Download or read book The Artifice of Love written by Fiona Black and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2009-02-19 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The lovers' expressions of mutual affection and desire in the Song of Songs include intimate and detailed poetic descriptions of the body. These are challenging to interpret because the imagery used is cryptic, drawing on seemingly incongruous aspects of nature, architecture and war. Biblical scholarship frequently expresses some discomfort or embarrassment over this language, yet largely maintains the view that it should be interpreted positively as a complimentary and loving description of the body. If read without this hermeneutic, however, the imagery appears to construct nonsensical and ridiculous pictures of the human form, which raise interesting questions, and pose definite challenges, for the Song's readers. Fiona Black addresses the problematic nature of the Song's body imagery by using the artistic and literary construct of the grotesque body as a heuristic. The resulting reading investigates some issues for the Song that are often left to the margins, namely, the Song's presentation of desire, its politics of gender, and the affect of the text. The book concludes with the identification of some implications of this reading, including the creation of a new framework in which to understand the relevance of the Song's imagery for its presentation of love. This is volume 12 in the Gender, Culture, Theory subseries and volume 392 in the Journal for the Study of the Old Testament Supplement series.

Download or read book The Remedy for Love written by Bill Roorbach and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 2014-10-14 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A page-turner, a love story and a vivid drama of man (and woman) against the elements . . . A great read by a wonderful writer.” —Newsday When the “Storm of the Century” threatens western Maine, Eric closes his office early and heads to the grocery store. In line ahead of him, an unkempt and seemingly unstable young woman comes up short on cash, so Eric offers her twenty bucks and a ride home. Trouble is, Danielle doesn’t really have a home. She’s squatting in a cabin deep in the woods: no electricity, no plumbing, no heat. Eric, with problems of his own, tries to walk away, but finds he can’t. Fending off her mistrust of him, he gets her set up with food, water, and firewood, and departs with relief. But when he climbs back to the road, his car is gone, and in desperation he returns to the cabin. As the storm intensifies, these two lost souls are forced to wait it out together. Deeply moving, frequently funny, The Remedy for Love is a story about the secrets revealed when there is no time or space for anything but the truth. “A superbly grown-uplove story.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review “Brilliant . . . A tale that is as gripping as any Everest expedition--and that is also tender and terrifying and funny and, in the end, so true it seems inevitable.” —Peter Heller, author of The Dog Stars and The Painter “Roorbach . . . is at the top of his literary game here. He is masterful in inviting readers along, allowing them to slowly get to know these two strangers as they get to know one another.” —Portland (Maine) Press Herald “Snowbound in Maine, two strangers struggle to survive--fighting, flirting, baring secrets. Their sexy, snappy dialogue will keep you racing through.” —People “One of the best novels of this or any year . . . A flat-out funny, sexy, and poignant romantic thriller.” —David Abrams, author of Fobbit

Download or read book The Women I Love written by Francesco Pacifico and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2021-12-07 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A provocative and bracing send-up of modern masculinity, from the author of Class and The Story of My Purity Marcello, an editor and poet, is on the brink of his forties. Like everyone in his life, including his sister-in-law, he’s writing a novel. This novel. This novel will be about women. Love. Growing older. Maybe even taking responsibility. But unfortunately for Marcello, the women in his life resist definition. They flit and flicker constantly between archetype and actuality: sirens and saviors, subordinates and savants, vixens and villains. So Marcello cannot write plainly about love. Instead, he tries to write into the complexities of his many relationships: Eleonora, the junior editor, his former protegeé and sometime lover; Barbara, his claustrophobic girlfriend; his estranged gay sister; his elegant mother. Fresh, frank, and painfully cool, Francesco Pacifico’s The Women I Love dives nakedly into gender, sex, and power. Set in a vivid and alcoholic Italy, it acknowledges and subverts the narrow ways canonical male writers gaze at, and somehow fail to see, women—illuminating the possibility of equity between people in love, in bed, in work, and in life.

Download or read book The Conditions of Love written by Dale M. Kushner and published by Hachette+ORM. This book was released on 2015-09-29 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A teenage girl endures fire, flood and the loss of her parents in this bracing, oddly uplifting debut” set in the American Midwest of the mid-20th century (Kirkus). Dale M. Kushner’s acclaimed debut novel traces the journey of a girl from childhood to adulthood as she reckons with her parents’ abandonment, her need to break from society’s limitations, and her overwhelming desire for love both spiritual and erotic. In 1953, ten-year-old Eunice lives in the backwaters of Wisconsin with her outrageously narcissistic mother, a manicureeste and movie star worshipper. Abandoned by her father as an infant, Eunice worries that she will become a misfit like her mother. But when a freak storm sends Eunice away from all things familiar, a strange odyssey begins. Through her capacity to redefine herself, reject bitterness and keep her heart open, Eunice survives and even flourishes despite hardship, heartbreak and loss.

