or flip the dial; how we determine what's sublime and what's "for real"--these are part of the way we construct our social identities, and an essential response to the performance of all music. Frith argues that listening itself is a performance, both social gesture and bodily response. From how they are made to how they are received, popular songs appear here as not only meriting aesthetic judgments but also demanding them, and shaping our understanding of what all music means.

    Cain's classic novels Double Indemnity and The Postman Always Rings Twice. As Roy Hoopes points out in his incisive Introduction, James M. Cain wrote best when he wrote succinctly, and this collection proves the point.The short stories, sketches and dialogues, and one novella in this book are filled with people caught in the cold-blooded grip of passion and fate. Every page is written in the crisp, fast-paced, caustically ironic style that made James M. Cain a master of the school of hard-boiled fiction."An impressive, revealing selection of Cain's journalistic sketches and short fiction" - ALA Booklist"Taken together, the short stories comprise a satisfying companion to Cain's novels." - Publishers Weekly

    Indeed, it can be argued that the "new space opera" is one of the defining streams of modern SF.Now, World Fantasy Award-winning anthologists David G. Hartwell and Kathryn Cramer have compiled a definitive overview of this subgenre, both as it was in the days of the pulp magazines, and as it has become in 2005. Included are major works from genre progenitors like Jack Williamson and Leigh Brackett, stylish midcentury voices like Cordwainer Smith and Samuel R. Delany, popular favorites like David Drake, Lois McMaster Bujold, and Ursula K. Le Guin, and modern-day pioneers such as Iain M. Banks, Steven Baxter, Scott Westerfeld, and Charles Stross.

    The poems of this collection are varied: some are like studies for the scenes of a novel; others, again, like a conversation, are purely imaginative sketches, whilst some have an autobiographical interest. The poems include: The Village, The Old Woman, A Dialogue, The Dog, My Opponent, An Axiom, Dost Thou Hearken to the Words of the Fool, The Beggar, A Contented Man, The Destruction of the World, Mescha, The Blockhead, An Oriental Legend, and many more. Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (1818 - 1883) was a Russian playwright, novelist, and writer of short stories. "A Sportsman's Sketches" (1852), his first serious publication, constitutes a milestone of Russian Realism. Many antiquarian texts such as this are increasingly hard to come by and expensive, and it is with this in mind that we are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition. It comes complete with a specially commissioned new biography of the author."

    A former circus clown who was spared the gas chamber so that he might entertain thousands of other Jews as they marched to their deaths, Adam Stein is now the ringleader at an asylum in the Negev desert populated solely by Holocaust survivors. Alternately more brilliant than the doctors and more insane than any of the patients, Adam struggles wildly to make sense of a world in which the line between sanity and madness has been irreversibly blurred. With the biting irony of Catch-22, the intellectual vigor of Saul Bellow, and the pathos and humanity that are Kaniuk's hallmarks, Adam Resurrected offers a vision of a modern hell that devastates even as it inches toward redemption.

    48 pages ofillustrations, 16 in color. Maps.

    A minority group in America is harassed for its ties to a foreign country. A worldwide conflict tests our resolve in combat abroad and our commitment to justice, equality, and liberty at home…Within months after Pearl Harbor, 110,000 Japanese Americans were forcibly “evacuated” from the West Coast, losing their jobs, their property, and their homes. In less than a year, they were “relocated” and incarcerated in desolate camps throughout the West, Southwest, and South. Yet, incredibly, thousands of young men from the camps joined the Army, to defend the country that had denied them their rights. This is the dramatic story of the segregated Japanese American 100th Battalion/442d Regimental Combat Team—and what they did to affirm their full citizenship. As Gen. Jacob L. Devers put it, in World War II the soldiers of the 100th/442d had “more than earned the right to be called just Americans, not Japanese Americans."During the fall of 1944, the combat team made headlines when it rescued the “lost battalion” of the 36th “Texas” Division. At the same time, with the 1944 elections looming, the Roosevelt Administration was debating whether to close the camps. And while the soldiers of the 100th/442d were sacrificing their lives in Europe, the Supreme Court was deciding the infamous Korematsu and Endo cases, which challenged the notion that “military necessity” justified the “relocation.”Through interviews with surviving veterans, archival research, maps, and photos, Robert Asahina has reconstructed these fateful events of October-November 1944. From breathless battle scenes, masterfully handled in all their detail; to the unbreakable bonds of friendship in the field; to heart- wrenching stories of loss and discrimination on the mainland and in Hawaii, Just Americans tells the story of what Gen. George C. Marshall called the “most decorated unit in American military history for its size and length of service.” It is also the story of soldiers in combat who were fighting a greater battle at home—a struggle that continues for minority groups today—over what it means to be an American.

    Shadows of Ecstasy tells of a mysterious invasion that threatens Europe from Africa. United in a fanatic crusade against death, the spiritual powers of the "Dark Continent" rise up with exultant paganism. Charles Williams-novelist, poet, critic, dramatist and biographer-died in his native England in May, 1945. He had a lively and devoted following there and achieved a considerable reputation as a lecturer on the faculty of Oxford University. T.S. Eliot, Dorothy Sayers and C.S. Lewis were among his distinguished friends and literary sponsors.

    Dario Capece. Gorgeous. Powerful. Untouchable. Of all men to fall for, he was the worse.I knew there were risks, but I couldn’t stay away. When Dario Capece called, I answered. When he touched me, I moved closer. When he broke all of my rules, I pretended not to notice.I knew there were risks in falling for him. I just didn't realize those risks included death.*This is a compilation of the Even Money and Double Down duet. This complete series includes Rolling the Dice, a spin-off novella.*

    He awakens her sexual desire, enslaves her . . . and leads her along a dark path to certain destruction.Poignantly honest and burning with unbridled sexuality The Ties that Bind was a scandalous bestseller in France where the young author's personality brought her briefly into the limelight before she died in a tragic car crash while still in her early twenties.