Paying for sex isn’t his style; it’s disgusting and beneath him, but it makes perfect sense. Infidelity provides their exclusive clientele discretion and ironclad nondisclosure agreements. What better way to explore his darker cravings without worry his sex life will become front page news. Turns out companionship is cheap, but happiness? When Rowan leaves at the end of their year long agreement, will he be left with the tattered remains of what could have been? Not if he has any say, but when privilege becomes a burden, even a King will cry.

    Kurtz is a surgeon, a good surgeon, if he does say so himself (which he does, despite the old joke about how if you ask a surgeon to name the three best surgeons in the world, he'll have trouble thinking of the other two). He has a luxury apartment on the East side, a good-looking girlfriend and a busy practice. >>>A surgeon pulled into a world of murder, betrayal and vengeance Kurtz demands the best, from himself, from his colleagues and from his residents, and he never runs from a fight. So when former girlfriend Sharon Lee is found strangled in a hospital call room, Kurtz cannot resist getting involved...and along with police detective Lew Barent, he soon finds himself embroiled in a twisted tale of murder, betrayal and brutal revenge. Scroll Up and Grab Your Copy Today!

    From radically different backgrounds yet with a common legacy, having grown up in post-handover Hong Kong, these young people have little attachment to the era of British colonial rule or today's China. Instead, they see themselves as Hong Kongers, an identity both reinforced and threatened by the rapid expansion of Beijing's influence. Amid great political and social uncertainty, Generation HK is trying to build a brighter future. Theirs is a truly captivating coming-of-age story that reflects the bitter struggles beneath the gleaming facade of modern Hong Kong.

    Slight of build, shy by nature, prone to fits of depression, the 28-year-old Beijing photographer was nonetheless at the forefront of Chinese artists' battle for creative freedom. Like his champion Ai Weiwei, Ren was controversial in his homeland and wildly popular in the rest of the world. He said, -I don't really view my work as taboo, because I don't think so much in cultural context, or political context. I don't intentionally push boundaries, I just do what I do.- Why? Because his models, friends, and increasingly, fans, are naked, often outdoors, high in the trees or on the terrifyingly vertiginous rooftops of Beijing, stacked like building blocks, heads wrapped in octopi, body cavities sprouting phone cords and flowers, whatever enters his mind at the moment. He denies his intentions are sexual, and there is a clean detachment about even his most extreme images: the urine, the insertions, the many, many erections. In a 2013 interview VICE magazine asked, -there are a lot of dicks ... do you just like dicks?- Ren responded, -It's not just dicks I'm interested in, I like to portray every organ in a fresh, vivid and emotional way.- True though that may be, the penises Ren photographed are not just fresh and vivid, but unusually large, making one wonder just where he met his friends. In the same piece, Hang also stated, -Gender isn't important when I'm taking pictures, it only matters to me when I'm having sex, - making him a pioneer of gender inclusiveness. Young fans still eagerly flock to his website, Facebook, Instagram, and Flickr accounts. His photographs, all produced on film, have been the subject of over 20 solo and 70 group shows in his brief six-year career, in cities as disparate as Tokyo, Athens, Paris, New York, Copenhagen, Frankfurt, Vienna, and yes, even Beijing. He self-published 16 monographs, in tiny print runs, that now sell for up to $600. TASCHEN's Ren Hang is his only international collection, covering his entire career, with well-loved favorites and many never-before-seen photos of men, women, Beijing, and those many, many erections. We take solace remembering Ren's joy when he first held the book, shared by his long-time partner Jiaqi, featured on the cover.Text in English, French, and German

