The family is gathering at the exclusive Duponte Hotel & Resort in Montego Bay for the highly anticipated nuptials of former playboy billionaire Zack Romero and ex-reporter Blue Monroe. Christian’s ex-girlfriend, Arianna Duponte, who walked out on him over a month ago just when things were getting hot, happens to be the general manager of the five-star palace resort where the family is gathering. No woman has ever turned him down before. Yet, sweet Arianna wasn’t just any woman. She’d given him her virginity and he’d given her his heart. So what went wrong? Will this be a bitter reunion or a better opportunity to find out if there are truly second chances?Arianna Duponte has always had a special place in her heart for sexy, hot Christian Romero, her first true love, but getting close to him would be too risky given her past and a scandalous family secret. She refuses to break his heart again. She tries to keep her distance while preparing for the big Romero wedding but it’s not as easy as it looks. As the wedding bells echo in the sultry island air, will they rekindle the union they once had? Books by Shadonna RichardsTHE ROMERO BROTHERSThe Billionaire’s Second-Chance Bride, #1 (Antonio III & Lucy)A Bride for the Billionaire Bad Boy, #2 (Lucas & Maxine)The Playboy Billionaire, #3 (Zack & Blue)The Billionaire’s Island Romance, #3.5 (Christian & Arianna)The Billionaire’s Proposition, #4 (Carl & Venus)The Billionaire’s Baby, #5 (Jules & Amber)The Billionaire’s Assistant, #6 (Dion & Jenna-Lynn)Snowbound with the Billionaire, #7 (Troy & Pamela)The Billionaire’s Marriage Proposal, #8 (Alonso & Britney)THE BRIDE SERIESAn Unexpected Bride The Jilted Bride The Matchmaker BrideHis Island Bride (Free)An Unexpected Baby (The sequel to An Unexpected Bride)The Billionaire’s Second Chance BrideThe Belmont Christmas Bride THE BRIDE SERIES COLLECTION (Books 1-5 and other stories)WHIRLWIND ROMANCE SERIESAccidentally Flirting with the CEO (Free)Accidentally Married to the Billionaire Accidentally Falling for the TycoonAccidentally Flirting with the CEO 2Accidentally Flirting with the CEO 3 THE BILLIONAIRE’S WHIRLWIND ROMANCE (Books 1-3)

    The third in a new series of authoritative analyses dealing with all aspects of humanity's achievements.Join Ricky Gervais and Steve Merchant and Karl Pilkington as they bring enlightenment to THE ARTS in their usual unenlightened manner.In this episode we ask the question, "What is art?"; Karl offers his thoughts on Hirst's oeuvre; Practical considerations regarding art in the home; Karl through the looking glass; Primeval paintings; Gratuitous graffiti; Sculptures in the Square; Karl on political works of art; Karl on film; Outsider art; Whistler's mother-in-law; Music - from Vaughan Williams to Whittaker; Shakespeare's plays on words; Harry the war poet.

    

    I was in demand from the world's best teams, a well-paid elite athlete. But I never won a race. I was the hired help.When my mum dropped me off in a small French town aged 17, I was full of determination to be a professional cyclist, but I was completely green. I went from mowing the team manager's lawn to winning every amateur race I entered. Then I turned pro and realised I hated the responsibility and pressure of chasing victory. And that's when I became a domestique.I learned to take that hurt and give it everything I had to give, all for someone else's win. When the order came in to ride it was I pushed out with the hardest rhythm I could, dragging the group faster and faster, until my whole body screamed with pain. There were times I rode myself to a standstill, clutching the barrier metres from the line, as the lead group shot past. But that's what made me a so good at my job.As my career took off, I started looking at the fans lining the route, cheering us like heroes. The passion for cycling oozed off them, but they couldn't know what it was really like. They didn't see the terrible hotels, the crazy egos or all the shit that goes with great expectations. Well, this is how it is.

