"Poignant, sexy. . . lyrical, passionate. . . cool and delicate. . . hot as a chili pepper."--Boston Globe.

    Purity rings, purity pledges, and purity balls came with a dangerous message: girls are potential sexual “stumbling blocks” for boys and men, and any expression of a girl’s sexuality could reflect the corruption of her character. This message traumatized many girls—resulting in anxiety, fear, and experiences that mimicked the symptoms of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder—and trapped them in a cycle of shame. This is the sex education Linda Kay Klein grew up with. Fearing being marked a Jezebel, Klein broke up with her high school boyfriend because she thought God told her to, and took pregnancy tests though she was a virgin, terrified that any sexual activity would be punished with an out-of-wedlock pregnancy. When the youth pastor of her church was convicted of sexual enticement of a twelve-year-old girl, Klein began to question the purity-based sexual ethic. She contacted young women she knew, asking if they were coping with the same shame-induced issues she was. These intimate conversations developed into a twelve-year quest that took her across the country and into the lives of women raised in similar religious communities—a journey that facilitated her own healing and led her to churches that are seeking a new way to reconcile sexuality and spirituality. Sexual shame is by no means confined to evangelical culture; Pure is a powerful wake-up call about our society’s subjugation of women.

    Wade In this deeply moving work, Ann Fessler brings to light the lives of hundreds of thousands of young single American women forced to give up their newborn children in the years following World War II and before Roe v. Wade. The Girls Who Went Away tells a story not of wild and carefree sexual liberation, but rather of a devastating double standard that has had punishing long-term effects on these women and on the children they gave up for adoption. Based on Fessler's groundbreaking interviews, it brings to brilliant life these women's voices and the spirit of the time, allowing each to share her own experience in gripping and intimate detail. Today, when the future of the Roe decision and women's reproductive rights stand squarely at the front of a divisive national debate, Fessler brings to the fore a long-overlooked history of single women in the fifties, sixties, and early seventies. In 2002, Fessler, an adoptee herself, traveled the country interviewing women willing to speak publicly about why they relinquished their children. Researching archival records and the political and social climate of the time, she uncovered a story of three decades of women who, under enormous social and family pressure, were coerced or outright forced to give their babies up for adoption. Fessler deftly describes the impossible position in which these women found themselves: as a sexual revolution heated up in the postwar years, birth control was tightly restricted, and abortion proved prohibitively expensive or life endangering. At the same time, a postwar economic boom brought millions of American families into the middle class, exerting its own pressures to conform to a model of family perfection. Caught in the middle, single pregnant women were shunned by family and friends, evicted from schools, sent away to maternity homes to have their children alone, and often treated with cold contempt by doctors, nurses, and clergy. The majority of the women Fessler interviewed have never spoken of their experiences, and most have been haunted by grief and shame their entire adult lives. A searing and important look into a long-overlooked social history, The Girls Who Went Away is their story.

    Among its pages are a couple who becomes obsessed with their friend hearing them have sex, then seeing them have sex…until they can’t have sex without him; a ten-year-old whose birthday party takes a sinister turn when she wishes for “something mean”; a woman who finds a book of spells half hidden at the library and summons her heart’s desire: a nameless, naked man; and a self-proclaimed “biter” who dreams of sneaking up behind and sinking her teeth into a green-eyed, long-haired, pink-cheeked coworker.Spanning a range of genres and topics—from the mundane to the murderous and supernatural—these are stories about sex and punishment, guilt and anger, the pleasure and terror of inflicting and experiencing pain. These stories fascinate and repel, revolt and arouse, scare and delight in equal measure. And, as a collection, they point a finger at you, daring you to feel uncomfortable—or worse, understood—as if to say, “You want this, right? You know you want this.”Bad boy --Look at your game, girl --Sardines --The night runner --The mirror, the bucket, and the old thigh bone --Cat person --The good guy --The boy in the pool --Scarred --The matchbox sign --Death wish --Biter --Acknowledgments

    M. Homes as one of the most provocative and daring writers of her generation. Here you'll find the cult classic A Real Doll, the tale of a teenage boy's erotic obsession with his sister's favorite doll; Adults Alone, which first introduced Paul and Elaine, the crack-smoking yuppie couple whose marriage careens out of control in Homes's novel Music for Torching; and Looking for Johnny, in which a kidnapped boy, having failed his abductor's expectations, is returned home. Brilliantly conceived, sharply etched, and exceptionally satisfying, these stories explore the American dream in ways you're not likely soon to forget. Working in Kodacolor hues, Homes offers an uncanny picture of a surreal suburbia-outrageous and utterly believable.

