A swoon-worthy, grunge meets pop, Rockstar Romance! Jax Mesmerized by her beauty, I watched as she swayed to the music. Incomparable and exotic, her call to every cell in my body was louder than the 120 decibels of our last concert. Winning her should have been easy. But Aria Winters was unphased by stardom and looked at me with disdain. She was the only girl I’d ever met who didn’t like rock stars. Challenge accepted. Aria With his chiseled jawline, piercing black eyes and international fame, Jax Andersson had a voice that made women everywhere swoon. Except for me. I couldn’t have cared less about the alternative rock world. It wasn’t my jam—and neither were junkie rock stars with massive egos. I was only there to do my job and move on with my life. But when Jax offered me the one thing I was desperate for, I couldn’t refuse. I should have stood my ground. He should have kept his distance. Because now, I was going to have to beat him at his own game. "Fans of AL Jackson and Kristen Ashley will devour this! I love a good rockstar romance and Cassidy London didn't disappoint. She brought me back in time to those moments when I'd experienced ALL THE FEELS!" — Not Your Moms Romance Blog

Considered the greatest long poem in 20th century Brazilian poetry, Ferreira's Gullar's Dirty Poem was written as a response to the Brazilian dictatorship that put him in exile and murdered thousands. Written in 1975 in Buenos Aires when Ferreira Gullar was in political exile from the Brazilian dictatorship, Dirty Poem is an epic poem that amid life events traces the author’s political and artistic evolution and is by most accounts the most important long poem of contemporary Brazilian literature. Scholar and critic Otto Maria Carpeaux wrote: “Dirty Poem deserves to be called ‘National Poem’ because it embodies all of the experiences, victories, defeats, and hopes in the life of the Brazilian citizen.” It is a hypnotic work that draws on the poet’s memory of adolescence in the seaside city of Sao Luís do Maranhao during World War II and deals openly with the “dirty” shamefulness of a socio-economic system that abuses its citizens with poverty, sexism, greed, and fear.

Northwood College was home to a decades old, dark and twisted secret. A secret that could kill. LILAH They stole my innocence and my dignity, yet still I stayed. They had me by the throat, yet still I stayed. No matter how painful it was, they’d convinced me it was my choice and so I stayed. Until him. Until he gave me a reason to breathe again, to hope, to live and maybe…love. But he wanted it all. Not just the scraps that could go unnoticed. He wanted my body, my heart and ultimately my soul. Even if it would kill us both. DECLAN She’d been kept captive for too long. Her scars told a story, beautiful and tragic like a priceless canvas, ripped from its frame. Resigned to her fate, she took refuge in my arms but only for a moment. One moment was all it took. I couldn’t let her go. I’d turn my back on everything just to have her, hold her, keep her as my own. I’d risk it all... she wasn’t the only one who needed saving. *Shades of Lust is a dark romantic suspense, standalone novel with no cliffhanger. There are dark elements that may be sensitive for some readers. These include sexual abuse, kidnapping, forced confinement and more. Please keep this in mind if you have triggers.

James Kugel’s essential introduction and companion to the Bible combines modern scholarship with the wisdom of ancient interpreters for the entire Hebrew Bible. As soon as it appeared, How to Read the Bible was recognized as a masterwork, “awesome, thrilling” (The New York Times), “wonderfully interesting, extremely well presented” (The Washington Post), and “a tour de force...a stunning narrative” (Publishers Weekly). Now, this classic remains the clearest, most inviting and readable guide to the Hebrew Bible around—and a profound meditation on the effect that modern biblical scholarship has had on traditional belief. Moving chapter by chapter, Harvard professor James Kugel covers the Bible’s most significant stories—the Creation of the world, Adam and Eve, Cain and Abel, Noah and the flood, Abraham and Sarah, Jacob and his wives, Moses and the exodus, David’s mighty kingdom, plus the writings of Isaiah, Jeremiah, and the other prophets, and on to the Babylonian conquest and the eventual return to Zion. Throughout, Kugel contrasts the way modern scholars understand these events with the way Christians and Jews have traditionally understood them. The latter is not, Kugel shows, a naïve reading; rather, it is the product of a school of sophisticated interpreters who flourished toward the end of the biblical period. These highly ideological readers sought to put their own spin on texts that had been around for centuries, utterly transforming them in the process. Their interpretations became what the Bible meant for centuries and centuries—until modern scholarship came along. The question that this book ultimately asks is: What now? As one reviewer wrote, Kugel’s answer provides “a contemporary model of how to read Sacred Scripture amidst the oppositional pulls of modern scholarship and tradition.”

