Every morning, Marcel Proust sipped his two cups of strong coffee with milk, ate a croissant from one boulangerie, dunking it in his coffee as he slowly read the day’s paper with great care—poring over each headline and section. Only Alain de Botton could have pulled so many useful insights from the oeuvre of one the world’s greatest literary masters. Fascinating and vital, How to Take Your Time will urge you to find the wisdom in defying “the self-satisfaction felt by ‘busy’ men—however idiotic their business—at ‘not having time’ to do what you are doing.” A Vintage Shorts Wellness selection. An ebook short.

    Instead, her "real" father was a best-selling self-help author and a world famous "Guru to the Stars." Known as Mr. MAJIC for the miraculous impact his books and seminars had on millions of people, he had inexplicitly vanished around the time Grace's mother became pregnant with her. For over 20 years, the mystery of Mr. MAJIC’s sudden and unexpected disappearance, and the speculation of what might have become of him, was the stuff of Urban Legend. The theories ranged from he was a homeless bum living under a bridge in the Bay Area to his most avid fans claiming he had attained divine enlightenment and had ascended straight to heaven. Even nearly a quarter of a century later, on the anniversary of his disappearance, there would be stories in the media asking what ever happened to Mr. MAJIC? Among her mother's things, Grace discovered MAJIC's long missing and thought lost forever unpublished manuscript, "The True Path to Enlightenment." The manuscript was considered to be the Holy Grail of self-help books and was worth a king's ransom. The problem for Grace, before anyone would publish the book, she must prove the manuscript was not a fake. This was no small task, considering the only person who could provide the definitive confirmation hasn't been seen or heard from in over two decades. With the help of her fellow Generation Z sister and an old-school, hard-boiled detective that had made finding MAJIC his life's work, Grace goes on a quest to find the elusive Mr. MAJIC. Along the way she meets her perfect soulmate and finds true inner-peace and a state of wellbeing she had previously thought unimaginable. Wrapped inside this fast-paced romantic mystery, the reader will discover a simple to follow tutorial of how to identify and release the things that are making them miserable. They will gently be shown a simple step-by-step process that, if followed, can lead to a state of enlightenment and wellbeing. From the Authors of The Fourth Awakening which spent four years in both the US and UK as the number one bestseller in New Age, Mysticism. The Spanish edition was the number one bestselling “Foreign Language eBook” in the world on Amazon.com.

    Yves Saint Laurent, the first comprehensive retrospective of his life’s work, will accompany an exhibition of some 250 garments from the collection of the Fondation Pierre Bergé–Yves Saint Laurent at the Petit Palais in Paris. From his early days working under Dior and heading the House of Dior after his mentor’s death, to the opening of his first prêt a porter shop on the Rive Gauche and the debut of the Le Smoking tuxedo, to the muses he adored, Loulou de la Falaise and Catherine Deneuve among them, this volume reveals the breadth and scope of the designer’s entire career. With a preface by Pierre Bergé, author Faride Chenoune explores the sources of inspiration that drove Saint Laurent’s continuous innovation, drawing upon painting, sculpture, theater, opera, literature, and cinema.

    “I’m willing to pay $100,000 to you for helping me to learn how to function as an adult, and pretend to be my girlfriend.”$100,000? For 3 months?That’s more money than Jacqueline Cross makes in three years!Dylan Brandt has just been given an ultimatum: Get your act together… or you’re getting cut off!No trust fund, no cars, no personal chefs, no bottomless expense cards, no nothing.That’s where Jacqueline Cross — Dylan’s sexy downstairs neighbor — comes in to the picture.After she barged in to his apartment at 2am on a Thursday morning to tell him off for his loud music and irreverent attitude……Dylan thinks he knows just the person to whip him in to shape… or at least pretend to.The plan works at first, his dad is happy and it looks like he’s making real progress… barring some confusing boundaries regarding sex……until Jaqueline finds out that Dylan’s father OWNS the company she works for and HR comes after her because she’s dating the boss’s son.It gets worse…A story breaks that Dylan knocked up two separate women — AT THE SAME TIME — and they say they’re carrying his children! The Playboy's Pretend Girlfriend is a stand-alone romance novel with a guaranteed HEA and no cliffhangers.

    Arriving in London as a young married woman, she quickly conquered English society, and would spend the next half a century inside the palaces, mansions and clubs of the elite. Her clandestine affair with young Bertie, the future George VI, caused ruptures at Buckingham Palace, with King George offering his son the title Duke of York in exchange for 'never hearing of the Australian again'. Sheila subsequently became Lady Milbanke and ended her days as Princess Dimitri of Russia, juggling her royal duties with a successful career as a travel agent. Throughout her remarkable life, she won the hearts of men ranging from Rudolph Valentino to Prince Obolensky, and maintained longstanding friendships with Evelyn Waugh, Wallis Simpson, Idina Sackville and Nancy Mitford. A story unknown to most, Sheila is a spellbinding account of an utterly fascinating woman.

