Replete with madwomen, murderers, musicians, and mystics, Lonely Woman dramatically interweaves the lives of five women. It remains Takako Takahashi's most sustained and multifaceted fictional realization of her concept of "loneliness." Her fiction typically features a woman for whom dreams and fantasies, crime, madness, sexual deviance, or occult pursuits serve as a temporary release from her society's definitions of female identity. The combination of surrealist, feminist, and religious themes in Takahashi's work makes it unique among that of modern Japanese women writers. The five individually titled short stories that constitute Lonely Woman are linked by certain characters, themes, and plot elements. In the first story, "Lonely Woman," a series of arson incidents in her neighborhood causes a nihilistic young woman to become fascinated with the psychology of the person who perpetrated the crimes. Her fantasies of the euphoric pleasure of setting a fire heighten her awareness of her own violent tendencies. "The Oracle" portrays a young widow who becomes convinced, through several disturbing dreams, that her late husband was unfaithful to her. She devises a cruel, ritualistic act as a strategy for defusing her sense of helpless rage. In "Foxfire," a store clerk has a series of encounters with sly, seductive youngsters and is revitalized by her discovery of the criminal and sexual impulses that lurk beneath their innocent façades. In "The Suspended Bridge," a bored housewife's passion is rekindled when a man with whom she once had a sadomasochistic relationship reenters her life. "Strange Affinities" recasts crime, madness, and amour fou as catalysts of a process of spiritual enlightenment: an old woman searches for an elusive man who seems to embody the bliss of self-renunciation.

First published serially in the Yiddish daily newspaper di Varhayt in 1916–18, Diary of a Lonely Girl, or The Battle against Free Love is a novel of intimate feelings and scandalous behaviors, shot through with a dark humor. From the perch of a diarist writing in first person about her own love life, Miriam Karpilove’s novel offers a snarky, melodramatic criticism of radical leftist immigrant youth culture in early twentieth-century New York City. Squeezed between men who use their freethinking ideals to pressure her to be sexually available and nosy landladies who require her to maintain her respectability, the narrator expresses frustration at her vulnerable circumstances with wry irreverence. The novel boldly explores issues of consent, body autonomy, women’s empowerment and disempowerment around sexuality, courtship, and politics. Karpilove immigrated to the United States from a small town near Minsk in 1905 and went on to become one of the most prolific and widely published women writers of prose in Yiddish. Kirzane’s skillful translation gives English readers long-overdue access to Karpilove’s original and provocative voice.

Jena Chung plays the violin. She was once a child prodigy and is now addicted to sex. She's struggling a little. Her professional life comprises rehearsals, concerts, auditions and relentless practice; her personal life is spent managing family demands, those of her creative friends, and lots of sex. Jena is selfish, impulsive and often behaves badly, though mostly only to her own detriment. And then she meets Mark - much older and worldly-wise - who bewitches her. Could this be love? When Jena wins an internship with the New York Philharmonic, she thinks the life she has dreamed of is about to begin. But when Trump is elected New York changes irrevocably, and Jena along with it. Is the dream over? With echoes of Frances Ha, Jena's favourite film, truths are gradually revealed to her. Jena comes to learn that there are many different ways to live and love and that no one has the how-to guide for any of it - not even her indomitable mother. A Lonely Girl is a Dangerous Thing unflinchingly explores the confusion of having expectations upturned, and the awkwardness and pain of being human in our increasingly dislocated world - and how, in spite of all this, we still try to become the person we want to be. It is a dazzling, original and astounding debut from a young writer with a fierce, intelligent and fearless new voice.

In the summer of 2009, as she was covering the popular uprisings in Tehran for the New York Times, Iranian journalist Nazila Fathi received a phone call. "They have given your photo to snipers," a government source warned her. Soon after, with undercover agents closing in, Fathi fled the country with her husband and two children, beginning a life of exile. In The Lonely War, Fathi interweaves her story with that of the country she left behind, showing how Iran is locked in a battle between hardliners and reformers that dates back to the country's 1979 revolution. Fathi was nine years old when that uprising replaced the Iranian shah with a radical Islamic regime. Her father, an official at a government ministry, was fired for wearing a necktie and knowing English; to support his family he was forced to labor in an orchard hundreds of miles from Tehran. At the same time, the family's destitute, uneducated housekeeper was able to retire and purchase a modern apartment -- all because her family supported the new regime. As Fathi shows, changes like these caused decades of inequality -- especially for the poor and for women -- to vanish overnight. Yet a new breed of tyranny took its place, as she discovered when she began her journalistic career. Fathi quickly confronted the upper limits of opportunity for women in the new Iran and earned the enmity of the country's ruthless intelligence service. But while she and many other Iranians have fled for the safety of the West, millions of their middleclass countrymen -- many of them the same people whom the regime once lifted out of poverty -- continue pushing for more personal freedoms and a renewed relationship with the outside world. Drawing on over two decades of reporting and extensive interviews with both ordinary Iranians and high-level officials before and since her departure, Fathi describes Iran's awakening alongside her own, revealing how moderates are steadily retaking the country.

