Mixing erotic vignettes with practical how-to suggestions and personal insight, 'Sensuous Magic' is Califia's classic beginner's guide to S/M for couples who harbour fantasies of erotic dominance and submission. Experienced players will appreciate the breadth of Califia's knowledge of safety and technique and his insights into the psychology of S/M. Novices will be reassured by Califia's honest, unpretentious approach.

Mixing erotic vignettes with practical how-to suggestions and personal insight, 'Sensuous Magic' is Califia's classic beginner's guide to S/M for couples who harbour fantasies of erotic dominance and submission. Experienced players will appreciate the breadth of Califia's knowledge of safety and technique and his insights into the psychology of S/M. Novices will be reassured by Califia's honest, unpretentious approach.

Winner of the International Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction Animal tracks, word magic, the speech of stones, the power of letters, and the taste of the wind all figure prominently in this intellectual tour de force that returns us to our senses and to the sensuous terrain that sustains us. This major work of ecological philosophy startles the senses out of habitual ways of perception. For a thousand generations, human beings viewed themselves as part of the wider community of nature, and they carried on active relationships not only with other people with other animals, plants, and natural objects (including mountains, rivers, winds, and weather patters) that we have only lately come to think of as "inanimate." How, then, did humans come to sever their ancient reciprocity with the natural world? What will it take for us to recover a sustaining relation with the breathing earth? In The Spell of the Sensuous David Abram draws on sources as diverse as the philosophy of Merleau-Ponty, Balinese shamanism, Apache storytelling, and his own experience as an accomplished sleight-of-hand of magician to reveal the subtle dependence of human cognition on the natural environment. He explores the character of perception and excavates the sensual foundations of language, which--even at its most abstract--echoes the calls and cries of the earth. On every page of this lyrical work, Abram weaves his arguments with a passion, a precision, and an intellectual daring that recall such writers as Loren Eisleley, Annie Dillard, and Barry Lopez.

DIVHer best friend in danger, a young woman’s search for her will take her into the dark heart of New York’s criminal underground—and into the arms of an unlikely heroDIV /divDIVThe lovely heiress to an olive oil empire, Donna Miro is gravely worried about her best friend, Lorna, who seems to be missing. Having traveled to New York to find the missing Lorna, Donna finds herself trapped in the city’s seedy underbelly—until an unexpected man comes to her aid. Father Luke Trudeau, the most unusual priest she has ever met, has the mouth of a sailor and the brawn to go with it. Luke offers Donna help, and he seems to know things about the city—and the dangerous people in it—that might lead them to Lorna. But how can Donna trust this beguiling stranger when all along he has seemed to know more than he is letting on?/divDIV /divDIVThis ebook features an illustrated biography of Heather Graham including rare photos from the author’s personal collection./divDIV /div /div

Since the 1991 publication of his groundbreaking book Gay and Lesbian Themes in Latin American Writing, David William Foster has proposed a series of theoretical and critical principles for the analysis of Latin American culture from the perspectives of the queer. This book continues that project with a queer reading of literary and cultural aspects of Latin American texts. Moving beyond its predecessor, which provided an initial inventory of Latin American gay and lesbian writing, Sexual Textualities analyzes questions of gender representation in Latin American cultural productions to establish the interrelationships, tensions, and irresolvable conflicts between heterosexism and homoeroticism. The topics that Foster addresses include Eva Peron as a cultural/sexual icon, feminine pornography, Luis Humberto Hermosillo's classic gay film Doña Herlinda y su hijo, homoerotic writing and Chicano authors, Matias Montes Huidobro's Exilio and the representation of gay identity, representation of the body in Alejandra Pizarnik's poetry, and the crisis of masculinity in Argentine fiction from 1940 to 1960.

In this lively ethnography, Weiss studies the pansexual BDSM community in the San Francisco Bay Area. Weiss finds that BDSM practice is not as transgressive as the participants imagine, nor is it simply reinforcing of older forms of social domination. Instead she shows how fantasy play depends on pre-existing social hierarchies, even as it also participates in a commodification of desires.

With audacious dexterity, David Howes weaves together topics ranging from love and beauty magic in Papua New Guinea to nasal repression in Freudian psychology and from the erasure and recovery of the senses in contemporary ethnography to the specter of the body in Marx. Through this eclectic and penetrating exploration of the relationship between sensory experience and cultural expression, Sensual Relations contests the conventional exclusion of sensuality from intellectual inquiry and reclaims sensation as a fundamental domain of social theory. David Howes is Professor of Anthropology, Concordia University, Montreal, Quebec.

Among the Songhay of Mali and Niger, who consider the stomach the seat of personality, learning is understood not in terms of mental activity but in bodily terms. Songhay bards study history by "eating the words of the ancestors," and sorcerers learn their art by ingesting particular substances, by testing their flesh with knives, by mastering pain and illness. In Sensuous Scholarship Paul Stoller challenges contemporary social theorists and cultural critics who—using the notion of embodiment to critique Eurocentric and phallocentric predispositions in scholarly thought—consider the body primarily as a text that can be read and analyzed. Stoller argues that this attitude is in itself Eurocentric and is particularly inappropriate for anthropologists, who often work in societies in which the notion of text, and textual interpretation, is foreign. Throughout Sensuous Scholarship Stoller argues for the importance of understanding the "sensuous epistemologies" of many non-Western societies so that we can better understand the societies themselves and what their epistemologies have to teach us about human experience in general.