Download or read book The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys written by Dao Strom and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2019-11-12 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The book is informed by the Vietnamese immigrations of the nineteen–seventies but is filled with social observation of contemporary middle–class culture and indie sensibility . . . Quietly beautiful, Strom's stories are hip without being ironic." —The New Yorker When The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys was first published in 2006, it was groundbreaking in its depiction of contemporary young Vietnamese women living in the United States, centering their ordinary lives as mothers, lovers, friends, and daughters against the backdrop of immigration and assimilation. Available now for the first time in paperback and featuring an introduction by Isabelle Thuy Pelaud and a new preface by the author, The Gentle Order of Girls and Boys is a beautifully written, psychologically astute foray into the rite of female passage.

Download or read book Love in the Time of Cholera Illustrated Edition written by Gabriel García Márquez and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2020-10-27 with total page 473 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A beautifully packaged edition of one of García Márquez's most beloved novels, with never-before-seen color illustrations by the Chilean artist Luisa Rivera and an interior design created by the author's son, Gonzalo García Barcha. In their youth, Florentino Ariza and Fermina Daza fall passionately in love. When Fermina eventually chooses to marry a wealthy, well-born doctor, Florentino is devastated, but he is a romantic. As he rises in his business career he whiles away the years in 622 affairs—yet he reserves his heart for Fermina. Her husband dies at last, and Florentino purposefully attends the funeral. Fifty years, nine months, and four days after he first declared his love for Fermina, he will do so again.

Download or read book Love Cures written by Laine E. Doggett and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2009 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Examines literary portrayals of women who practice healing and love magic, and argues that these figures were modeled on informally trained practitioners common in the magico-medical paradigm of the high Middle Ages, and were well-respected and successful"--Provided by publisher.

Download or read book Peony in Love written by Lisa See and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2011-05-04 with total page 399 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Peony has neither seen nor spoken to any man other than her father, a wealthy Chinese nobleman. Nor has she ever ventured outside the cloistered women's quarters of the family villa. As her sixteenth birthday approaches she finds herself betrothed to a man she does not know, but Peony has dreams of her own. Her father engages a theatrical troupe to perform scenes from The Peony Pavilion, a Chinese epic opera, in their garden amidst the scent of ginger, green tea and jasmine. 'Unmarried girls should not be seen in public,' says Peony's mother, but her father allows the women to watch from behind a screen. Here, Peony catches sight of an elegant, handsome man and is immediately bewitched. So begins her unforgettable journey of love, desire, sorrow and redemption.

Download or read book A Theory of Love written by Margaret Bradham Thornton and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2018-05-08 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A follow-up to her successful debut Charleston and set in the world’s most glamorous landscapes, this moving new love story from Margaret Bradham Thornton draws on a metaphor of entanglement theory to ask: when two people collide, are they forever attached no matter where they are? Helen Gibbs, a British journalist on assignment on the west coast of Mexico, meets Christopher Delavaux, an intriguing half-French, half-American lawyer-turned-financier who has come alone to surf. Living lives that never stop moving, from their first encounter in Bermeja to marriage in London and travels to such places as Saint-Tropez, Tangier, and Santa Clara, Helen and Christopher must decide how much they exist for themselves and how much they exist for each other. In an effort to build his firm, Christopher leads a life full of speed and ambition with little time for Helen and even less when he suspects his business partner of illegal activity. Helen, a reluctant voyeur to Christopher’s world of power and position, searches far and wide for reporting work that will “take a bite out of her soul”—refugees in Calais, a mountain climber in Chamonix, an orphaned circus performer in Cuba. A Theory of Love captures the ambivalence at the center of human experience: does one reside in the familiar comforts of solitude or dare to open one’s heart and risk having it broken? Set in some of the most picturesque places in the world, this novel questions what it means to love someone and leaves us wondering—can nothing save us but a fall?

