Love hurts. Breaking up is hard to do. For all the joy that relationships and friendships can bring, showing romantic interest, establishing boundaries, and expressing identities as partners and friends isn’t easy for teens. They navigate an often ugly social universe. Even commonplace struggles can derail academic focus and harm emotional health. English teachers hope to give students communication skills, a love of literature, a passport to an intellectually vibrant life rich in opportunity. Through discussions of canonical works of literature, assignment ideas, anecdotes from teaching, and student perspectives, this book outlines how an academically rigorous English class can also heal, empower, and provide wisdom for teens weathering storms in their social lives. English class is health class. Widely taught novels brim with rich lessons about courtship, love, heartbreak, sexuality, bonds, and belonging. Learning to write stories, reflections, and arguments, speak confidently, and listen critically gives students powerful tools for self-expression, advocacy, and empathy in their relationships and friendships. The stakes are high and the rewards far-reaching. Students with healthier social lives do better academically, but they also end up becoming more responsible, caring grown-ups capable of improving an adult society that too often feels unsafe and tragically bereft of compassion.

Few of us have been spared the agonies of intimate relationships. They come in many shapes: loving a man or a woman who will not commit to us, being heartbroken when we're abandoned by a lover, engaging in Sisyphean internet searches, coming back lonely from bars, parties, or blind dates, feeling bored in a relationship that is so much less than we had envisaged - these are only some of the ways in which the search for love is a difficult and often painful experience. Despite the widespread and almost collective character of these experiences, our culture insists they are the result of faulty or insufficiently mature psyches. For many, the Freudian idea that the family designs the pattern of an individual's erotic career has been the main explanation for why and how we fail to find or sustain love. Psychoanalysis and popular psychology have succeeded spectacularly in convincing us that individuals bear responsibility for the misery of their romantic and erotic lives. The purpose of this book is to change our way of thinking about what is wrong in modern relationships. The problem is not dysfunctional childhoods or insufficiently self-aware psyches, but rather the institutional forces shaping how we love. The argument of this book is that the modern romantic experience is shaped by a fundamental transformation in the ecology and architecture of romantic choice. The samples from which men and women choose a partner, the modes of evaluating prospective partners, the very importance of choice and autonomy and what people imagine to be the spectrum of their choices: all these aspects of choice have transformed the very core of the will, how we want a partner, the sense of worth bestowed by relationships, and the organization of desire. This book does to love what Marx did to commodities: it shows that it is shaped by social relations and institutions and that it circulates in a marketplace of unequal actors.

Malorie Blackman brings together the best teen writers of today in a stunningly romantic collection about love against the odds. Featuring short stories and extracts - both brand-new and old favourites - about modern star-crossed lovers from stars such as Gayle Forman, Markus Zusak, Patrick Ness and Andrew Smith, and with a new story from Malorie Blackman herself, Love Hurts looks at every kind of relationship, from first kiss to final heartbreak.

With more than 450,000 copies in print, When Helping Hurts is a paradigm-forming contemporary classic on the subject of poverty alleviation. Poverty is much more than simply a lack of material resources, and it takes much more than donations and handouts to solve it. When Helping Hurts shows how some alleviation efforts, failing to consider the complexities of poverty, have actually (and unintentionally) done more harm than good. But it looks ahead. It encourages us to see the dignity in everyone, to empower the materially poor, and to know that we are all uniquely needy—and that God in the gospel is reconciling all things to himself. Focusing on both North American and Majority World contexts, When Helping Hurts provides proven strategies for effective poverty alleviation, catalyzing the idea that sustainable change comes not from the outside in, but from the inside out.

Like millions of other women, HLN anchor Christi Paul blamed herself for the emotional abuse heaped on her by her first husband, whose violent, profanity-laced tirades left her feeling as though she had no value, no self-worth, and nowhere to turn for help. Then one day, when Christi was taking refuge in a church parking lot, the verse “Trust in the Lord with all your heart and lean not on your own understanding” popped into her head. In that moment, she realized she did have someplace to turn after all. Holding fast to her Christian faith, Christi began the arduous process of rebuilding her self-image and regaining control of her life. Now happily remarried and the mother of three girls, Christi feels called to share her story in the hope that other victims will find courage to seek the help they desperately need and deserve. Written with candor and poignancy, Love Isn’t Supposed to Hurt chronicles Christi’s personal experience with emotional abuse and shows how—with God’s help, some unconventional therapy, and faith—she was able to break the cycle and regain her sense of self-worth.

