When Tsukasa meets a mysterious man in a hotel lobby, and ends up spending a maddening night of pleasure with him. Afterwards, he accepts to meet him again in the same room the following week, despite the fact he doesn't even know his name. As their secret encounters continue, he finds himself falling in love and is worried that it may not last. Simultaneously, he's scouted by a business-talent head-hunter and receives an interesting work offer. But when he goes to meet them... his new boss is none other than his secret lover!

Goddu traces the development of the female, southern, and African-American gothic in literature between the Revolutionary and Civil Wars, placing in a new historical context Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Hawthorne's The Blithedale Romance, Alcott's ghost stories, and Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.

"Regis makes an important contribution to the understanding of eighteenth-century American ideas."--

We take for granted the idea that white, middle-class, straight masculinity connotes total control of emotions, emotional inexpressivity, and emotional isolation. That men repress their feelings as they seek their fortunes in the competitive worlds of business and politics seems to be a given. This collection of essays by prominent literary and cultural critics rethinks such commonly held views by addressing the history and politics of emotion in prevailing narratives about masculinity. How did the story of the emotionally stifled U.S. male come into being? What are its political stakes? Will the "release" of straight, white, middle-class masculine emotion remake existing forms of power or reinforce them? This collection forcefully challenges our most entrenched ideas about male emotion. Through readings of works by Thoreau, Lowell, and W. E. B. Du Bois, and of twentieth century authors such as Hemingway and Kerouac, this book questions the persistence of the emotionally alienated male in narratives of white middle-class masculinity and addresses the political and social implications of male emotional release.

The first installment in this fierce and sensual new paranormal romance series features demonic gladiators, ruthless mafia villains, and a proud race on the brink of extinction. Lindsey Piper’s hotly anticipated debut series, The Dragon Kings, begins with a gritty, fiercely sexy tale of romance and rebirth. The Dragon Kings, an ancient race of demons, were once worshipped as earthly gods. Centuries later and facing extinction, they fight at the whim of human cartels for the privilege of perpetuating their bloodlines. After marrying a human, Nynn of Clan Tigony became Audrey MacLaren, banished from a life of distinction and power. But when Nynn gives birth to the first natural-born Dragon King in a generation, she and her son are kidnapped by a sadistic cartel scientist whose life mission is studying demon procreation. Leto of Clan Garnis is a Cage warrior, using his superhuman speed and reflexes to secure the right for his sister to conceive. Within the Cages, he has no equal. When torture unlocks Nynn’s repressed powers, she is sent to the Cages, where Leto is charged with her training. He believes her a traitor to their people, while she sees him as no better than a slave. But for the sake of her son, Nynn must learn to survive. An undeniable connection turns antagonists to allies to impassioned lovers as they learn the high price of honor in their violent underground world.

During the era of the Atlantic slave trade, vibrant port cities became home to thousands of Africans in transit. Free and enslaved blacks alike crafted the necessary materials to support transoceanic commerce and labored as stevedores, carters, sex workers, and boarding-house keepers. Even though Africans continued to be exchanged as chattel, urban frontiers allowed a number of enslaved blacks to negotiate the right to hire out their own time, often greatly enhancing their autonomy within the Atlantic commercial system. In The Black Urban Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade, eleven original essays by leading scholars from the United States, Europe, and Latin America chronicle the black experience in Atlantic ports, providing a rich and diverse portrait of the ways in which Africans experienced urban life during the era of plantation slavery. Describing life in Portugal, Brazil, Mexico, the Caribbean, and Africa, this volume illuminates the historical identity, agency, and autonomy of the African experience as well as the crucial role Atlantic cities played in the formation of diasporic cultures. By shifting focus away from plantations, this volume poses new questions about the nature of slavery in the sixteenth to nineteenth centuries, illustrating early modern urban spaces as multiethnic sites of social connectivity, cultural incubation, and political negotiation. Contributors: Trevor Burnard, Mariza de Carvalho Soares, Matt D. Childs, Kevin Dawson, Roquinaldo Ferreira, David Geggus, Jane Landers, Robin Law, David Northrup, João José Reis, James H. Sweet, Nicole von Germeten.

Informed by Jurgen Habermas's public sphere theory, this book studies the popular eighteenth-century genre of the epistolary narrative through readings of four works: Montesquieu's Lettres persanes (1721), Richardson's Clarissa (1749-50), Riccoboni's Lettres de Mistriss Fanni Butlerd (1757), and Crevecoeur's Letters from an American Farmer (1782).The author situates epistolary narratives in the contexts of eighteenth-century print culture: the rise of new models of readership and the newly influential role of the author; the model of contract derived from liberal political theory; and the techniques and aesthetics of mechanical reproduction. Epistolary authors used the genre to formulate a range of responses to a cultural anxiety about private energies and appetites, particularly those of women, as well as to legitimate their own authorial practices. Just as the social contract increasingly came to be seen as the organising instrument of public, civic relations in this period, the author argues that the epistolary novel serves to socialise and regulate the private subject as a citizen of the Republic of Letters.

