An apprentice sushi chef and a mysterious blue-eyed woman share a bottle of wine inside a climate-controlled otter tank. The Great Wall of China grumbles as workers forego construction to watch an imperial game of baseball. A young woman tries to imagine a future unsullied by her family’s history of untimely death. First issued in 1991, Pangs of Love introduced David Wong Louie’s bold storytelling. The son of Chinese immigrants, he centered his stories around characters who are in conflict with their place in the world, disconnected from both American society and their own families. The depth of his portrayals renders their experiences of love, envy, loneliness, loss, and duty universal—informed by their heritage yet not confined by it. These twelve short stories and one essay swerve from the absurd to longing for love, understanding, or simply a morsel of food. Pangs of Love and Other Writings makes Louie’s debut book available again, along with an additional short story and an extraordinary autobiographical essay, “Eat, Memory,” in which he reflects on life without food after throat cancer took away his ability to swallow. Pulitzer Prize–winner Viet Thanh Nguyen contributes a foreword elucidating Louie’s role in shaping contemporary Asian American literature, while an afterword by literary scholar King-Kok Cheung retraces the three phases of Louie’s career.

Cultures as well as generations clash in the funny and heartbreaking short stories that mark David Los Angeles Times Book Prize for First Fiction and the Ploughshares Award, Pangs of Love explores the bizarre contradictions inherent in assimilation.

Injured in a seemingly pointless war, Captain Nathan J. Northland returns home to Lorehaven to an uncertain future. He doesn't know what to expect, but it certainly wasn't being posted on an island full of vampires. An island whose local vampire dandy lord causes Nathan to feel strange things he'd never felt before.Feelings about fangs.When Viscount Vlad Blutstein agreed to hire Nathan as Captain of the Eyrie Guard, he hadn't been sure what to expect either. It certainly hadn't been to fall in love with a disabled werewolf. A werewolf who treats him with respect. Kindness. More kindness than Vlad feels he deserves. Vlad has fallen and fallen hard, and that's the problem.There's a storm coming.Torn by their allegiances-to family, to duty, and the age-old enmity between vampires and werewolves-Vlad and Nathan find themselves in a difficult situation: to love where the heart wants or to follow where expectation demands. The situation is complicated further when a mysterious and beguiling figure known only as Lady Ursula crashes into their lives, bringing with her dark omens of death, doom, and destruction in her wake. One thing is for certain, nothing will ever be the same.- This is a fluffier version of Hunger Pangs: True Love Bites as requested by several of my readers. The majority of the story is the same with only a few scenes changed to accommodate those readers.

With her customary accuracy, Jane Gardam reveals the extraordinariness of ordinary people as she deals with the pangs of love- fulfilled or hopeless, sexual or spiritual, tortured or hilarious- in these eleven stories. Paraded here are ladies with a 'thing' about vicars, strange events happening in ornate downstairs lavatories (and in ornate upstairs ones), and the English abroad, desperate and dotty. The glum and impossible Edna haunts the supermarket- and dispenses an unlikely kiss of life. The younger sister of Hans Christian Andersen's Little Mermaid declares her sibling 'very silly' and turns her story on its tail, an old maid forms a curious liason with a tramp, and small moments of temptation fill hotel rooms as histories glance briefly off each other.

"I had everything I needed to run a household: a house, food, and a new family. From now on it would just be me and Sammy–the two of us, and no one else." A tragic accident has turned eleven-year-old Aubrey’s world upside down. Starting a new life all alone, Aubrey has everything she thinks she needs: SpaghettiOs and Sammy, her new pet fish. She cannot talk about what happened to her. Writing letters is the only thing that feels right to Aubrey, even if no one ever reads them. With the aid of her loving grandmother and new friends, Aubrey learns that she is not alone, and gradually, she finds the words to express feelings that once seemed impossible to describe. The healing powers of friendship, love, and memory help Aubrey take her first steps toward the future. Readers will care for Aubrey from page one and will watch her grow until the very end, when she has to make one of the biggest decisions of her life. Love, Aubrey is devastating, brave, honest, funny, and hopeful, and it introduces a remarkable new writer, Suzanne LaFleur. No matter how old you are, this book is not to be missed.