    Yet consent is a blunt tool. To grasp sex in all its complexity—its deep ambivalences, its relationship to gender, class, race and power—we need to move beyond yes and no, wanted and unwanted.We do not know the future of sex—but perhaps we could imagine it. Amia Srinivasan’s stunning debut helps us do just that. She traces the meaning of sex in our world, animated by the hope of a different world. She reaches back into an older feminist tradition that was unafraid to think of sex as a political phenomenon. She discusses a range of fraught relationships—between discrimination and preference, pornography and freedom, rape and racial injustice, punishment and accountability, students and teachers, pleasure and power, capitalism and liberation.The Right to Sex: Feminism in the Twenty-First Century is a provocation and a promise, transforming many of our most urgent political debates and asking what it might mean to be free.

    A phone call in the middle of the night to ask for a "free pass" from her boyfriend of 7 1/2 years was hard to take seriously. When he doesn't get the answer he wanted, his drunken stupor is all it takes to tell her via text message that it's over. That's enough to irritate Mattie into flying home to deal with him.However, bad weather grounds her flight out of Washington leaving her stranded in the airport all night with one other passenger... Logan McNarry.Ordinarily, she wouldn't even think of speaking to him, but Travis' unexpected break up was just the opportunity she needed to seek passion in the arms of another man.All this leads up to the predicament that Mattie must face. Choosing the safe, steady life already mapped out, or chasing the love and passion one only stumbles upon once in a lifetime.

    The fairy tale-based works of the tortured confessional poet, whose raw honesty and wit in the face of psychological pain have touched thousands of readers.

    Martin. The new world culture of eating disorders and food and body issues affects virtually all -- not just a rare few -- of today's young women. They are your sisters, friends, and colleagues -- a generation told that they could "be anything," who instead heard that they had to "be everything." Driven by a relentless quest for perfection, they are on the verge of a breakdown, exhausted from overexercising, binging, purging, and depriving themselves to attain an unhealthy ideal.An emerging new talent, Courtney E. Martin is the voice of a young generation so obsessed with being thin that their consciousness is always focused inward, to the detriment of their careers and relationships. Health and wellness, joy and love have come to seem ancillary compared to the desire for a perfect body. Even though eating disorders first became generally known about twenty-five years ago, they have burgeoned, worsened, become more difficult to treat and more fatal (50 percent of anorexics who do not respond to treatment die within ten years). Consider these statistics:Ten million Americans suffer from eating disorders. Seventy million people worldwide suffer from eating disorders. More than half of American women between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five would pre fer to be run over by a truck or die young than be fat. More than two-thirds would rather be mean or stupid. Eating disorders have the highest mortality rate of any psychological disease.In "Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters," Martin offers original research from the front lines of the eating disorders battlefield. Drawn from more than a hundred interviews with sufferers, psychologists, nutritionists, sociocultural experts, and others, her expose reveals a new generation of "perfect girls" who are obsessive-compulsive, overachieving, and self-sacrificing in multiple -- and often dangerous -- new ways. Young women are "told over and over again," Martin notes, "that we can be anything. But in those affirmations, assurances, and assertions was a concealed pressure, an unintended message: You are special. You are worth something. But you need to be perfect to live up to that specialness."With its vivid and often heartbreaking personal stories, "Perfect Girls, Starving Daughters" has the power both to shock and to educate. It is a true call to action and cannot be missed.

    Six years later and broke off my ass, I take a job at the best special feature magazine in the southern United States. It's my dream job, and I'm more than happy to take on my first assignment that includes a one-way ticket to South Africa, where I'm supposed to follow a veterinarian who has made a name for himself as the lion whisperer. I haven't dated anyone since Preston, and the bitter, broken-hearted girl I used to be is ready to pack up and quit the very second I see him again. It's only the soft words from Preston's best friends, Jay and Wren, that stop me in my tracks. Encouragement and a way out presents itself in the form of the two hot as sin safari guides. I can't let Preston get to me like he used to. I'm here to do a job and nothing more. If he wants to rekindle anything, he'll have to get used to competition because, in my dreams, I'm no longer flying solo. No. I don't want one man. I want three.