    As al-Qaeda hunts the pair across Europe and the Middle East, Cameron must rely on his wits to survive relentless attacks designed to silence his Saudi friend and preserve a sweeping plan to attack the American homeland.From the subways of Paris to the parched dunes of the Arabian Desert, The Phoenix Affair is a fast-paced and intricately-wrought thriller that skips across three continents. Cameron is a natural survivor, and his is a sweeping tale of technology, tradecraft, quick-thinking and hard fighting from the first pages to the final climactic conflict.

    Every officer should read and reread this text, to understand it, and to take its message to heart. Warfighting has stimulated discussion and debate from classrooms to wardooms, training areas to combat zones. The philosophy contained in this publication has influenced our approach to every task we have undertaken.

    But when they find themselves stranded alone together on New Year’s Eve, Ryan discovers Joe most definitely doesn’t want to avoid Ryan…

    A sequence of love affairs with beautiful young women are fatally damaged by the collapse of his family's fortune, and the novel ends with him poised to face the challenge of making his own way in the world. Composed in an unconventional narrative mode, the novel is a rich fusion of satiric and romance idioms, and found a captivated audience on its publication in 1920. It made Fitzgerald rich and famous overnight.The Beautiful and Damned is a bleaker version of the corrosive power of wealth and its privileges, one of Fitzgerald's abiding subjects. Anthony Patch, is heir to a huge fortune, whose marriage to the beautiful and indolent Gloria is increasingly shadowed by Anthony's fall into alcoholism. Though he wins a lawsuit to gain his inheritance of millions of dollars, it is a pyrrhic victory, for he is now a physically and morally broken man.

    Here is a poet talking to you instead of around himself, while doing absolutely brilliant and outrageous things with language."--Publishers WeeklyStarred Review in Booklist "[C]hoices of poems from each of Harrison's books are passionate and sharp... Of special note is a section from Letters to Yesenin, a book-length poem, and the title poem from The Theory and Practice of Rivers , which contains these echoing lines, 'I forgot where I heard that poems / are designed to waken sleeping gods.' Reading this essential volume, one might imagine that the gods are, indeed, staying up late, reading lights on, turning the pages."Jim Harrison: The Essential Poems is distilled from fourteen volumes--from visionary lyrics and meditative suites to shape-shifting ghazals and prose-poem letters. Teeming throughout these pages are Harrison's legendary passions and appetites, his meditations, rages, and love-songs to the natural world.The New York Times concluded a review from early in Harrison's career with a provocative quote: "This is poetry worth loving, hating, and fighting over, a subjective mirror of our American days and needs." That sentiment still holds true, as Jim Harrison's essential poems continue to call for our fiercest attention.Also included are full-color images of poem drafts--both typescripts and holographs--as well as the letter Denise Levertov sent to publisher W.W. Norton in the early 1960s, advocating for Harrison's debut collection.In his essay "Poetry as Survival," Jim Harrison wrote, "Poetry, at its best, is the language your soul would speak if you could teach your soul to speak." The Essential Poems is proof positive that Jim Harrison taught his soul to speak."In this unforgiving literary moment, we must deal honestly with [Harrison's] life and work, as they are inextricable in a way that is not true of other poets...These poems bear-crawl gorgeously after a genuine connection to being, thrashing in giant leaps through the underbrush to find consolation, purpose, and redemption. In his raw, original keening he ambushes moments of unimaginable beauty, one after another, line after line...The Essential Poems demonstrates perfectly why we should turn to Harrison again. He lived and breathed an American confrontation with the physical earth, married himself to a universe of bodies and stumps and birds, did not try to shuck his grotesque masculinity and stared hard with his one good eye (the left was blinded when he was seven) at the inescapable, beckoning finger of death." --Dean Kuipers, LitHub"The Essential Poems provides a good introduction--or reintroduction--to the work of this singular writer... these pieces illustrate Harrison's range and his ease with various formats, from lyric poems to meditative suites to prose poems. They also spotlight his deep, rugged kinship with rural landscapes and the natural world, where 'the cost of flight is landing.'" --The Washington Post"Jim Harrison's latest collection, The Essential Poems, contains...engaging and enlightening poems [that] should be taught, learned, and loved. Remember this."--New York Journal of Books"Had he been a chef, all the other foodies would have talked about how Jim Harrison dealt with big flavors. In his poems, they're all there -- love and death, remorse and longing, the rocket contrails of living. There's not a lot of small talk in The Essential Poems... this book grabs you by the collar and tells you in eleven hundred ways to wake up."--John Freeman, Executive Editor, "Recommended Reading from Lit Hub Staff""Jim Harrison had an appetite. He devoured the natural world with gusto and wrote about it with wild energy and sweetly caustic wit...Harrison was also a prodigious poet, and this thoughtfully curated collection [The Essential Poems] showcases him at his best. Like his fiction, the poems observe the collision between civilization and the wildness outside our cities; they act like geocaches both harrowing and beautiful... Organized chronologically, the material here becomes a time line distilling Harrison's signature concerns."--Alta"It is hard-boiled poetry, some of the best of its kind, and one is not surprised to know that Harrison has written very tough novels... His poetic vision is at the heart of it all."--Harper's

