In Oran, a coastal town in North Africa, the plague begins as a series of portents, unheeded by the people. It gradually becomes an omnipresent reality, obliterating all traces of the past and driving its victims to almost unearthly extremes of suffering, madness, and compassion.

    Her father, a famous musician, dies, and she is raised in the Paris Opera House with his dying promise of a protective angel of music to guide her. After a time at the opera house, she begins hearing a voice, who eventually teaches her how to sing beautifully. All goes well until Christine's childhood friend Raoul comes to visit his parents, who are patrons of the opera, and he sees Christine when she begins successfully singing on the stage. The voice, who is the deformed, murderous 'ghost' of the opera house named Erik, however, grows violent in his terrible jealousy, until Christine suddenly disappears. The phantom is in love, but it can only spell disaster.Leroux's work, with characters ranging from the spoiled prima donna Carlotta to the mysterious Persian from Erik's past, has been immortalized by memorable adaptations. Despite this, it remains a remarkable piece of Gothic horror literature in and of itself, deeper and darker than any version that follows.

    Its directionless New York City author arrives in town to defend the book and finds that it has inspired a group of local teens to rebel in strange and unexpected ways. A timely and unforgettable drama about the failure of urban and heartland America to understand each other, The Metal Children explores what happens when fiction becomes a matter of life and death.

    

    As she helps women plan and execute their special day, Reese is secretly waiting for the day it is her walking down the aisle. However, it seems that with Cordell, a well-known Miami DJ, that will never happen. Though she thought she had a fairy tale, after finding out a secret, Reese has to do her best to move on. It may be easier said than done, though. Anthony is a rapper, and to the outside eye, he has everything. The money, the cars, and the picture perfect trophy girlfriend, Elysia. However, with her continuously pressuring Anthony to get married, he strongly doubts their relationship and where it's meant to head. When he meets Reese, the inevitable happens. With her outgoing and vibrant smile, he finds himself easily attracted to her. However, all is not fair in love and war. Will their hearts be the casualty?

    has revved up the chaos in her second installment of Pretty Lips That Thugs Love series. Twyla T. intensely catapults the audience into the lives of Ashanti and Kentay as love, drama, and secrets unfold in droves. Kentay Mill adamantly claims Ashanti McNeal as his woman in more ways than one. However, his philandering ways always find its way to Ashanti’s front door—literally when his baby is dropped off at the front door. Kentay has been the man in Ashanti’s life for years, but his constant disrespect and unfaithfulness are pushing her into the arms of another man. And, the kicker is that it’s just not any man, but his very own blood. Regardless of the situation, Kentay vows to keep Ashanti as his by any means necessary. He hates to lose and declares that he will win no matter what. Not trying to entertain the thought, he decides to take matters into his own hands and takes desperate measures to ensure that she will always be his. Ashanti is not feeling the love for Kentay that she used to feel. She knows that she is a good woman and has grown tired of his ill treatment of her. When she wasn’t looking, Ashanti finds love in an unexpected place when it literally bumps into her by the name of Ahmad Jones. Their budding friendship develops into something more that neither of them could deny any longer. After watching Ahmad and his team win the NCAA Championship for his college Mississippi State University, Ahmad and Ashanti celebrate with a hot and passionate kiss on live TV that the world sees and she knows that there is no turning back. Ahmad and Ashanti enter new relationship territory and can’t wait to explore their new found love. They are ready to deal and to tackle the fallout with Kentay in order to start their lives together, but they know it won’t be easy. Just as things are looking up for the new couple, tragedy strikes that sends all of their lives in a tumultuous domino. Secrets will no longer remain secrets. No one will go unscathed as lives are turned upside and inside out. Lives will be changed. Relationships will be tried and tested. Pain is inevitable. Love still rules in the end. As darkness descends over the lives of Ashanti, Kentay, and Ahmad, will any of them find light at the end of the tunnel? Whose love will endure the torrent of disasters? Discover who will survive all of the hazy drama that is unrelenting and unlimited in the second installment of this urban fiction love story in Pretty Lips That Thugs Love 2