Download or read book What Love Is written by Carrie Jenkins and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2017-01-24 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A rising star in philosophy examines the cultural, social, and scientific interpretations of love to answer one of our most enduring questions What is love? Aside from being the title of many a popular love song, this is one of life's perennial questions. In What Love Is, philosopher Carrie Jenkins offers a bold new theory on the nature of romantic love that reconciles its humanistic and scientific components. Love can be a social construct (the idea of a perfect fairy tale romance) and a physical manifestation (those anxiety- inducing heart palpitations); we must recognize its complexities and decide for ourselves how to love. Motivated by her own polyamorous relationships, she examines the ways in which our parameters of love have recently changed-to be more accepting of homosexual, interracial, and non-monogamous relationships-and how they will continue to evolve in the future. Full of anecdotal, cultural, and scientific reflections on love, What Love Is is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand what it means to say "I love you." Whether young or old, gay or straight, male or female, polyamorous or monogamous, this book will help each of us decide for ourselves how we choose to love.

Download or read book The History of Love A Novel written by Nicole Krauss and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2006-05-17 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ONE OF THE MOST LOVED NOVELS OF THE DECADE. A long-lost book reappears, mysteriously connecting an old man searching for his son and a girl seeking a cure for her widowed mother's loneliness. Leo Gursky taps his radiator each evening to let his upstairs neighbor know he’s still alive. But it wasn’t always like this: in the Polish village of his youth, he fell in love and wrote a book…Sixty years later and half a world away, fourteen-year-old Alma, who was named after a character in that book, undertakes an adventure to find her namesake and save her family. With virtuosic skill and soaring imaginative power, Nicole Krauss gradually draws these stories together toward a climax of "extraordinary depth and beauty" (Newsday).

Download or read book The Light We Lost written by Jill Santopolo and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-02-06 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times Bestseller and A Reese’s Book Club Pick “This love story between Lucy & Gabe spans decades and continents as two star-crossed lovers try to return to each other…Will they ever meet again? This book kept me up at night, turning the pages to find out, and the ending did not disappoint.”—Reese Witherspoon “One Day meets Me Before You meets your weekender bag.”—The Skimm “Extraordinary.”—Emily Giffin He was the first person to inspire her, to move her, to truly understand her. Was he meant to be the last? Lucy is faced with a life-altering choice. But before she can make her decision, she must start her story—their story—at the very beginning. Lucy and Gabe meet as seniors at Columbia University on a day that changes both of their lives forever. Together, they decide they want their lives to mean something, to matter. When they meet again a year later, it seems fated—perhaps they'll find life's meaning in each other. But then Gabe becomes a photojournalist assigned to the Middle East and Lucy pursues a career in New York. What follows is a thirteen-year journey of dreams, desires, jealousies, betrayals, and, ultimately, of love. Was it fate that brought them together? Is it choice that has kept them away? Their journey takes Lucy and Gabe continents apart, but never out of each other's hearts. This devastatingly romantic debut novel about the enduring power of first love, with a shocking, unforgettable ending, is Love Story for a new generation. “It's the epic love story of 2017.”—Redbook

Download or read book Blow Your House Down written by Gina Frangello and published by Catapult. This book was released on 2021-04-06 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • A Good Morning America Recommended Book • A LitReactor Best Book of the Year • A BuzzFeed Most Anticipated Book of the Year • A Lit Hub Most Anticipated Book of the Year • A Rumpus Most Anticipated Book of the Year • A Bustle Most Anticipated Book of the Month "A pathbreaking feminist manifesto, impossible to put down or dismiss. Gina Frangello tells the morally complex story of her adulterous relationship with a lover and her shortcomings as a mother, and in doing so, highlights the forces that shaped, silenced, and shamed her: everyday misogyny, puritanical expectations regarding female sexuality and maternal sacrifice, and male oppression." —Adrienne Brodeur, author of Wild Game Gina Frangello spent her early adulthood trying to outrun a youth marked by poverty and violence. Now a long-married wife and devoted mother, the better life she carefully built is emotionally upended by the death of her closest friend. Soon, awakened to fault lines in her troubled marriage, Frangello is caught up in a recklessly passionate affair, leading a double life while continuing to project the image of the perfect family. When her secrets are finally uncovered, both her home and her identity will implode, testing the limits of desire, responsibility, love, and forgiveness. Blow Your House Down is a powerful testimony about the ways our culture seeks to cage women in traditional narratives of self-sacrifice and erasure. Frangello uses her personal story to examine the place of women in contemporary society: the violence they experience, the rage they suppress, the ways their bodies often reveal what they cannot say aloud, and finally, what it means to transgress "being good" in order to reclaim your own life.