    who is the beast? I couldn't care less about conventions. After the most important thing in my life is snatched from me, I don't give a rip about anything or anyone. I hole up in my house and work myself to exhaustion. Too bad I need human help to subdue the wild pack of crazy chihuahuas I inherited.They bark until my ears hurt, rummage through my neighbor's garbage and try to climb me like a tree. One night, as I'm about to throw up my hands in surrender, I see her.An angel sent from heaven just to tame the heathen canines. That one fateful meeting with Brooke changes everything. I struggle to resist her killer curves. I try. I fail. It's only supposed to be one time with no strings attached. A passionate night based on addictive chemistry crackling between two consenting adults.But after one taste, I can't sweep her perfect image out of my dirty mind. The movie reel inside my head replays the touch of her silky skin and the feel of her soft curves pressed against my body on an endless loop.Now a vicious bastard has stolen my dogs, and he's trying to steal her too. But he won't win. I've claimed Brooke for my own. They all belong to me. If he comes after either one of us, he'll lose.Not since the most devastating tragedy of my life have I allowed a woman to help me heal the scars on my soul. Until now.This Beauty & The Beast inspired full-length romantic comedy with a HEA, is by International Best Selling steamy romance author Colleen Charles. Colleen's books are always free with Kindle Unlimited. Download now so you don't miss out on the special launch price!

    Her lack of activity in the bedroom is so apparent that her best friend declares her a MARGIN, or Middle-Aged Virgin—a term used for adults who have experienced a drought so long that they can’t remember the last time they had sex.Determined to transform her life whilst she’s still young enough to enjoy it, Sophia hatches a plan to work less, live more and embark on exciting adventures, including rediscovering the electrifying passion she’s been craving.But after ending her fifteen-year relationship, how will Sophia, a self-confessed control freak handle navigating the unpredictable world of online dating?If she does meet someone new, will she even remember what to do? And as an independent career woman, how much is Sophia really prepared to sacrifice for love?The Middle-Aged Virgin is a funny, uplifting story of a smart single woman on a mission to find love and happiness and live life to the full.

    Many years earlier, after an unexplained absence, Julianne was relegated to a separate home by a rigidly unforgiving husband, and the Crouse women have suffered the disgrace of her assumed guilt ever since. Despite her family's strong disapproval, Annabelle is driven to pursue her mission through cobwebs and dust, finding the clues and the coded story left behind by her great-grandmother -- Why did she go? And why did she return? Annabelle has to know. Only one person, a man she grew up with but never noticed, stands with Annabelle as she discovers the parallels between her story and her great-grandmother's--two women, generations apart, experiencing what love truly is.

    So when she learns of a summer job on a wine-growing estate in the small French village of Beaumes-de-Venise, she jumps at the chance, hoping it can provide her with the escape she needs to clear her head.But it would seem that where wine flows, trouble follows. Jean-Luc Rougeon, the handsome-but-surly owner of the estate, appears distinctly unsettled by Saskia’s presence. And he’s not the only one: everyone in the village is behaving oddly toward her. It could just be curiosity about the new girl, but something more seems to be afoot.Unwittingly entangled in her new community, Saskia faces charged emotions. Can this be the identity she’d come to Provence to discover?

    In October 2009, after a series of bad investments, Yamamoto Inc. went bankrupt; by the end of that year the designer had inaugurated a new business and a complete reevaluation of his direction. My Dear Bomb is an outcome of this transition moment. Coauthored with Ai Mitsuda, this carefully and beautifully written autobiography (with biographical interpolations by friends and collaborators) seamlessly combines extended meditations on clothing and life with Yamamoto's memories and anecdotes, in short, concise paragraphs. Throughout its pages, we encounter Yamamoto as a tough realist unburdened by disingenuousness ("I am, in fact, a man who may turn heartless in an instant; I desire only to settle each and every score immediately"); and, of course, as a great designer blessed with unerring instinct for his materials ("how does the cloth want to drape, to sway, to fall? If one keeps these things in mind and looks very carefully, the fabric itself begins to speak"). Illustrated with drawings by Yamamoto, this open-hearted meditation offers a take on the autobiography form as imaginative as the designer's fashion wear.

    Garstang makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts. The lives of the inhabitants of a condominium in Washington, D.C.'s Chinatown are told separately and as part of a web of entanglements. The entrances and exits are handled with the deftness of a French comedy, but the empathy of the author brings all the characters achingly alive. What the Zhang Boys Know is a wonderful and haunting book." - John Casey, author of Compass Rose and Spartina, winner of the National Book Award

    They were, after all, born as conjoined twins. But a horrific revelation drives a wedge between the siblings, plunging Chandan into a cycle of guilt and blame from which he cannot escape. One of Mahesh Dattani's most popular works, Tara was also one of the first Indian plays in English to highlight the dangers of gender discrimination, and the insidious ways in which it operates in our society.

