Mike is a Japanese American chef at a Mexican restaurant and Benson's a Black day care teacher, and they've been together for a few years -- good years -- but now they're not sure why they're still a couple. There's the sex, sure, and the meals Mike cooks for Benson, and, well, they love each other. But when Mike finds out his estranged father is dying in Osaka just as his acerbic Japanese mother, Mitsuko, arrives in Texas for a visit, Mike picks up and flies across the world to say goodbye. In Japan he undergoes an extraordinary transformation, discovering the truth about his family and his past. Back home, Mitsuko and Benson are stuck living together as unconventional roommates, an absurd domestic situation that ends up meaning more to each of them than they ever could have predicted. Without Mike's immediate pull, Benson begins to push outwards, realizing he might just know what he wants out of life and have the goods to get it. Both men will change in ways that will either make them stronger together, or fracture everything they've ever known. And just maybe they'll all be okay in the end. Memorial is a funny and profound story about family in all its strange forms, joyful and hard-won vulnerability, becoming who you're supposed to be, and the limits of love.

    Well known for writing out the heartache and melancholia, this title explores the softer side of Savage, one not many are privileged to. She pours over the pages with a full love, one returned. You'll find no sadness or unrequited feelings in here. This is the real, heartfelt musings of a woman in love.

    Taking time, and specifically the months of the year as an overarching structure, Dimitrov elevates the every day and speaks directly to the reader as if the poem were a phone call or a text message. From the personal to the cosmos, the moon to New York City, NASA’s golden record to the Ouija board, the speaker is convinced that love is “our best invention.” While he navigates darkness and fear, loneliness and guilt, Dimitrov doesn’t resist joy even in despair. There is a determined curiosity about who we are as people and a shameless interest in the idea of hope. These poems are obsessed with everything around us, even the terrible and fraught.

    As we read, each of our senses is engaged, and we come to detect a search for spiritual revelations--in buildings, churches, homes, trains, and cars. Then suddenly we find ourselves back in the open, pursuing the course to Baltimore and Bucharest, to the zoo and the park, to the past and future. As ever, Ashbery's wakeful digressions are wily, comic, heartbreaking, and vertiginous.

    He is regarded as one of the world's great short story writers as well as a great lyric poet, and is credited with inventing the detective story and the modern gothic horror tale. He has been an important influence on many major American and European writers including William Faulkner, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Baudelaire, H.P. Lovecraft, and William Butler Yeats, among many others.Poe's poetry, which is collected in this volume, is more personal than his prose. The themes of love, death, and despair which recur throughout reflect the anguish he suffered in his own troubled life. "Annabel Lee" is a haunting lament to his young wife, Virginia, who died of tuberculosis. "The Bells" is an eerie and melancholy meditation which recreates with brilliant musical language the hypnotic, funereal aura of ringing bells. "The Raven" is a comic tour de force in which the protagonist turns his strange visitor into a symbol of his own sorrow and loss. Poe's best poems remain some of the most popular and technically accomplished in the English language.This book features a deluxe cover, ribbon marker, top stain, and decorative endpaper with a name plate.

    She had scraped together what previous generations of trans women could only dream of: a life of mundane, bourgeois comforts. The only thing missing was a child. But then her girlfriend, Amy, detransitioned and became Ames, and everything fell apart. Now Reese is caught in a self-destructive pattern: avoiding her loneliness by sleeping with married men.Ames isn't happy either. He thought detransitioning to live as a man would make life easier, but that decision cost him his relationship with Reese—and losing her meant losing his only family. Even though their romance is over, he longs to find a way back to her. When Ames's boss and lover, Katrina, reveals that she's pregnant with his baby—and that she's not sure whether she wants to keep it—Ames wonders if this is the chance he's been waiting for. Could the three of them form some kind of unconventional family—and raise the baby together?This provocative debut is about what happens at the emotional, messy, vulnerable corners of womanhood that platitudes and good intentions can't reach. Torrey Peters brilliantly and fearlessly navigates the most dangerous taboos around gender, sex, and relationships, gifting us a thrillingly original, witty, and deeply moving novel.

    TREASURE TROVE A COLLECTION OF ICSE POEMS AND SHORT STORIES [paperback] EVERGREEN,EVER\ [Jan 01, 2017] …

    If the universe had his back, he wouldn’t be on his way to the post office carrying a box of his ex-boyfriend’s things.But when Arthur and Ben meet-cute at the post office, what exactly does the universe have in store for them?Maybe nothing. After all, they get separated.Maybe everything. After all, they get reunited.But what if they can’t quite nail a first date . . . or a second first date . . . or a third?What if Arthur tries too hard to make it work . . . and Ben doesn’t try hard enough?What if life really isn’t like a Broadway play?But what if it is?

    And then one day this closest of friendships grows into something more.But then we fast forward a decade or so, to find that Ellis is married to Annie, and Michael is nowhere in sight. Which leads to the question, what happened in the years between?This is almost a love story. But it's not as simple as that.

    

    After her mother convinces her to make an appearance, she makes a huge impression on everyone present, from the villagers to the king and queen, but she ends up finding true love in a most surprising place.

    Includes biographical notes, a key to Roman transcription, a list of titles or first lines, and a glossary of Urdu words in Roman script.

    She poses the eternal question: Can you heal once you’ve been marked by a monster, or will the sun always sting?

    I was convinced that when they'd happen, the world would end.But the world didn't end. In fact, it pushed on and demanded to keep spinning through all sorts of mayhem, and I got through it. And because I persisted, I learned lessons about how to be a stronger, kinder, better human - lessons you can only learn by going through these sorts of things.This is for the people with minds that just don't stop; for those who feel everything seemingly a thousand times more than the people around them.Here are some words I wrote.

    For all readers of Ian McEwan's Atonement or L P Hartley's The Go-Between.1970s Weston-Super-Mare and ten-year-old oddball Eustace, an only child, has life transformed by his mother's quixotic decision to sign him up for cello lessons. Music-making brings release for a boy who is discovering he is an emotional volcano. He laps up lessons from his young teacher, not noticing how her brand of glamour is casting a damaging spell over his frustrated and controlling mother.When he is enrolled in holiday courses in the Scottish borders, lessons in love, rejection, and humility are added to daily practice.Drawing in part on his own boyhood, Patrick Gale's new novel explores a collision between childish hero worship and extremely messy adult love lives.