Download or read book The Pleasure Was Mine written by Tommy Hays and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2007-04-01 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Prate Marshbanks proposed to his future wife on a muggy July night at Pete's Drive-in back in '52. "She said yes to me between bites of a slaw burger all-the-way." A college graduate and daughter of a prominent lawyer, Irene was an unlikely match for Prate, a high school dropout. He lived his married life aware of the question on people's minds: How in the world did a tall, thin, fair-skinned beauty and one of the most respected high school English teachers in all of Greenville County, in all of South Carolina for that matter, wind up married to a short, dark, fat-faced, jug-eared house painter? That their marriage not only survived for fifty years, but flourished, is a source of constant wonder to Prate. Now he faces a new challenge with Irene. From the author of In The Family Way, a novel the Atlanta Constitution called "an instant classic" and the Charlotte Observer praised as "a lovely, moving book," comes a powerful story of hard-earned hope. The Pleasure Was Mine takes place during a critical summer in the life of Prate Marshbanks, when he retires to care for his wife, who is gradually slipping away. To complicate things, Prate's son, Newell, a recently widowed single father, asks Prate to keep nine-year-old Jackson for the summer. Though Prate is irritated by the presence of his moody grandson, during the summer Jackson helps tend his grandmother, and grandfather and grandson form a bond. As Irene's memory fades, Prate, a hardworking man who has kept to himself most of his life, has little choice but to get to know his family. With elegance and skillful economy of language, Tommy Hays renders an unforgettable character in Prate Marshbanks. The Pleasure Was Mine is at once a quietly wrenching portrayal of grief, a magical and romantic story about the power of love, and an unexpectedly moving take on the resilience of family.

Download or read book The Pleasure is all Mine written by Shanaya Taneja and published by Sristhi Publishers & Distributors. This book was released on 2016-07 with total page 176 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Trisha wants to be rich and famous, so she opens her arms for all the right men. She doesn't care if it's Sanjay or someone else. She has the beauty to lure and the brain to know how, where and when. Sanjay is a happy man - with a beautiful trophy wife and roaring extra marital affairs. He dated a few, slept with many, but respected none. Until he saw Trisha, and she was all he could think about. A refined socialite and a renowned man's wife - that's the identity Bharti has lived with. Caught in a loveless marriage, she dares to break free and find herself when love comes knocking. Breathtakingly charming and lovable, Ankit is a guy who thinks from his heart. He lives to enjoy life and makes every second count when he bumps into Bharti. The only thing more shocking than the dark, dangerous pleasures they discover is how right it feels. When their lives mingle and feelings kindle, dirty secrets are revealed. A story of love, lust, deception and betrayal, The Pleasure Is All Mine is an irresistibly sensual page-turner that explores having it all, and the consequences of wanting more.

Download or read book The Pleasure s All Mine written by Julie Peakman and published by Reaktion Books. This book was released on 2013-10-15 with total page 473 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Handcuffs, paddles, whips—the words alone are enough to make a person blush. Even by our society’s standards, the practice of things like BDSM is still very hush-hush, considered deviant sexual behavior that must be kept hidden. But the narrow view of what is thought of as “normal” sex—a vanilla act performed by one man and one woman—is more and more contested these days. And as Julie Peakman reveals, normal never really existed; for everyone, different kinds of sex have always offered myriad pleasures, and almost all sexual behaviors have traveled between acceptance and proscription. The Pleasure’s All Mine examines two millennia of letters, diaries, court records, erotic books, medical texts, and more to explore the gamut of “deviant” sexual activity. Delving into the specialized cultures of pain, necrophilia, and bestiality and the social world of plushies, furries, and life-size sex dolls, Peakman considers the changing attitudes toward these, as well as masturbation, “golden showers,” sadomasochism, homosexuals, transvestites, and transsexuals. She follows the history of each behavior through its original reception to its interpretation by sexologists and how it is viewed today, showing how previously acceptable behaviors now provoke social outrage, or vice versa. In addition, she questions why people have been and remain intolerant of other people’s sexual preferences. The first comprehensive history of sexual perversion and packed with both color and black and white images, The Pleasure’s All Mine is a fascinating and sometimes shocking look at the evolution of our views on sex.