    Literally… So what if I gave into a moment of weakness with a hot stranger on a train? Maybe did some things that would make my mom shake her head. No problem, right? Go on about your way, right? It’s a big city…millions of people and you’ll never see them again, right? Wrong. It turns out this guy I let myself go with is my new client, Derek Lowell. Not only that, but of course he has to be a hot, single, billionaire and all, and obviously he has every woman at my job salivating over his ultra-ripped body with his 8-pack abs and beautiful, rugged face and his monster…uhmm…ego? You know by now what all those alpha-male billionaires say in these blurbs. Like, ‘Oh I always get what I want and I want her, haha’ or ‘She doesn’t know it yet but she’s going to be on her knees begging me not to stop, haha’. Ya, whatevs, dude. You wanna get me on my knees it better be because I’m about to sit on your face. Oh, what’s wrong? Is the Big Bad Alpha-Male Billionaire scared of lil’ ol’ me? Oh, now he’s mad and he says he’s gonna teach me a lesson. I think this is gonna be fun… *** It’s the cute single girl versus the Big Bad Billionaire in this first installment from Mona Cox. Guaranteed to be sweet, sexy, sassy, and fun. No cheating or cliffhangers. Happily Ever After? Always, babe ***

    James:This is not a fairytale. This is not a story of a woman who is perfect. This is not the story of a perfect couple that sails off into the sunset. This is gritty. This is frustrating. This is heartbreaking. This is my story, hard as it may be to tell.**********My name is Sullivan Beal – at least, that’s what I tell people – and I live life by my own rules. Most of my adult life has been spent hiding from my past. That is, until I meet him face-to-face.Ben Hayes is the demanding C.O.O. who is hell-bent on having me for himself. But, I’m wrong for him. I know it, the universe knows it.If he ever found out who I really am, how utterly tainted I am, he wouldn’t waste his time wanting me.There are things in my past that would destroy everyone in my wake.But Ben is relentless, trying to break down the walls around my heart that a messy past has caused me to construct. It’s a pity he doesn’t know…I am too tainted for love. “Love isn’t for me, and my kind of love is too tainted, too blemished to share with anyone.” For mature readers ONLY

    Two Dominants. One Drunken Bet. IAN MATHERS That feisty blonde making my life hell is Kathryn, a woman who seduced me twelve years ago. Seduced and left me in one of the most embarrassing situations of my life. I don't hold a grudge. Not really. How can I when I still find myself staring at her every time she's around? How can I want her to leave my presence when all I think about is her watching my every move, studying me... wanting me? Oh, I still want her. I need to have her like the world needs the sun. There's just one problem. She's a Domme. I have no idea how to seduce a woman I refuse to let control me. KATHRYN ALISON Ian is smug, condescending... and so stupidly handsome that I can't stop thinking about him as we work together. When the sparks fly so hot that we finally get what we've wanted for the longest decade ever, I make the greatest mistake of my life. I propose a friendly wager that sees the loser submitting to the other for a night. I never anticipated losing.

    But, as she comes to learn, liberation and happiness are not necessarily the same thing. A literary sensation when first published in 1973, Fear of Flying established Erica Jong as one of her generation’s foremost voices on sex and feminism. Nearly four decades later, the novel has lost none of its insight, verve, or jaw-dropping wit.

    This is her story: of coming to Christ, of building a career, of admitting who she is, and of how her faith remained strong through it all.At the top of her career in the Christian music industry, Jennifer Knapp quit. A few years later, she publicly revealed she is gay. A media frenzy ensued, and many of her former fans were angry with what they saw as turning her back on God. But through it all, she held on to the truth that had guided her from the beginning.In this memoir, she finally tells her story: of her troubled childhood, the love of music that pulled her through, her dramatic conversion to Christianity, her rise to stardom, her abrupt departure from Christian Contemporary Music, her years of trying to come to terms with her sexual orientation, and her return to music and Nashville in 2010, when she came out publicly for the first time. She also talks about the importance of her faith, and despite the many who claim she can no longer call herself a believer, she maintains that she is both gay and a Christian.Now an advocate for LGBT issues in the church, Jennifer has witnessed heartbreaking struggles as churches wrestle with issues of homosexuality and faith. This engrossing, inspiring memoir will help people understand her story and to believe in their own stories, whatever they may be.