    They were the eldest of the James/Santos offspring who were all either siblings or cousins and ranged in age from infants to early teens. But, now that the three boys were older, they had to face real life issues and responsibility. Lil Q’s name had already been run through the system due to the parents of his first puppy love, Jyla. Now the majority of his summer vacation was spent going back and forth to the courthouse trying to clear his name. Cons’ vacation was spent on his new career, but he later finds himself walking the footsteps of his father. Cons was a go-getter and had been that way since he could comprehend that people catered to children. Once Cons’ career blew up, he also figured out how much it brought attention from his peers, be it good or bad. Now that Cee saw how much drama had come into his family from his little brother and cousin, he chose to keep his feelings for his best friend at bay, not knowing that she liked him too. Cee, Cons, and Lil Q all knew the rules of the James and Santos family. Now that they were older, their parents felt they needed a little more freedom, but would it all be taken away after their parents learned just how much chaos surrounded their children?

    School is her get away, and her safe haven, because at home, she suffers through an abusive relationship with her boyfriend William.Due to the stress of life and school, Amelia loses her job, but quickly bounces back and finds a better opportunity, and with a new job on the horizon, she falls into the arms of the owner of the business, Ceedric.Ceedric is a savage street king who goes legit and leaves his past behind, opening a construction company.The chemistry between these two is real and raw, but what will she do about William? With the fear of leaving William, and falling into something new with Ceedric, hearts and lives are on the line and in the way.Can Ceedric use his tru savage ways to hold on to his woman, or will she slip through his fingers, and stick to what she knows, abandoning her chance at happiness?

    He rules with an iron fist, but when someone from his past steps back in his life, he realizes that he must protect that person from the streets.Lisa—the fast life is no longer something she has a passion for. Her time away gave her plenty of time to think of how her love of money caused her to lose the one the truly loved. She gets a second chance at love, but will deceit creep into this relationship causing it to fail?LaTanza—is a beautiful sister with a haunting past. When she met Carlos Fuentes, the son of Chicago’s leading Latin drug dealer, at the young age of sixteen she immediately fell in love. Now older and married to Carlos she is rich, safe and wants for nothing. But when she eavesdrops on a conversation between Carlos and his father, she hears that the senior Fuentes doesn’t like his son being married to a black woman and wants him to father an all Latin son to carry the family tradition. This sends the unstable LaTanza over the edge. Fearing that she and her daughter will be left out in the cold she carries out a deadly plan—a plan to become ‘The Queenpin’.Rivalries explode. Love is found while it is also lost. Betrayal causes people to hurt the ones they love—all for the love of money. Who will come out on top—or even alive?BioA former undercover narcotics detective, Alex Richardson’s familiarity with the seamy side of the streets adds a steamy kind of street cred and realism to his gritty page turning novels. He spends his time between Chicago and Fort Wayne, Indiana.

    He has an operating theatre in the basement of his chateau and keeps his partner Eve imprisoned in her bedroom, a room he has equipped with an intercom and 300-watt speakers through which he bellows orders. Eve is only allowed out to be paraded at cocktail parties and on the last Sunday of each month, when the couple visit a young woman in a mental asylum. Following these outings, Lafargue humiliates Eve by forcing her to perform lewd sexual acts with strangers while he watches through a one-way mirror. In alternating chapters, Jonquet introduces seemingly unrelated characters - a criminal on the run after murdering a policeman, and an abducted young man who finds himself chained naked in a dark chamber, forced to endure all manner of physical torture at the hands of a mysterious stranger, whom he calls 'Mygale', after a type of tropical spider. All of these characters are caught in a deceitful web, doomed to meet their fate.

    Sentenced to life imprisonment in the penal colony of French Guiana, he became obsessed with one goal: escape. After planning and executing a series of treacherous yet failed attempts over many years, he was eventually sent to the notorious prison, Devil's Island, a place from which no one had ever escaped . . . until Papillon. His flight to freedom remains one of the most incredible feats of human cunning, will, and endurance ever undertaken.Charrière's astonishing autobiography, Papillon, was published in France to instant acclaim in 1968, more than twenty years after his final escape. Since then, it has become a treasured classic -- the gripping, shocking, ultimately uplifting odyssey of an innocent man who simply would not be defeated.