After a decade apart, childhood sweethearts reconnect by chance in New York Times bestselling author Christina Lauren’s touching, romantic novel Love and Other Words…how many words will it take for them to figure out where it all went wrong? The story of the heart can never be unwritten. Macy Sorensen is settling into an ambitious if emotionally tepid routine: work hard as a new pediatrics resident, plan her wedding to an older, financially secure man, keep her head down and heart tucked away. But when she runs into Elliot Petropoulos—the first and only love of her life—the careful bubble she’s constructed begins to dissolve. Once upon a time, Elliot was Macy’s entire world—growing from her gangly bookish friend into the man who coaxed her heart open again after the loss of her mother...only to break it on the very night he declared his love for her. Told in alternating timelines between Then and Now, teenage Elliot and Macy grow from friends to much more—spending weekends and lazy summers together in a house outside of San Francisco devouring books, sharing favorite words, and talking through their growing pains and triumphs. As adults, they have become strangers to one another until their chance reunion. Although their memories are obscured by the agony of what happened that night so many years ago, Elliot will come to understand the truth behind Macy’s decade-long silence, and will have to overcome the past and himself to revive her faith in the possibility of an all-consuming love.

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY NPR Introducing an irresistibly relatable graphic novel about friendship and growing up, "an excellent companion to Raina Telgemeier's Guts and Shannon Hale and LeUyen Pham's Real Friends series."—Booklist, Starred Review New Friends. New grade. New worries? Katie's always felt different. She's homeschooled, she has freckles, and her teeth are really crooked. But none of these things matter to Kacey. They’re best friends forever—just like their necklaces say. But when they go to summer camp, Kacey starts acting weird. What happened to the “forever”? And when Katie gets home, she can’t stop worrying. About getting braces. About 6th grade. About friends. She knows tapping three times or opening and closing a drawer won’t make everything better . . . but sometimes it helps stop the worrying. Is something wrong with her?

Physician, anthropologist, travel writer, novelist, politician, Paolo Mantegazza (1831-1910) was probably the most eclectic figure in late-nineteenth century Italian culture. A prolific writer, Mantegazza can be seen as a forerunner of what has come to be known as cultural studies on account of his interdisciplinary approach, his passionate blend of scientific and literary elements in his writings, and his ability to transcend the boundaries between 'high' and 'low' culture. Though extremely popular during his lifetime both in Italy and abroad, Mantegazza's works have not been made available in a significant English language compilation. This volume is a representative overview of Mantegazza's key works, many of them translated into English for the first time. In addition to the unabridged Physiology of Love (1873), a veritable best-seller at the time of its initial publication, this compilation features selections from Mantegazza's writings on medicine, his travelogues, his epistolary novel One Day in Madeira (1868), and his treatise on materialistic aesthetics. Replete with an extensive and informative introduction by the editor, The Physiology of Love and Other Writings also excerpts Mantegazza's works of science fiction, memoir, and social and cultural criticism. As an anthology of the works of Paolo Mantegazza, a writer of diverse topical orientations, this volume is also an account of the circulation of ideas and cross-fertilization of disciplines that defined a crucial period of Italian and European cultural life.

Hopeless romantic Isla has had a crush on brooding artist Josh since their first year at the School of America in Paris. And, after a chance encounter in Manhattan over the summer break, romance might be closer than Isla imagined. But as they begin their senior year back in France, Isla and Josh are forced to face uncertainty about their futures, and the very real possibility of being apart. Set against the stunning backdrops of New York, Paris and Barcelona, this is a gorgeous, heart-wrenching and irresistible story of true love, and the perfect conclusion to Stephanie Perkins’s beloved series.

Presents an anthology of the best literary essays published in the past year, selected from American periodicals.