    David Shields and Matthew Vollmer, both writers and professors, have gathered forty short fictions that they've found to be seriously hilarious and irresistibly teachable (in both writing and literature courses): counterfeit texts that capture the barely suppressed frustration and yearning that percolate just below the surface of most official documents. The innovative stories collected in Fakes including ones by Ron Carlson (a personal ad), Amy Hempel (a complaint to the parking department), Rick Moody (Works Cited), and Lydia Davis (a letter to a funeral parlor) trace the increasingly blurry line between fact and fiction and exemplify a crucial form for the twenty-first century.With contributions by:David MeansGeorge SaundersStanley CrawfordMark HallidayCharles YuCaron A. LevisLorrie MooreKevin WilsonElizabeth Stuckey-FrenchAmy HempelDonald BarthelmeJoe WenderothLaura Jayne MartinRon CarlsonChris BachelderRob CohenMieke EerkensJoseph SalvatoreDaniel OrozcoGreg BurnhamJack PendarvisRobin HemleyKari Anne RoyRachel B. GlaserWendy BrennerLucas CooperSamantha HuntCharles McLeodMatthew WilliamsonArda CollinsDavid ShieldsMelanie Rae ThonMatthew VollmerLydia DavisPaul TherouxRick MoodyMichael MartoneJ. Robert LennonJonathan Safran FoerJ. G. Ballard

    But ‘Mr Indestructible’ – who had become the first Australian to win the Rock of Roubaix earlier that year – got back on his bike.By 2013 Stuart O’Grady had competed in 17 Tours; secured Olympic and Commonwealth Games medals; been named Australian Cyclist of the Year, and Australian Male Road Cyclist of the Year; won the inaugural Tour Down Under; and earned an Order of Australia Medal in recognition of his contribution to the sport. But then came the worst time of his life, when he announced his retirement after such an impressive cycling career and revealed that he had used the performance enhancing drug EPO before the 1998 Tour de France – a Tour marred by widespread doping.In this up-front and honest autobiography Stuey reveals all. This is his story: as candid and down-to-earth as the man himself.

    accompanied by evocative illustrations, it is an intimate and unapologetically personal journey through a life the way we remember them, as Keaton puts it "chaotic, fragmented and often grammatically incorrect".

    But how are they being heard? In this book, Damon Krukowski examines how the switch from analog to digital audio is changing our perceptions of time, space, love, money, and power. In Ways of Hearing--modeled on Ways of Seeing, John Berger's influential 1972 book on visual culture--Krukowski offers readers a set of tools for critical listening in the digital age. Just as Ways of Seeing began as a BBC television series, Ways of Hearing is based on a six-part podcast produced for the groundbreaking public radio podcast network Radiotopia. Inventive uses of text and design help bring the message beyond the range of earbuds.Each chapter of Ways of Hearing explores a different aspect of listening in the digital age: time, space, love, money, and power. Digital time, for example, is designed for machines. When we trade broadcast for podcast, or analog for digital in the recording studio, we give up the opportunity to perceive time together through our media. On the street, we experience public space privately, as our headphones allow us to avoid "ear contact" with the city. Heard on a cell phone, our loved ones' voices are compressed, stripped of context by digital technology. Music has been dematerialized, no longer an object to be bought and sold. With recommendation algorithms and playlists, digital corporations have created a media universe that adapts to us, eliminating the pleasures of brick-and-mortar browsing. Krukowski lays out a choice: do we want a world enriched by the messiness of noise, or one that strives toward the purity of signal only?

    In The Immortal Class, Culley takes us inside the heart and soul of an American urban icon: the bicycle messenger. In describing his own history and those of his peers, he evokes a classic American maverick, deeply woven into the fabric of society—from the pits of squalor to the highest reaches of power and privilege—yet always resolutely, exuberantly outside. Culley’s voice is at once earthy and soaringly poetic—a Gen-X Tom Joad at hyperspeed. The Immortal Class is a unique personal and political narrative of a cyclist’s life on the street.