Author: Pamela Moses
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0425275396
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 417
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Book Description
For the audience that made Commencement a New York Times bestseller comes a novel about women making their way in the world. Four young women are thrown together as roommates freshman year in college: Ruth, Francesca, Opal, and Setsu. Each is striving to overcome struggles from childhood and find her true self. Tormented by self-doubt, Ruth is coddled by her immigrant mother, who uses food to soothe and control her. Defiant Francesca believes her heavy frame shames her Park Avenue family; to provoke them, and to protect herself, she consumes everything in sight. Opal longs to be included in her glamorous, adventure-seeking mother’s dinner dates—until a disturbing encounter forever changes her desires. Finally, Setsu, a promising violinist, staves off conflict with her jealous older brother by allowing him to take away the choicest morsels from her plate—and from her future. As their stories and appetites collide, these women make a pact to maintain their friendships into adulthood—but each must first find strength and her way in the world. READERS GUIDE INSIDE
Author: Caroline Knapp
Publisher: ReadHowYouWant.com
ISBN: 1458716465
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 326
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Book Description
What looks like a consciously altruistic effort to encapsulate one woman's entire life into lessons for the benefit of womankind may be just that: after divulging every gruesome detail of her spiral into anorexia and subsequent self-discoveries in this memoir, Knapp died of lung cancer last June at age 42. Similar in tone to her previous Drinking: A Love Story, this work is candid and persuasive enough to reach many women with analogous problems. But it's more than one woman's tragic story; multitudinous interviews with women with eating disorders, excerpts from classic feminist texts and sociological statistics lend credence and categorize the book under cultural studies as much as self-help. Knapp hypothesizes that the feminists who came after the revolutionary 1960s, herself included, were stifled rather than empowered by the overwhelming choices before them. They gained ''the freedom to hunger and to satisfy hunger in all its varied forms.'' Unfortunately, writes Knapp, size-obsessed fashion magazines and other social messages contradict a woman's right to desire, contributing to the rise in eating disorders and other illnesses. Knapp observes an aspect of the backlash against the feminist movement: when ''women were demanding the right to take up more space in the world,'' they were being told by a still patriarchal society ''to grow physically smaller.'' Though Knapp admits it's ''easier to worry about the body than the soul,'' she hopes creating a dialogue about anorexia will enable all women to nourish both.
Author: Rachel Monroe
Publisher: Scribner
ISBN: 1501188895
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 288
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Book Description
A “necessary and brilliant” (NPR) exploration of our cultural fascination with true crime told through four “enthralling” (The New York Times Book Review) narratives of obsession. In Savage Appetites, Rachel Monroe links four criminal roles—Detective, Victim, Defender, and Killer—to four true stories about women driven by obsession. From a frustrated and brilliant heiress crafting crime-scene dollhouses to a young woman who became part of a Manson victim’s family, from a landscape architect in love with a convicted murderer to a Columbine fangirl who planned her own mass shooting, these women are alternately mesmerizing, horrifying, and sympathetic. A revealing study of women’s complicated relationship with true crime and the fear and desire it can inspire, together these stories provide a window into why many women are drawn to crime narratives—even as they also recoil from them. Monroe uses these four cases to trace the history of American crime through the growth of forensic science, the evolving role of victims, the Satanic Panic, the rise of online detectives, and the long shadow of the Columbine shooting. Combining personal narrative, reportage, and a sociological examination of violence and media in the 20th and 21st centuries, Savage Appetites is a “corrective to the genre it interrogates” (The New Statesman), scrupulously exploring empathy, justice, and the persistent appeal of crime.
Author: Erika J. Kendrick
Publisher: One World
ISBN: 034551484X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 305
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Book Description
MANY CULTURES • ONE WORLD With her exotic looks and killer body, Kennedy Lee is a rising star in the reality TV and soap opera worlds. Now she’s really hit the big time and landed a role on the hugely popular daytime drama America’s Next Sweetheart. As this great news coincides with Kennedy’s birthday, her friends take her out for a wild night on the town. So wild, in fact, that the next morning Kennedy wakes up with a hard-bodied hunk in her bed, a vicious headache, and no recollection of how this gorgeous guy ended up beside her–naked. Not only that, but it’s her first day at the new gig, and Page Six has already chronicled her previous night’s exploits, calling her “America’s Next Lush.” Now Kennedy must endure dirty looks on the set, abuse from the soap’s bitchy diva, and the shocker that the guy who broke her five-year celibacy streak is none other than her co-star, Jesse James. As she battles catty actors, snarky production assistants, malicious gossip, and her growing appetite for food and sex, she struggles to fit in, find her true Prince Charming, and eat a slice of red velvet cake without any guilt.
Author: Felicia Grossman
Publisher: Carina Press
ISBN: 1488052182
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 311
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Book Description
He’s her ticket into high society… Banking heiress Ursula Nunes has lived her life on the fringes of Philadelphia’s upper class. Her Jewish heritage means she’s never quite been welcomed by society’s elite…and her quick temper has never helped, either. A faux engagement to the scion of the mid-Atlantic’s most storied family might work to repair her rumpled reputation and gain her entrée to the life she thinks she wants…if she can ignore the way her “betrothed” makes her feel warm all over and stay focused on her goal. She’s his ticket out… Former libertine John Thaddeus “Jay” Truitt is hardly the man to teach innocent women about propriety. Luckily, high society has little to do with being proper and everything to do with identifying your foe’s temptation—an art form Jay mastered long ago. A broken engagement will give him the perfect excuse to run off to Europe and a life of indulgence. But when the game turns too personal, all bets are off… One-click with confidence. This title is part of the Carina Press Romance Promise: all the romance you’re looking for with an HEA/HFN. It’s a promise! Publisher’s Note: Appetites & Vices deals with topics some readers may find difficult, including substance abuse and mental illness.