The Adventurers is a series of AD&D (Advanced Dungeons and Dragons) campaign writeups, set in the World of Greyhawk, which has evolved ove time into an ongoing story. They are among the first internet D&D sagas and chronicles an adventuring group's rise from the anonymity of first level to the heights of prestige and power at 15th to 20th level, and is VERY entertaining reading. This isn't Dragonlance, or Eberron, or even Forgotten Realms. This is classic Greyhawk, the first published setting for D&D and created by Gygax himself.

This is a historical, nonfiction, true story and addresses necessary changes that must be implemented, maintained, and enforced in worldwide healthcare provider professional training programs and hospitals. The book exposes abuses and enslavement policies and attitudes in health care training programs and hospital administrations worldwide and offers simple and genius remedies to eradicate these deleterious policies and slave owner attitudes of hospital administrators. The book lays out a realistic pathway, achievable goals, and a potential glorious and auspicious destiny of worldwide improvement in the care of hospitalized patients, physicians morale, respect, and dignity, maintenance and perseverance of eternal zenith patient care and ethical and moral hospital administrations and individual hospital administrators behavior and policies in this generation and all future generations. The book elucidates essential key strategies to restore power, influence, dignity, and respect (all have been stripped from "physician slaves" by malevolent "administrator slave owners"), back to their rightful owners (and rightfully so, based on their education and training in the direct care of patients), who are those individual and independent contractor physician specialists (who admirably sacrifice their healthy sleep and rest time to compassionately care for the emergent needs of hospitalized patients at all inconvenient hours of the day and night in addition to their full-time weekly, busy work schedule, caring for their outpatient office practice patients). Dignity, respect and balance of power must be restored to independent physicians and other healthcare provider personnel throughout the world to emancipate these current "slaves" from their current "slave owners" and the current "slave owner system." Emancipated "slaves" must then continue to be guided by ethical and moral singularity of purpose and intent, and be organized, supported, and defended by "pro-independent healthcare providers" powerful unions. Independent and emancipated healthcare providers will then be empowered and powerfully defended and willing and capable to continue the fight and battle for their new freedom, respect and dignity, each generation, against the ever-present threat of re-enslavement of independent healthcare providers by hospital administrators who may (and often) only have unethical, selfish fiscal, or "avoid litigation" goals instead of more highly admirable and desired intentions and goals of ethical and moral behavior, respecting physician independence, judgement and balance of power (versus hospital administrator's maleficent goals and aspirations), ultimately achieving the desired outcome and goal of realizing zenith patient care worldwide, all stemming from the long overdue emancipation of current "Physician Slaves" from their current hospital "Adminis-Traitors" or "Slave Owners" that has persisted for centuries, but now can and must be abolished, via enlightenment that inspires individuals to unite and act now on the recommendations in this book, adhering to the gestalt and paradigm shift brilliantly (proscribed by current and past "slave owners") prescribed by this book's dynamic author.

Past studies have discussed antebellum and early national sentimental literature by and about women as a retreat from, or criticism of, the burgeoning market. In this landmark study, Joseph Fichtelberg examines how this literature actually helped to bring market behaviors into maturity. Between 1780 and 1870, Americans endured no fewer than seventeen economic depressions. Each one generated sentimental outpourings in which women came to personify the travails of the marketplace. In the early national period, novels like Martha Meredith Read's Margaretta and Isaac Mitchell's The Asylum depicted resolute heroines who soothed national ills with virtuous vulnerability. While men often languished in such novels, women thrived. Antebellum fictions extend the argument: bankrupt husbands dissolved in sentimental despair, while their wives used a different sensibility to understand, and adapt to, the market itself. These fictions used women characters to think through the problems of economic crisis and growth--a process completed by the Civil War, when popular fictions began to depict merchants and clerks as feminine. To master the market was to act like a woman--virtuous, immune to commercial temptation, and thus pure. This notion, Fichtelberg argues, was crucial to the onset of liberalism and the emergence of the American middle class. In addition to his discussions of popular, though noncanonical, writers such as Read and Mitchell, Fichtelberg also covers well-known authors such as Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur, Olaudah Equiano, and Walt Whitman. He brings to bear neglected sources (including the ledgers of Ralph Waldo Emerson) and interweaves best-selling novels and pamphlets with political debates and contemporary economic analyses to create rich descriptions of the era. A crucial addition to American literary criticism on sentimental literature, Critical Fictions is a groundbreaking analysis of the relations between commercial and sentimental discourses in early American literature as well as a history of early American economics. It will appeal to specialists as well as to the general reader interested in how American culture has portrayed women in ways that express its deepest needs.