A widow and stay at home mother of five children, Annie Miller struggles with the difficult realities of her life, until she wins the grand prize in a contest sponsored by The Channel, a network that caters to women's fantasies, a prize that includes a week at a luxurious spa and a chance to program and experience her own personal sexual fantasies. Original.

This pioneering work examines prostitution in Shanghai from the late nineteenth century to the present. Drawn mostly from the daughters and wives of the working poor and declassé elites, prostitutes in Shanghai were near the bottom of class and gender hierarchies. Yet they were central figures in Shanghai urban life, entering the historical record whenever others wanted to appreciate, castigate, count, regulate, cure, pathologize, warn about, rescue, eliminate, or deploy them as a symbol in a larger social panorama. Over the past century, prostitution has been understood in many ways: as a source of urbanized pleasures, a profession full of unscrupulous and greedy schemers, a changing site of work for women, a source of moral danger and physical disease, a marker of national decay, and a sign of modernity. For the Communist leadership of the 1950s, the elimination of prostitution symbolized China's emergence as a strong, healthy, and modern nation. In the past decade, as prostitution once again has become a recognized feature of Chinese society, it has been incorporated into a larger public discussion about what kind of modernity China should seek and what kind of sex and gender arrangements should characterize that modernity. Prostitutes, like every other non-elite group, did not record their own lives. How can sources generated by intense public argument about the "larger" meanings of prostitution be read for clues to those lives? Hershatter makes use of a broad range of materials: guidebooks to the pleasure quarters, collections of anecdotes about high-class courtesans, tabloid gossip columns, municipal regulations prohibiting street soliciting, police interrogations of streetwalkers and those accused of trafficking in women, newspaper reports on court cases involving both courtesans and streetwalkers, polemics by Chinese and foreign reformers, learned articles by Chinese scholars commenting on the world history of prostitution and analyzing its local causes, surveys by doctors and social workers on sexually transmitted disease in various Shanghai populations, relief agency records, fictionalized accounts of the scams and sufferings of prostitutes, memoirs by former courtesan house patrons, and interviews with former officials and reformers. Although a courtesan may never set pen to paper, we can infer a great deal about her strategizing and working of the system through the vast cautionary literature that tells her customers how not to be defrauded by her. Newspaper accounts of the arrests and brief court testimonies of Shanghai streetwalkers let us glimpse the way that prostitutes positioned themselves to get the most they could from the legal system. Without recourse to direct speech, Hershatter argues, these women have nevertheless left an audible trace. Central to this study is the investigation of how things are known and later remembered, and how, later still, they are simultaneously apprehended and reinvented by the historian.

In the past decade, as prostitution once again has become a recognized feature of Chinese society, it has been incorporated into a larger public discussion about what kind of modernity China should seek and what kind of sex and gender arrangements should characterize that modernity. Prostitutes, like every other non-elite group, did not record their own lives.

Eleven electric stories of lost women, gay men, curious children, and nostalgic adults from the bestselling author of Notes from an Exhibition. A woman tries on a wig and it unlocks a side of herself she never knew existed. Visiting his old boarding school, a man is nearly undone by memories of a romantic encounter with a former classmate. When she introduces her girlfriend to her family, a young woman is shocked by her mother’s all-too-welcoming reaction. These are the stories of Patrick Gale: loving and warm, familiar and surprising, and all crafted with the precise wit that has made him one of Britain’s most beloved authors of short fiction. The eleven stories that make up Dangerous Pleasures reveal the hidden joys and buried agonies that lie behind our friends’ and neighbors’ happy smiles. Gale understands that the moments that can alter our lives forever come quietly, unexpectedly—as soft and innocuous as a platinum-blond wig. The Sunday Times calls Gale’s short fiction “nattily subversive, sexually ambiguous, intelligent and disturbing.” More than anything, his prose displays an unerring sense of humanity, in every brilliant story, and every perfect line.

Collected here, in DANGEROUS PLEASURES for the first time, are Patrick Gale's most brilliant pieces of short fiction. His subjects are wide-ranging and various - curious childhood loyalties, long-hidden unsettling mem- ories, newly discovered joys, dislocated relationaships, overwhelming, thrilling passions.

"Renee Matthews is starting over. Free of a demanding ex-husband who left her feeling worthless, she's ready for a purely physical connection, on her terms..." --P. [4] of cover.

"Strong-willed and independent, Paisley Nichols is used to taking care of herself. But when an insane mage begins tracking her every move and threatening her at every turn, she has no choice but to put her life in the hands of a demon ..."--Page 4 of cover.

#1 New York Times bestselling author Lora Leigh has captivated millions with her sizzling tales. Paige Galbraithe has always wondered if the dark, cool and mysterious Abram Mustafa is hiding a wicked side... a side that will allow her to explore the kind of pleasure she has only dreamed of. For Abram, Paige is the only woman he has ever loved. But Abram faces the greatest test of his life when his father kidnaps Paige. With Paige's life now in danger, Abram knows that his plans for escape from the only home he has ever known have become more imperative than ever. And for Paige, with her freedom taken from her, she must learn to trust Abram with more than her fantasies. She must trust him with her life... and her heart.

Meet Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter, in the first novel in the #1 New York Times bestselling series that “blends the genres of romance, horror and adventure with stunning panache”(Diana Gabaldon). Laurell K. Hamilton’s bestselling series has captured readers’ wildest imaginations and addicted them to a seductive world where supernatural hungers collide with the desires of the human heart, starring a heroine like no other... Anita Blake is small, dark, and dangerous. Her turf is the city of St. Louis. Her job: re-animating the dead and killing the undead who take things too far. But when the city’s most powerful vampire asks her to solve a series of vicious slayings, Anita must confront her greatest fear—her undeniable attraction to master vampire Jean-Claude, one of the creatures she is sworn to destroy... “What The Da Vinci Code did for the religious thriller, the Anita Blake series has done for the vampire novel.”—USA Today