Download or read book The Pleasures All Mine written by Joan Kelly and published by Da Capo Press. This book was released on 2009-04-29 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Joan Kelly took a weekend job as a professional submissive in a private dungeon, it seemed she'd finally found a perfect outlet for her pent-up desires. Suddenly, Joan was being paid to do things she'd only fantasized about. Having spent several years scouring the Internet unsuccessfully for a man who would dominate her in the bedroom without getting on her nerves outside of it, Joan had nearly lost hope of satisfying her sexually submissive urges. Now, using her professional name, "Marnie," she was being paid to do only what she felt like with kinky men who didn't even expect to have any real sex in their sessions. To Joan, it almost felt like being paid to practice the art of self-centeredness -- except for the part where she had to kneel and address strangers as "Master." The Pleasure's All Mine offers the reader a rare, intimate, often amusing, sometimes disturbing look into the life of a professional submissive -- one whose drive for self-acceptance and respect is as relentless as her sexual need for the services she provides. Readers will experience many humorous, bizarre, frightening, and utterly entertaining events through the perceptive and insightful eyes of this writer.

Download or read book The Pleasure Is All Mine written by Suzanne Pirret and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-03-03 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With The Pleasure is All Mine, anyone can enjoy a Steak au Poivre with Frites, Three-Cheese Ravioli, Coconut Fish Curry with Homemade Naan Bread, or a Wild Blueberry Free-Form Tart without the expense and hassle of restaurants or fussy dinner guests. The 100 uncomplicated, exquisite recipes in this collection are simple to prepare and require no fancy equipment. With just a skillet, bowl, knife, and a few perfect ingredients, Pirret makes great solo dining effortless-and she offers inspired wine and cocktail pairings, too, to make dinner complete. Edgy and bursting with personality, The Pleasure is All Mine is also filled with a wealth of devilishly entertaining stories based on her experiences living in New York, Los Angeles, Paris, and London.

Download or read book The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction written by Alan Jacobs and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2011-05-26 with total page 172 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In recent years, cultural commentators have sounded the alarm about the dire state of reading in America. Americans are not reading enough, they say, or reading the right books, in the right way. In this book, Alan Jacobs argues that, contrary to the doomsayers, reading is alive and well in America. There are millions of devoted readers supporting hundreds of enormous bookstores and online booksellers. Oprah's Book Club is hugely influential, and a recent NEA survey reveals an actual uptick in the reading of literary fiction. Jacobs's interactions with his students and the readers of his own books, however, suggest that many readers lack confidence; they wonder whether they are reading well, with proper focus and attentiveness, with due discretion and discernment. Many have absorbed the puritanical message that reading is, first and foremost, good for you--the intellectual equivalent of eating your Brussels sprouts. For such people, indeed for all readers, Jacobs offers some simple, powerful, and much needed advice: read at whim, read what gives you delight, and do so without shame, whether it be Stephen King or the King James Version of the Bible. In contrast to the more methodical approach of Mortimer Adler's classic How to Read a Book (1940), Jacobs offers an insightful, accessible, and playfully irreverent guide for aspiring readers. Each chapter focuses on one aspect of approaching literary fiction, poetry, or nonfiction, and the book explores everything from the invention of silent reading, reading responsively, rereading, and reading on electronic devices. Invitingly written, with equal measures of wit and erudition, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction will appeal to all readers, whether they be novices looking for direction or old hands seeking to recapture the pleasures of reading they first experienced as children.

Download or read book Pleasure Me written by Monica Burns and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2011-03-01 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of Assassin's Honor, a bold and sexy new historical romance. Youth and beauty are a courtesan's greatest assets. Concerned, at forty-one, that she is no longer desirable, Lady Ruth Attwood is uncertain whether to be offended or flattered when a younger man makes her an unusual offer. In need of funds, she agrees. But then she does the unthinkable-she falls in love...