    The allegation that sections of and individual Indian Muslims indulged in "terrorism" surfaced for the first time with the ascent of the Hindutva forces in mid-1990s and became state policy with the BJP coming to power at the Centre. With even "secular" media joining the role as stenographers of security agencies, this became an accepted fact so much so that common Indians and even many Muslims started believing in this false propaganda. This book, by a former senior police officer, with a distinguished career that included unearthing the Telgi scam, peeps behind the propaganda screen, using material mostly in the public domain as well as his long police experience. It comes out with some startling facts and analysis, the first of its kind, to expose the real actors behind the so-called "Islamic terrorism" in India whose greatest feat was to murder the Maharashtra ATS chief Hemant Karkare who dared to expose these forces and paid with his life for his courage and commitment to truth. While unearthing the conspiracy behind the murder of Karkare, this book takes a hard look at some of the major incidents attributed to "Islamic terrorism" in India and finds them baseless.

    The day is unbearably hot, and the snazzy car’s air-con is broken, blowing out hot air instead of cold. Lily follows the meandering road in a state of dehydration, and experiences a series of encounters with angels and demons and ghosts from the past. As time begins to travel backwards, Lily knows that very soon she will find her way back to the city. But even when eventually she does, events nearer home seem to mirror her encounters on the long winding road that disappeared.

    This is the shocking story of a nuclear submarine that witnessed the end of the world and refused to accept it. Join the crew of the USS Florida as they remain Submerged in the World of Wool. David Forsyth is the author of numerous bestselling apocalyptic sea adventures. His Sedulity series, featuring the passengers and crew of a cruise ship after an asteroid strikes the Pacific Ocean, has earned hundreds of 5 Star reviews since 2014. "Sedulity 1: Impact" reached #23 Paid in Kindle Store. David's "Voyage of the Dead" and "Sovereign Spirit Saga" offer a nautical perspective on the zombie apocalypse. The USS Florida, featured in Submerged, has also made a cameo appearance in another popular series, and will sail into other post-apocalyptic worlds in the future. Welcome aboard and bon voyage.

    Aemilia Bassano Lanier is beautiful and accomplished, but her societal conformity ends there. She frequently cross-dresses to escape her loveless marriage and to gain freedoms only men enjoy, but a chance encounter with a ragged, little-known poet named Shakespeare changes everything.Aemilia grabs at the chance to pursue her long-held dream of writing and the two outsiders strike up a literary bargain. They leave plague-ridden London for Italy, where they begin secretly writing comedies together and where Will falls in love with the beautiful country — and with Aemilia, his Dark Lady. Their Italian idyll, though, cannot last and their collaborative affair comes to a devastating end. Will gains fame and fortune for their plays back in London and years later publishes the sonnets mocking his former muse. Not one to stand by in humiliation, Aemilia takes up her own pen in her defense and in defense of all women.The Dark Lady’s Mask gives voice to a real Renaissance woman in every sense of the word.

     PROFESSOR NICK UPTON’S DISCOVERY IN THE WOODS COULD BE HIS LAST. Anthropology Professor Nick Upton is tired of his life, tired of the redneck state he has to live in, tired of uninterested students, and most of all tired of his own laziness. Something has to change. But his grey existence gets violently shaken when he discovers during a run, signs of a sinister cult sacrificing animals in abandoned houses around his Upper Midwest college town. Soon he is plunged into a dark world where town and gown rivalries turn murderous and forces him to team up with the locals, he’s never trusted in order to face the growing evil in the hidden depths of the countryside. But can Nick and his band of locals prevail or will this be the challenge that finally breaks the bored Professor!