Desire In The Desert by Mary Lyons released on Apr 24, 1984 is available now for purchase.

Las Vegas, says William Fox, is a pay-as-you-play paradise that succeeds in satisfying our fantasies of wealth and the excesses of pleasure and consumption that go with it. In this context, Fox examines how Las Vegas’s culture of spectacle has obscured the boundaries between high art and entertainment extravaganza, nature and fantasy, for-profit and nonprofit enterprises. His purview ranges from casino art galleries—including Steve Wynn’s private collection and a branch of the famed Guggenheim Museum—to the underfunded Las Vegas Art Museum; from spectacular casino animal collections like those of magicians Siegfried and Roy and Mandalay Bay’s Shark Reef exhibit to the city’s lack of support for a viable public zoo; from the environmental and psychological impact of lavish water displays in the arid desert to the artistic ambiguities intrinsic to Las Vegas’s floating world of showgirls, lapdancers, and ballet divas. That Las Vegas represents one of the world’s most opulent displays of private material wealth in all its forms, while providing miserly funding for local public amenities like museums and zoos, is no accident, Fox maintains. Nor is it unintentional that the city’s most important collections of art and exotic fauna are presented in the context of casino entertainment, part of the feast of sensation and excitement that seduces millions of visitors each year. Instead, this phenomenon shows how our insatiable modern appetite for extravagance and spectacle has diminished the power of unembellished nature and the arts to teach and inspire us, and demonstrates the way our society privileges private benefit over public good. Given that Las Vegas has been a harbinger of national cultural trends, Fox’s commentary offers prescient insight into the increasing commercialization of nature and culture across America.

“A landmark work of lesbian fiction” and the basis for the acclaimed film Desert Hearts (The New York Times). Against the backdrop of Reno, Nevada, in the late 1950s, award-winning author Jane Rule chronicles a love affair between two women. When Desert of the Heart opens, Evelyn Hall is on a plane that will take her from her old life in Oakland, California, to Reno, where she plans to divorce her husband of sixteen years. A voluntary exile in a brave new world, she meets a woman who will change her life. Fifteen years younger, Ann Childs works as a change apron in a casino. Evelyn is instantly drawn to the fiercely independent Ann, and their friendship soon evolves into a romantic relationship. An English professor who had always led a conventional life, Evelyn suddenly finds all her beliefs about love, morality, and identity called into question. Peopled by a cast of unforgettable characters, this is a novel that dares to ask whether love between two women can last.

The debt Ionanthe will leave her freedom at the castle doors. Ancient laws demand an eye for an eye—she must pay the price for her sister's mistake. The payment Recently crowned Prince Max plans to bring change to his country, but only after his new bride has arrived—as settlement for the debt he is owed…. The price A ruthless ruler and his virgin queen. Trembling with the fragility of a new spring bud, Ionanthe will go to her husband: She was given as penance, but he'll take her for pleasure!

Aidan explores the ways in which Nietzsche's warning that 'the desert grows' has been taken up by Heidegger, Derrida and Deleuze in their critiques of modernity, and the desert in literature ranging from T.S Eliot to Don DeLillo; from imperial travel writing to postmodernism; and from the Old Testament to salvagepunk.

Dashing Druce Pevel, the Marquis of Peverell, Lord of all he surveys, with women falling at his feet… A pair of money-grabbing, murderous cousins bent on bleeding him dry – or even dead… Shamara, an innocent, yet strangely exotic, Missionary’s daughter, plucked from an orphanage to become the Marquis’s ward… A bewildered Shamara finds herself voyaging aboard his yacht to Senegal – where it’s the Marquis’s turn to be bewildered when they’re kidnapped by a tribal chieftain and held for ransom in his kasbah… At first he is mystified… How is it that this innocent abroad knows the ways of the Africans – even speaks their language. How has she such wisdom beyond her tender years? Then, as he watches over her sleeping in their kasbah prison, Druce is suddenly smitten – and taken aback by the fierceness and passion with which he swears, “I will kill anyone who hurts her!”

Desire in L.A. confronts limitless longing in a city that is itself without limits. In these poems, the object of desire is decidedly missing, whether that object be love or beauty or the past. Shifting even within a single poem, and certainly from section to section, the objects of desire in Martha Ronk's poetry become as elusive as the unnamed Marilyn Monroe--"that image of another's skirts"--of the title poem, or the moment captured in "A photograph as good as a picture": "He leans forward with such / fervor, yet isn't young and something / decidedly is happening, even / to the beefy fellow in his white / short-sleeved shirt. A photograph-- / oh, perhaps not the same as a / Manet, but it is Auden, and / for whatever reason he stares at / the square flesh neckline / of her dress. He is forward / in his chair, rumpled about / the collar and everyone is wearing / black and white. It is the formal / occasion of how much he cares / to be there, Venice, 1951 / and how much I care to see him / no matter what for, longing / like that." Moving from thwarted examples of family and place to language and its corruptions, from classical Japanese love poems to failed love in the southwestern desert, from emotionality to artifice, the book ends with a series focused on the slipperiness of all categories.

Can your ultimate desire ever be fulfilled? Everywhere you look, every time you listen, with each click and tap, there's something you desire. How do you know if what you desire will satisfy, or if you are seeing a "desire mirage"? The global village presents countless ways to connect to all kinds of information. We think we can scarcely live without these connections. Do we realize, however, that these connections often block or slow down connections to God, self, and others? Divided Desire is a journey along the road of desire--a road everyone travels. Along the journey, Kenny Damara explores why we desire what we desire in the global village today. What role does God have in fulfilling the ultimate desire of the heart? And how should we respond?

Sheikh Najib blasted into Rosalind Lewis’s life and staked a sultan’s claim on her son! Her denial of the boy’s royal lineage was met with deaf ears—and relentless kisses. When danger threatened, mother and child were whisked into Najib’s exotic world, a faraway place where protection meant marriage. But with every night in the arms of her sheikh “husband,” Rosalind’s secret threatened to surface. Would the truth bring a bitter end—or a heartfelt vow?