One Moment’s Pleasure will become a lifetime’s passion when Boston spinster, Alexis Alden, embarks on a search for her missing sister. Pretending to be a rich bored woman looking for an interlude with an anonymous male, Alexis enters the San Francisco bordello where her sister was last seen. She escapes the bordello almost too easily, but she can’t escape the passion ignited by a stranger’s kiss. Born and raised in the brothels of the California gold rush, Dutch Trahern worked for years to erase a childhood spent committing petty crimes and worse in order to survive. That past comes back to haunt him in the form of a woman he rescues from prostitution. Now his hard won respectability is threatened by an irresistible desire for a woman he shouldn’t want. Sensuality Level: Sensual

A Guide to Meditation and Mindfulness for the Modern Day In our never-ending search for happiness we often find ourselves looking to external things for fulfillment, thinking that happiness can be unlocked by buying a bigger house, getting the next promotion, or building a perfect family. In this profound and inspiring book, Gelong Thubten shares a practical and sustainable approach to happiness. Thubten, a Buddhist monk and meditation expert who has worked with everyone from school kids to Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and Benedict Cumberbatch, explains how meditation and mindfulness can create a direct path to happiness. A Monk’s Guide to Happiness explores the nature of happiness and helps bust the myth that our lives and minds are too busy for meditation. The book can show you how to: - Learn practical methods to help you choose happiness - Develop greater compassion for yourself and others - Learn to meditate in micro-moments during a busy day - Discover that you are naturally ‘hard-wired’ for happiness Reading A Monk’s Guide to Happiness could revolutionize your relationship with your thoughts and emotions, and help you create a life of true happiness and contentment.

A year's worth of sacred and sensual quotations to inspire and renew love's fires. • Spans the world's cultures and religious traditions. • An invaluable resource for couples following the path of Tantric spirituality. What has happened to the language of lovers? Where are the rich, sensual, erotic, and alluring words that can describe our feelings and emotions? For centuries in cultures throughout the world there have been poetic and evocative words used to express the ecstatic feelings that men and women share in that marvelous and mysterious moment of being in love. For people who want to find their way back to that moment, this book contains inspirations that reveal the sacred tradition of ecstasy in love and sexuality. This celebration of love contains a vast and diverse body of writings on sacred sexuality from Aboriginal Australia, Celtic Ireland, India, Japan, and China to ancient Greece and Rome and Renaissance and Enlightenment Europe. This treasure trove exalting the powers of love will kindle the fires of romance and offer playful and profound ways to contact the divine through earthly love.

Mickalene Thomas' immersive two-story installation transforms the East Lobby of the Baltimore Museum of Art into a living room for Baltimore reflective of Thomas' signature aesthetic influenced by 1970s and 1980s motifs. The experience -- the most expansive commission undertaken by both the artist and the BMA -- extends onto an enclosed terrace, where Thomas has curated a presentation of works by artists with ties to Baltimore. Featured artists include: Derrick Adams, Zoë Charlton Theresa Chromati, Alex Dukes, Dominiqua S. Eldridge, Devin N. Morris, Clifford Owens, and D'Metrius John Rice.Mickalene Thomas: A Moment's Pleasure is the inaugural Robert E. Meyerhoff and Rheda Becker Biennial Commission at the Baltimore Museum of Art.

In 2014, when the Russian-Latvian radio talk-show host Alex Dubas started asking his celebrity guests to describe a personal “moment of happiness” in their lives, the results were unexpectedly frank and exhilarating. Soon the project expanded to include submissions from two million listeners. This book holds a collection of hundreds of mini-stories about human joy, ranging from a diver’s first beholding of the underwater world, to the words of a new mother in sign language, to a Russian rock star’s rousing concert in Ukraine. As Alex puts it, “this book is a distillation—and a catalyst—of intense happiness.”

Excerpt from The Little Moment of Happiness They had not lifted into view suddenly, but had rather emerged from the east, solidifying slowly out of a slate-colored blur which to the eyes of unaccustomed voyagers might or might not have been land. There was no ebullition of spirits. The two thousand men and women aboard the vessel crowded to the rail and strained their eyes toward that land in which great events awaited them, for the most part in utter silence. Conversation failed. There was an impressiveness about the moment akin to the impressiveness of entering some great cathedral - there was awe! There, rising out of the east was France! France!

An intriguing, fabulously bizarre debut collection of short stories by prize-winning German writer Ingo Schulze, author of Simple Stories. These thirty-three macabre, often comical short pieces revolve around moments of odd bliss–moments seized by characters who have found ways to conquer the bleakness of everyday life in the chaotic world of post-communist Russia. Peopled by Mafia gunmen, desperate young prostitutes, bewildered foreign businessmen, and even a trio of hungry devils, the stories are by turns tragic and bleakly funny. From a sly retelling of the legend of St. Nicholas featuring a rich American named Nick, to a lavish gourmet feast in which the young female cook ends up as the main dish, these stories are above all playful and even surreal–and many of them are masterful tributes to Russian writers from Gogol to Nabokov. Translated by John E. Woods.