Author Anna M. Madsen's book is a fresh and challenging look at the legacy of Martin Luther and the new reformation that is calling people of faith to action today. This book is born out of the conviction that at least two gods are currently competing for our collective trust: nationalism (and its many sub-manifestations) and quietism. Both make a case for and a claim on our allegiance, each by way of different motivations of self and institutional protection. Madsen looks at today's modern context and asks: Where will the church stand in a day that is marked by globalization, polarization, racism, bigotry, and debates about justice for humanity and for the earth itself. While the Reformation church was built on the foundation of justification by grace, Madsen calls people of faith to a new reformation that will focus on standing for justice in the world. Madsen delves into who Jesus was, and how our claim that he died and was raised establishes our faith and impacts the way we live it out. She pays attention to Luther's theology and juxtaposes it with our present context. She explores recent examples of Nazi resistance, liberation theology, black and womanist theology, and feminist theology, each of which come at social justice in their unique ways, with a common conviction that justice work is central to the Christian life. She speaks of how our faith grounding and our faith history weave together and entwine themselves into our present moment, offering both warnings and encouragement. And last, a case is made that justice, anchored in justification, is our new Reformation moment, one not inconsistent with Luther's theology, but weighted differently to address the different weighty concerns of our day. A study guide is included to encourage group conversation and action.

LIFE Magazine is the treasured photographic magazine that chronicled the 20th Century. It now lives on at LIFE.com, the largest, most amazing collection of professional photography on the internet. Users can browse, search and view photos of today’s people and events. They have free access to share, print and post images for personal use.

Poetic Song Verse: Blues-Based Popular Music and Poetry invokes and critiques the relationship between blues-based popular music and poetry in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The volume is anchored in music from the 1960s, when a concentration of artists transformed modes of popular music from entertainment to art-that-entertains. Musician Mike Mattison and literary historian Ernest Suarez synthesize a wide range of writing about blues and rock—biographies, histories, articles in popular magazines, personal reminiscences, and a selective smattering of academic studies—to examine the development of a relatively new literary genre dubbed by the authors as “poetic song verse.” They argue that poetic song verse was nurtured in the fifties and early sixties by the blues and in Beat coffee houses, and matured in the mid-to-late sixties in the art of Bob Dylan, the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Doors, Jimi Hendrix, Joni Mitchell, Leonard Cohen, Gil Scott-Heron, Van Morrison, and others who used voice, instrumentation, arrangement, and production to foreground semantically textured, often allusive, and evocative lyrics that resembled and engaged poetry. Among the questions asked in Poetic Song Verse are: What, exactly, is this new genre? What were its origins? And how has it developed? How do we study and assess it? To answer these questions, Mattison and Suarez engage in an extended discussion of the roots of the relationship between blues-based music and poetry and address how it developed into a distinct literary genre. Unlocking the combination of richly textured lyrics wedded to recorded music reveals a dynamism at the core of poetic song verse that can often go unrealized in what often has been considered merely popular entertainment. This volume balances historical details and analysis of particular songs with accessibility to create a lively, intelligent, and cohesive narrative that provides scholars, teachers, students, music influencers, and devoted fans with an overarching perspective on the poetic power and blues roots of this new literary genre.

Dirty Hands--Pure Hearts is a collection of sermons and interviews from well-known Wesleyan preachers. The collection is designed to be used as an interactive tool to sample and experience their message to gain insight into the state of holiness preaching today...