**Don't miss the sequel to The Lonely Wife! Children of Fortune is available now** --------------------------------- A powerful story about a woman's struggle to claim what is rightfully hers, from the Sunday Times bestselling author Val Wood. 1850: Beatrix Fawcett is just eighteen when her father tells her she is to marry a stranger. Hesitantly, but with little choice, she agrees to the match - in the hope of a good husband in Charles, and a happy new life together in rural Yorkshire. As Beatrix sets about making their house a home, she falls in love with it and the surrounding countryside. But she does not fall in love with her husband... Charles has chosen her simply to meet the requirements of his inheritance and has little interest in his young wife. Soon, the only spark in Beatrix's lonely life is her beloved children. But when Charles threatens to take them away from her, Beatrix must find strength in desperate times. Can she fight against her circumstances and keep what is rightfully hers? --------------------------------- Praise for Val Wood: 'A heart-warming story filled with compelling action' Rosie Goodwin 'Hull's answer to Catherine Cookson' BBC Radio 4's Front Row 'Wonderfully fully-fleshed characters are the mainstay of [Val Wood's] stories' Peterborough Telegraph

In this witty, engaging guide, a renowned Vogue editor takes readers through the fundamentals of living alone by showing them how to create a welcoming environment and cultivate home-friendly hobbies, "for no woman can accept an invitation every night without coming to grief." "Whether you view your one-woman ménage as Doom or Adventure, you need a plan, if you are going to make the best of it." Thus begins Marjorie Hillis' archly funny, gently prescriptive manifesto for single women. Though it was 1936 when the Vogue editor first shared her wisdom with her fellow singletons, the tome has been passed lovingly through the generations, and is even more apt today than when it was first published. Hillis, a true bon vivant, was sick and tired of hearing single women carping about their living arrangements and lonely lives; this book is her invaluable wake-up call for single women to take control and enjoy their circumstances. With engaging chapter titles like "A Lady and Her Liquor" and "The Pleasures of a Single Bed," along with a new preface by author Laurie Graff (You Have to Kiss A Lot of Frogs), Live Alone and Like It is sure to appeal to live-aloners—and those considering taking the plunge.

An updated new edition of Ted Gioia's acclaimed compendium of jazz standards, featuring 15 additional selections, hundreds of additional recommended tracks, and enhancements and additions on almost every page. Since the first edition of The Jazz Standards was published in 2012, author Ted Gioia has received almost non-stop feedback and suggestions from the passionate global community of jazz enthusiasts and performers requesting crucial additions and corrections to the book. In this second edition, Gioia expands the scope of the book to include more songs, and features new recordings by rising contemporary artists. The Jazz Standards is an essential comprehensive guide to some of the most important jazz compositions, telling the story of more than 250 key jazz songs and providing a listening guide to more than 2,000 recordings. The fan who wants to know more about a tune heard at the club or on the radio will find this book indispensable. Musicians who play these songs night after night will find it to be a handy guide, as it outlines the standards' history and significance and tells how they have been performed by different generations of jazz artists. Students learning about jazz standards will find it to be a go-to reference work for these cornerstones of the repertoire. This book is a unique resource, a browser's companion, and an invaluable introduction to the art form.

The Lonely Soldier--the inspiration for the documentary The Invisible War--vividly tells the stories of five women who fought in Iraq between 2003 and 2006--and of the challenges they faced while fighting a war painfully alone. More American women have fought and died in Iraq than in any war since World War Two, yet as soldiers they are still painfully alone. In Iraq, only one in ten troops is a woman, and she often serves in a unit with few other women or none at all. This isolation, along with the military's deep-seated hostility toward women, causes problems that many female soldiers find as hard to cope with as war itself: degradation, sexual persecution by their comrades, and loneliness, instead of the camaraderie that every soldier depends on for comfort and survival. As one female soldier said, "I ended up waging my own war against an enemy dressed in the same uniform as mine." In The Lonely Soldier, Benedict tells the stories of five women who fought in Iraq between 2003 and 2006. She follows them from their childhoods to their enlistments, then takes them through their training, to war and home again, all the while setting the war's events in context. We meet Jen, white and from a working-class town in the heartland, who still shakes from her wartime traumas; Abbie, who rebelled against a household of liberal Democrats by enlisting in the National Guard; Mickiela, a Mexican American who grew up with a family entangled in L.A. gangs; Terris, an African American mother from D.C. whose childhood was torn by violence; and Eli PaintedCrow, who joined the military to follow Native American tradition and to escape a life of Faulknerian hardship. Between these stories, Benedict weaves those of the forty other Iraq War veterans she interviewed, illuminating the complex issues of war and misogyny, class, race, homophobia, and post-traumatic stress disorder. Each of these stories is unique, yet collectively they add up to a heartbreaking picture of the sacrifices women soldiers are making for this country. Benedict ends by showing how these women came to face the truth of war and by offering suggestions for how the military can improve conditions for female soldiers-including distributing women more evenly throughout units and rejecting male recruits with records of violence against women. Humanizing, urgent, and powerful, The Lonely Soldier is a clarion call for change.

Meet JeriLee Randall, aspiring actress, ambitious writer, and sexual powerhouse. It is this ambition that takes her away from her tiny hometown of Port Clare and sets her on a collision course with her future. Surviving on determination and seduction, she makes her way to Broadway and then on to Hollywood. The bright lights mask a deeper darkness, and JeriLee is quickly drawn into a world of greed, drugs, casting couches, and smooth-talking power players. She struggles to hold on to her honesty and the code of ethics she developed in her youth. More than anything else, she struggles to hold on to her dreams of success and stardom. It will take all her strength and cunning to escape Hollywood's death grip and beat the power elite at their own game. Harold Robbins, the author who rewrote the rules for erotic fiction, turns Hollywood on its ear in The Lonely Lady.