Download or read book This Is Pleasure written by Mary Gaitskill and published by Pantheon. This book was released on 2019-11-05 with total page 97 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Starting with Bad Behavior in the 1980s, Mary Gaitskill has been writing about gender relations with searing, even prophetic honesty. In This Is Pleasure, she considers our present moment through the lens of a particular #MeToo incident. The effervescent, well-dressed Quin, a successful book editor and fixture on the New York arts scene, has been accused of repeated unforgivable transgressions toward women in his orbit. But are they unforgivable? And who has the right to forgive him? To Quin’s friend Margot, the wrongdoing is less clear. Alternating Quin’s and Margot’s voices and perspectives, Gaitskill creates a nuanced tragicomedy, one that reveals her characters as whole persons—hurtful and hurting, infuriating and touching, and always deeply recognizable. Gaitskill has said that fiction is the only way that she could approach this subject because it is too emotionally faceted to treat in the more rational essay form. Her compliment to her characters—and to her readers—is that they are unvarnished and real. Her belief in our ability to understand them, even when we don’t always admire them, is a gesture of humanity from one of our greatest contemporary writers.

Download or read book The Pleasure Seekers written by Tishani Doshi and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2011-04-04 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: August, 1968: Babo Patel arrives in London from Madras, with curly hair, jhill mill teeth and dreams of becoming a success. When he meets the beautiful, auburn-haired Siân Jones, he falls in love instantly. She, like him, is in search of something bigger than what the home she left behind can offer.But when Babo's parents learn of his intention to marry 'some girl from God knows where' he is given an ultimatum: he can only marry Siân if they agree to live in Madras for two years before returning to London. As the years pass by, the calamities, quirks and heartaches of first love, lost innocence, and old age unfold across cultures and generations of this mixed-up family in a topsy-turvy world.

Download or read book All Mine written by Stephen Owen and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2021-12-14 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Under the Song Dynasty, China experienced rapid commercial growth and monetization of the economy. In the same period, the austere ethical turn that led to neo-Confucianism was becoming increasingly prevalent in the imperial bureaucracy and literati culture. Tracing the influences of these trends in Chinese intellectual history, All Mine! explores the varied ways in which eleventh-century writers worked through the conflicting values of this new world. Stephen Owen contends that in the new money economy of the Song, writers became preoccupied with the question of whether material things can bring happiness. Key thinkers returned to this problem, weighing the conflicting influences of worldly possessions and material comfort against Confucian ideology, which locates true contentment in the Way and disdains attachment to things. In a series of essays, Owen examines the works of writers such as the prose master Ouyang Xiu, who asked whether tranquility could be found in the backwater to which he had been exiled; the poet and essayist Su Dongpo, who was put on trial for slandering the emperor; and the historian Sima Guang, whose private garden elicited reflections on private ownership. Through strikingly original readings of major eleventh-century figures, All Mine! inquires not only into the material conditions of happiness but also the broader conditions of knowledge.

Download or read book Pleasure for Pleasure written by Eloisa James and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-10-13 with total page 594 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The conclusion of New York Times bestselling author Eloisa James's Essex Sisters series! Fueled by the knowledge that notoriety is better than failure, witty, unconventional Josie does what no proper young lady should—she challenges fate. She discards her corset and flirts outrageously. She attends the horse races and allows an arrogant rakehell to whisk her behind the stables for a surreptitious kiss . . . and is caught! She doesn't want to marry the young hellion—but who's to help? Her chaperone keeps disappearing for mysterious appointments; her guardian is on his wedding trip; and his friend the Earl of Mayne is too busy staring into the eyes of his exquisite French fiancÉe. Can a marriage forced by stuffy convention and unwilling desire become the match of the season?

Download or read book The Lost Hours written by Karen White and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2009-04-07 with total page 372 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times bestselling author of the Tradd Street novels delivers a gripping tale of family, fate, and forgiveness. When Piper Mills was twelve, she helped her grandfather bury a box that belonged to her grandmother in the backyard. For twelve years, it remained untouched. Now a near fatal riding accident has shattered Piper’s dreams of Olympic glory. After her grandfather’s death, she inherits the house and all its secrets, including a key to a room that doesn’t exist—or does it? And after her grandmother is sent away to a nursing home, she remembers the box buried in the backyard. In it are torn pages from a scrapbook, a charm necklace—and a newspaper article from 1939 about the body of an infant found floating in the Savannah River. The necklace’s charms tell the story of three friends during the 1930s— each charm added during the three months each friend had the necklace and recorded her life in the scrapbook. Piper always dismissed her grandmother as not having had a story to tell. And now, too late, Piper finds she might have been wrong.