Download or read book Stage Kiss written by Sarah Ruhl and published by Theatre Communications Group. This book was released on 2015-02-02 with total page 127 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Wickedly clever . . . Ruhl's unique, breezily elegant dialogue is fully present, as is her pleasingly loopy logic."—Variety "In the smart, rollicking Stage Kiss . . . passion and fidelity engage in a kind of elegant pas de deux. . . . The play manages to be both wholly original and instantly recognizable . . . with its combination of hilarity and trenchancy."—The New Yorker Award-winning playwright Sarah Ruhl brings her unique mix of lyricism, sparkling humor, and fierce intelligence to her new romantic comedy, Stage Kiss. When estranged lovers He and She are thrown together as romantic leads in a long-forgotten 1930s melodrama, the line between off-stage and on-stage begins to blur. A "knockabout farce that channels Noël Coward and Michael Frayn" (Chicago Tribune), Stage Kiss is a thoughtful and clever examination of the difference between youthful lust and respectful love. Ruhl, one of America's most frequently produced playwrights, proves that a kiss is not just a kiss in this whirlwind romantic comedy, which will receive its New York premiere at Playwrights Horizons in winter 2014. Sarah Ruhl's other plays include the Pulitzer Prize finalists In the Next Room (or the vibrator play) and The Clean House, as well as Passion Play, Dead Man's Cell Phone, Demeter in the City, Eurydice, Melancholy Play, and Late: a cowboy song. She is the recipient of a Whiting Writers' Award, a PEN/Laura Pels Award, and a MacArthur Fellowship. Her plays have premiered on Broadway, Off-Broadway, and have been produced in many theaters around the world.

Download or read book The Love Artist written by Jane Alison and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2001-03-31 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A darkly brilliant first novel that imagines a missing chapter in the life of Ovid. Why was Ovid, the most popular author of his day, banished to the edges of the Roman Empire? Why do only two lines survive of his play Medea, reputedly his most passionate work and perhaps his most Accomplished? Between the known details of the poet's life and these enigmas, Jane Alison has Interpolated a haunting drama of passion and psychological manipulation. On holiday at the Black Sea, on the fringes of the Empire, Ovid encounters an almost otherworldly woman who seems to embody the fictitious creations of his soon-to-be-published Metamorphoses. Part healer, part witch, she seems myth come to life. Enchanted and obsessed -- and, for the first time in a long while, flush with inspiration -- Ovid takes her back with him to Rome. But the inexorable pull of ambition leads him to make a Faustian bargain with fate that will betray his newfound muse. As the two of them become entangled in its snares, the reader is drawn deep into an ingeniously enacted meditation on love, art, and the desire for immortality.

Download or read book Why Men Fall Out of Love written by Michael French and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2007-03-27 with total page 364 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The groundbreaking book that breaks the silence of the male code. Why do men fall out of love? It’s rarely a simple issue of attraction, sex, or money trouble. In this provocative no-holds-barred guide, Michael French brings unparalleled insight into the male psyche and reveals why so many men feel trapped, unhappy, or unfulfilled, and what women can do about it. Based on interviews with men from all ages and walks of life this grippingly honest book illustrates why, when it comes to relationships, so many men feel “outgunned and outmatched” by women. Discover: • The 4 relationship busters that lead couples to flounder and sink–the loss of intimacy / the quest for validation / the perfection impulse / the fading of attraction–and strategies for dealing with them head-on • Six key reasons why men fall out of love–from issues of identity, power, and fear to stereotypes about who they really are and what they want • The truth about men and (mis)communication–and ways for them to open up • Three questions a woman needs to ask a man before she becomes emotionally involved • The Relationship Audit–how couples can figure out what is driving them apart and find ways to mend their relationship By finally bringing men’s true feelings to the surface, Michael French offers a dramatic new approach to understanding men and their hidden emotions. This guide illuminates the deeper reasons why men fall out of love and, more important, shows how relationships can be healed. “An impressive, insightful, and completely accessible view deep into the heart’s of men and their struggle with love.” –Joel D. Block, Ph.D., author of Naked Intimacy “Read this brilliant book and untie the knot of life– why does love fade?” –Susan Braudy, former editor of Ms. Magazine From the Trade Paperback edition.

Download or read book Mediation and Love A Study of the Medieval Go Between in Key Romance and Near Eastern Texts written by Leyla Rouhi and published by BRILL. This book was released on 1999-02-23 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study offers a typology of the go-between across key texts from antiquity and several medieval literary traditions, analyzing the role of the third party in the poetics of love. The work provides the indispensable context for the study of the significant transformations undergone by the go-between. Legal and scientific sources are taken into account alongside Latin, French, and English literary works and literature of the medieval Islamic period for the critique of differences and intertextual links which inform the conception of the go-between. The case of the Medieval Spanish go-between is given a special attention due to the figure's complex relationship with diverse traditions. The range covered in the work provides a comprehensive view of the figure's trajectory and representation in each text.