Author: Lara Williams
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 052553959X
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 321
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Book Description
Named a Best Book of the Year: Vogue * TIME * Real Simple * Kirkus Reviews A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice For fans of Sally Rooney's Normal People: A sharply intelligent and intimate debut novel about a secret society of hungry young women who meet after dark and feast to reclaim their appetites--and their physical spaces--that posits the question: If you feed a starving woman, what will she grow into? Roberta spends her life trying not to take up space. At almost thirty, she is adrift and alienated from life. Stuck in a mindless job and reluctant to pursue her passion for food, she suppresses her appetite and recedes to the corners of rooms. But when she meets Stevie, a spirited and effervescent artist, their intense friendship sparks a change in Roberta, a shift in her desire for more. Together, they invent the Supper Club, a transgressive and joyous collective of women who gather to celebrate, rather than admonish, their hungers. They gather after dark and feast until they are sick; they break into private buildings and leave carnage in their wake; they embrace their changing bodies; they stop apologizing. For these women, each extraordinary yet unfulfilled, the club is a way to explore, discover, and push the boundaries of the space they take up in the world. Yet as the club expands, growing in both size and rebellion, Roberta is forced to reconcile herself to the desire and vulnerabilities of the body--and the past she has worked so hard to repress. Devastatingly perceptive and savagely funny, Supper Club is an essential coming-of-age story for our times.
Author: Patricia Weitz
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101015055
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 342
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Book Description
“A raw and resonant debut novel” (Megan McCafferty) and a vivid portrait of life on a modern college campus. College senior Natalie Bloom is beautiful and ambitious, but also painfully insecure. At twenty, she’s still a virgin, never even having had a boyfriend. At school, Natalie hides out most weekends in the library—until she meets Patrick, her fantasy (she thinks) of a cultured, intellectual Prince Charming. But the more time they spend together, the more Patrick brings out her worst insecurities. And before Natalie’s ready, she winds up losing her virginity— and her sense of direction, as her emotional responses take a dangerously self-destructive turn. Soon it’ll take only the most extreme measures to reclaim her sense of self, her confidence, and her ambition. Insightful, moving, and achingly self-aware, College Girl is an intensely real portrait of a character whose insecurities are recognizable to us all, and of a time of life that changes everything.
Author: Madeline Stevens
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062883240
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 279
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Book Description
A captivating debut novel about a woman who falls into an overwhelming mutual obsession with the Upper East Side mother who hires her as a nanny Ella is flat broke: wasting away on bodega coffee, barely making rent, seducing the occasional strange man who might buy her dinner. Unexpectedly, an Upper East Side couple named Lonnie and James rescue her from her empty bank account, offering her a job as a nanny and ushering her into their moneyed world. Ella’s days are now spent tending to the baby in their elegant brownstone or on extravagant excursions with the family. Both women are just 26—but unlike Ella, Lonnie has a doting husband and son, unmistakable artistic talent, and old family money. Ella is mesmerized by Lonnie’s girlish affection and disregard for the normal boundaries of friendship and marriage. Convinced there must be a secret behind Lonnie’s seemingly effortless life, Ella begins sifting through her belongings, meticulously cataloguing lipstick tubes and baby teeth and scraps of writing. All the while, Ella’s resentment grows, but so does an inexplicable and dizzying attraction. Soon Ella will be immersed so deeply in her cravings—for Lonnie’s lifestyle, her attention, her lovers—that she may never come up for air. Riveting, propulsive, and startling, Devotion is a masterful debut novel where mismatched power collides with blinding desire, incinerating our perceptions of femininity, lust, and privilege.
Author: Hanne Blank
Publisher: Seal Press
ISBN: 0786750596
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 209
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Book Description
This deftly written collection of twenty erotic tales is sure to titillate, intrigue and inspire. Editor of several successful erotica anthologies, Hanne Blank knows good sex, and this, her first book-length solo offering, demonstrates her considerable talents as a creator of erotic fiction. Blank's tantalizing descriptions, smart writing, and fantastic imagination are sure to hit their mark. Unruly Appetites draws readers in immediately with the most scintillating, intimate details of its characters’ unrestrained encounters. One story describes a chance meeting on the road where "maybe turns to yes without ceremony, without fuss." Readers may find themselves both shocked and enthralled by the human-feline encounter described in "The Princess and the Tiger," or lost in possibilities from the graphic memories of a foursome aroused by steamy Polaroids. Or intrigued by the adventures of pearls-from-Tiffany Katie with the nipple-less bra under her Chanel suit, or a young virgin's deflowering in Europe: "I wonder, does that make me a tramp, not knowing the last name of the man who took my virginity?". The myriad fantasies, perspectives, dreams, realities, groupings, shapes and ages presented here offer almost limitless variety.
Author: Maya Rodale
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780990635666
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
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Book Description
Long before clinch covers and bodice rippers, romance novels had a bad reputation as the lowbrow lit of desperate housewives and hopeless spinsters. But why were these books-the escape and entertainment of choice for millions of women-singled out for scorn and shame? Dangerous Books for Girls examines the secret history of the genre's bad reputation-from the "damned mob of scribbling women" in the nineteenth century to the sexy mass-market paperbacks of the twentieth century-and shows how romance novels have inspired and empowered generations of women to dream big, refuse to settle, and believe they're worth it. For every woman who has ever hidden the cover of a romance-and every woman who has been curious about those "Fabio books"-Dangerous Books For Girls shows why there's no room for guilt when reading for pleasure.