    In these marvellous essays on history, politics and society, cultural critic Nadeem Farooq Paracha upturns various reductive readings of the country by revealing its multi-layered reality. With wit and insight, he investigates past events and their implications for modern-day society. Thus, one piece explores how and why Mohenjo-daro has been neglected as a historical site, and another examines how Muhammad-bin-Qasim, who briefly invaded Sindh in 713 CE, has come to be lionised as the original founder of Pakistan. There is a story about a Pakistani Jimi Hendrix who plays the guitar like a dream and also one about a medieval emperor who lives on in the swear words of a Punjabi peasant. There are essays on Pakistani pop music, on Afro-Pakistanis and on how Jhuley Lal came to be more than just a folk deity for Sindhi immigrants in India. Points of Entry examines the constant struggle between two distinct tendencies in Pakistani civic-nationalism—one modernist, the other theocratic—and the complex society it has birthed.

    ("fresh off the boat")Does your mom still make Peking duck instead of turkey on Thanksgiving, own a giant cleaver, or take twenty-four more napkins than she needs at Chipotle?Your mom may be a fob.Through their hit blog "My Mom Is a Fob," Teresa and Serena Wu have seized ownership of this formerly derogatory term, applying it instead to the heartfelt, hilarious, and thoroughly unique ways that Asian mothers adapt to American culture, from the perspective of those who love them most: their children.Through texts, emails, phone calls, and more, My Mom Is a Fob showcases the stories of a community of Asian-American kids who know exactly what it's like to be on the receiving end of that amazing, unconditional, and sometimes misspelled love. It's about those Asian mothers who refuse to get in the car without their sun-protective arm sheaths, the ones who send us passive-aggressive text messages "from the dog" in hopes that we'll call home, and email us unsolicited advice about everything from homosexuality to constipation. In these pages you'll find solace in the fact that thousands of moms out there are as painfully nosy, unintentionally hilarious, and endearingly fobby as yours is.

    In this lively, entertaining, and often hilarious memoir, he relates the early life of a first-generation Thai-American and his constant, often bumbling attempts to reconcile cultural and familial expectations with the trials of growing up in 1980s America.            Young Ira may have lived in Oak Lawn, Illinois, but inside the family’s bi-level home was “Thailand with American conveniences.” They ate Thai food, spoke the Thai language, and observed Thai customs. His bedtime stories were tales of Buddha and monkey-faced demons. On the first day of school his mother reminded him that he had a Siamese warrior’s eyes—despite his thick glasses—as Aunty Sue packed his Muppets lunch box with fried rice. But when his schoolmates played tag he was always It, and as he grew, he face the constant challenge of reconciling American life with a cardinal family rule: “Remember, you are Thai.”            Inside the Thai Buddhist temple of Chicago, another “simulated Thailand,” are more rules, rules different from those of the Southside streets, and we see mainstream Western religion—“god people”—through the Sukrungruang family’s eyes. Within the family circle, we meet a mother who started packing for her return to Thailand the moment she arrived; her best friend, Aunty Sue, Ira’s second mother, who lives with and cooks for the family; and a wayward father whose dreams never quite pan out.            Talk Thai is a richly told account that takes us into an immigrant’s world. Here is a story imbued with Thai spices and the sensibilities of an American upbringing, a story in which Ira practices English by reciting lines from TV sitcoms and struggles with the feeling of not belonging in either of his two worlds. For readers who delight in the writings of Amy Tan, Gish Jen, and other Asian-Americans, Talk Thai provides generous portions of a still-mysterious culture while telling the story of an American boyhood with humor, playfulness, and uncompromising honesty.

    With characters ranging from cross-dressing hairdressers, drag queens, and rent boys to fanatic Muslims and low-life security personnel, the action of this tragicomedy moves between an Islamic boarding school and a gay bar in Jakarta, and in so doing illuminates the mindset and yearning of a new generation of Indonesians.