    The full range of his poetry—from classical rhymed alexandrines to "cubist" modernism, and from feverish, even visionary, depression to airy good humor—offers a challenge no translator has accepted until now.Here, for the first time in English translation, is the complete poetry of a legendary twentieth-century French writer. Cendrars, born Frederick Louis Sauser in 1887, invented his life as well as his art. His adventures took him to Russia during the revolution of 1905 (where he traveled on the Trans-Siberian Railway), to New York in 1911, to the trenches of World War I (where he lost his right arm), to Brazil in the 1920s, to Hollywood in the 1930s, and back and forth across Europe.With Guillaume Apollinaire and Max Jacob he was a pioneer of modernist literature, working alongside artist friends such as Chagall, Delaunay, Modigliani, and Léger, composers Eric Satie and Darius Milhaud, and filmmaker Abel Gance. The range of Cendrars's poetry—from classical rhymed alexandrines to "cubist" modernism, and from feverish, even visionary, depression to airy good humor—offers a challenge no translator has accepted until now.

    Only months before her retirement, new mandatory background checks threaten to expose Jackie’s darkest secrets, secrets she’s kept buried for nearly fifty years. As Jackie pleads with her husband Peter for help, her carefully hidden past unfolds.Alabama, 1961- As an ambitious student, Jackie is looking forward to her senior year, with hopes for college. However, on Homecoming morning, her father’s infidelity causes her world to change suddenly and irrevocably. In the year that follows, Jackie and her sister are increasingly trapped by poverty, Jim Crow, and ongoing violence and abuse—and Jackie is ultimately forced to protect herself in ways she never imagined. Ways which now, fifty years later, may prove to be her undoing.

    Nothing but a four letter word and in part two of Treat Me Like Somebody, you'll find out just how true that is. After forgiving Justice for sleeping with Tammi, Jaz gives him one more chance to prove that she is all he wants. She thinks he is on a straighten narrow until a certain someone moves back in town. Finding out that your mother isn't your mother is heart breaking. After confronting his mother he realized that he never really knew her. He fought hard to get Jaz to forgive him and just when everything is going good, the unexpected happens. Not wanting to lose the love of her life, Mya finally tells Harlem her big secret. After being caught in a room with Diesel, it really left her no choice. She thought that once she came clean, he would understand but she was sadly mistaken and regretted even opening her mouth. Harlem hated the day he met Mya. After learning her secret he wanted nothing more than to forget he even know Mya but after a tragic accident and almost losing her, he knows he don't want to witness life without her. There's only one problem Diesel. Take a ride with these couples as they witness betrayal, long lost lovers and damaged hearts. Will they find out what love truly is or will they fall deep into temptation.

    Both at the top of their game with their careers taking off. With thoughts of a new beginning for Bass Industries and a wedding to plan, nothing or no one can stand in their way; that is until Jason Tremaine finds his way back into their lives. Jason Tremaine was once one of Jordyn James' greatest loves and biggest heart breaks. Falling in love with a man at an early age, Jordyn thought Jason was it for her; until she realized he was possessive, manipulative and just plain wrong. Jordyn thinks she has it all; perfect fiancé, a respectable job, a loving family but then her ex shows up staking his claim on her. Jordyn does everything in her power to steer the course and stay committed to Micah, but Jason is way too present for her to have her happily ever after. Thinking that she left Jason Tremaine in her former life, she'll soon discover he will try to get her back no matter the cost. Micah Bass is the new President and CEO of Bass Industries, a job he has been working for since he was a kid. After an upsetting and heart-breaking end to his first marriage, he thought he was ready to move on and then in walks Jordyn James. Micah falls hard for Jordyn and just as he is starting to feel like his life is unstoppable, he is thrown for a loop when his fiancé's ex shows up unannounced. Things only go down hill from there as he competes to try to save his relationship. Mistakes are made, trust is betrayed, and things aren't as happy in the budding relationship as everyone thought. In this finale, so many twists and turns come into play that neither Jordyn nor Micah are prepared for. Will their love conquer all? Can their love survive another storm?