Download or read book Hostage to Pleasure written by Nalini Singh and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2008-09-02 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A rebel Psy scientist finds herself at the mercy of a changeling who has sworn vengeance against her kind in this thrilling romance in Nalini Singh’s New York Times bestselling series. Separated from her son and forced to create a neural implant that will mean the effective enslavement of her psychically gifted race, Ashaya Aleine is the perfect Psy—cool, calm, emotionless...at least on the surface. Inside, she’s fighting a desperate battle to save her son and escape the vicious cold of the PsyNet. Yet when escape comes, it leads not to safety, but to the lethal danger of a sniper’s embrace. DarkRiver sniper Dorian Christensen lost his sister to a Psy killer. Though he lacks the changeling ability to shift into animal form, his leopard lives within. And that leopard’s rage at the brutal loss is a clawing darkness that hungers for vengeance. Falling for a Psy has never been on Dorian’s agenda. But charged with protecting Ashaya and her son, he discovers that passion has a way of changing the rules...

Download or read book The Footprints of God written by Greg Iles and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2004 with total page 572 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this "New York Times" bestseller, Iles probes the terrifying possibility that the next phase of human evolution may not be human at all. Alarming, believable, and utterly consuming.--Dan Brown. Now available in a tall Premium Edition. Reissue.

Download or read book Why I Read written by Wendy Lesser and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2014-01-07 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Wendy Lesser's extraordinary alertness, intelligence, and curiosity have made her one of America's most significant cultural critics," writes Stephen Greenblatt. In Why I Read, Lesser draws on a lifetime of pleasure reading and decades of editing one of the most distinguished literary magazines in the country, The Threepenny Review, to describe her love of literature. As Lesser writes in her prologue, "Reading can result in boredom or transcendence, rage or enthusiasm, depression or hilarity, empathy or contempt, depending on who you are and what the book is and how your life is shaping up at the moment you encounter it." Here the reader will discover a definition of literature that is as broad as it is broad-minded. In addition to novels and stories, Lesser explores plays, poems, and essays along with mysteries, science fiction, and memoirs. As she examines these works from such perspectives as "Character and Plot," "Novelty," "Grandeur and Intimacy," and "Authority," Why I Read sparks an overwhelming desire to put aside quotidian tasks in favor of reading. Lesser's passion for this pursuit resonates on every page, whether she is discussing the book as a physical object or a particular work's influence. "Reading literature is a way of reaching back to something bigger and older and different," she writes. "It can give you the feeling that you belong to the past as well as the present, and it can help you realize that your present will someday be someone else's past. This may be disheartening, but it can also be strangely consoling at times." A book in the spirit of E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel and Elizabeth Hardwick's A View of My Own, Why I Read is iconoclastic, conversational, and full of insight. It will delight those who are already avid readers as well as neophytes in search of sheer literary fun.

Download or read book A Plea for Eros written by Siri Hustvedt and published by Picador. This book was released on 2007-04-01 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of the international bestseller What I Loved, a provocative collection of autobiographical and critical essays about writing and writers. Whether her subject is growing up in Minnesota, cross-dressing, or the novel, Hustvedt's nonfiction, like her fiction, defies easy categorization, elegantly combining intellect, emotion, wit, and passion. With a light touch and consummate clarity, she undresses the cultural prejudices that veil both literature and life and explores the multiple personalities that inevitably inhabit a writer's mind. Is it possible for a woman in the twentieth century to endorse the corset, and at the same time approach with authority what it is like to be a man? Hustvedt does. Writing with rigorous honesty about her own divided self, and how this has shaped her as a writer, she also approaches the works of others--Fitzgerald, Dickens, and Henry James--with revelatory insight, and a practitioner's understanding of their art.

Download or read book ENYA written by Chilly Gonzales and published by Rough Trade Books. This book was released on 2020-11-18 with total page 55 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chilly Gonzales is one of the most exciting, original, hard-to-pin-down musicians of our time. Filling halls worldwide at the piano in his slippers and a bathrobe—in any one night he can be dissecting the musicology of an Oasis hit, giving a sublime solo recital, and displaying his lyrical dexterity as a rapper. In his book about Enya, he asks: Does music have to be smart or does it just have to go to the heart? In dazzling, erudite prose Gonzales delves beyond her innumerable gold discs and millions of fans to excavate his own enthusiasm for Enya's singular music as well as the mysterious musician herself, and along the way uncovers new truths about the nature of music, fame, success and the artistic endeavour.