Finalist for the 2013 PEN/Faulkner Award "The magnificence of Hold It 'Til It Hurts is not only in the prose and the story but also in the book's great big beating heart. These complex and compelling characters and the wizardry of Johnson's storytelling will dazzle and move you from first page to last. Novels don't teach us how to live but Hold It 'Til It Hurts will make you hush and wonder."--Anthony Swofford, author of Jarhead "This rich and sophisticated first novel brings together pleasures rarely found in one book: Hold It 'Til It Hurts is a novel about war that goes in search of passionate love, a dreamy thriller, a sprawling mystery, a classical quest for a lost brother in which the shadowy quarry is clearly the seeker’s own self, and a meditation on family and racial identity that makes its forerunners in American fiction look innocent by comparison."--Jaimy Gordon, National Book Award winner for Lord of Misrule When Achilles Conroy and his brother Troy return from a tour of duty in Afghanistan, their white mother presents them with the key to their past: envelopes containing details about their respective birth parents. After Troy disappears, Achilles--always his brother’s keeper--embarks on a harrowing journey in search of Troy, an experience that will change him forever. Heartbreaking, intimate, and at times disturbing, Hold It ’Til It Hurts is a modern-day odyssey through war, adventure, disaster, and love, and explores how people who do not define themselves by race make sense of a world that does. T. Geronimo Johnson was born in New Orleans, Louisiana. His fiction and poetry have appeared in Best New American Voices, Indiana Review, Los Angeles Review of Books, and Illuminations, among others. A graduate of the Iowa Writers' Workshop and a former Stegner Fellow at Stanford University, Johnson teaches writing at the University of California-Berkeley. Hold It 'Til It Hurts is his first book.

Celebrate feelings in all their shapes and sizes in this New York Times bestselling picture book from the Growing Hearts series! Happiness, sadness, bravery, anger, shyness . . . our hearts can feel so many feelings! Some make us feel as light as a balloon, others as heavy as an elephant. In My Heart explores a full range of emotions, describing how they feel physically, inside, with language that is lyrical but also direct to empower readers to practice articulating and identifying their own emotions. With whimsical illustrations and an irresistible die-cut heart that extends through each spread, this gorgeously packaged and unique feelings book is sure to become a storytime favorite.

"Sharp and dangerous and breathtaking.... A defiant story about a young woman choosing the life and motherhood that is best for her, without apology.” —Roxane Gay, bestselling author of Bad Feminist Marie is a waitress at an upscale Dallas steakhouse, attuned to the appetites of her patrons and gifted at hiding her private struggle as a young single mother behind an easy smile and a crisp white apron. It’s a world of long hours and late nights, and Marie often gives in to self-destructive impulses, losing herself in a tangle of bodies and urgent highs as her desire for obliteration competes with a stubborn will to survive. Pulsing with a fierce and feral energy, Love Me Back is an unapologetic portrait of a woman cutting a precarious path through early adulthood and the herald of a powerful new voice in American fiction.

Includes a bonus chapter and a Q&A with the author at the end of the story! Josefina: My story isn't sweet or easy to hear. It's the truth. A brutal truth anyone you know could be living through right now. I'm the person people talk about, asking, "Why does she stay?" My story will tell you why. It will tell you how it starts, where it leads. When does it end or will it ever? This is a different side of love, a darker, and deadly side that isn't always discussed. People think it can't be love, that it starts with pain. Trust me, it starts with love. A love that hurts. Ridge: Because if love doesn't hurt, it can't be real. *TRIGGER WARNINGThis book contains strong language, violence, and graphic descriptions of domestic abuse. Please read with caution.Only for readers 18 years and up.

“Every woman who is struggling to understand the mistreatment she is experiencing in her relationship should begin by reading [this] wonderful book.”—Lundy Bancroft, author of Why Does He Do That? What do you do when the one you love hurts you? Have you been searching for answers to difficult questions about your relationship? Do you feel confused about why your partner seems loving one moment and angry the next? Summoning the courage to ask these challenging questions can seem daunting. You know something is wrong in your relationship, but you are not sure what. If you are beginning to wonder if you are experiencing abuse, this book can offer you support, information, and, most of all, hope as you look for answers. Written by two women with a wealth of experience supporting victims of abuse, When Love Hurts introduces exercises and resources to help you make sense of your relationship, addressing all forms of abuse, including verbal, emotional, financial, sexual, and physical. This practical guidebook is a supportive and nonjudgmental friend to those who don’t know where to turn and is filled with stories from women who have been in the same position. By drawing on your own wisdom and that of the many others who have shared your experience, When Love Hurts can help you find the answers you have been looking for.