The New York Times bestselling author of On Dublin Street is back with the first in a sexy new romance series set in a small town on the Delaware coastline. Welcome to Hartwell, a quiet seaside escape where uncovering old secrets could lead one woman to discover the meaning of a love that lasts… While Doctor Jessica Huntington engages with the inmates at the women’s correctional facility where she works, she’s always careful to avoid emotional attachments in her personal life. Loss and betrayal taught her that lesson long ago. But when she comes across a set of old love letters in the prison’s library and visits the picturesque town of Hartwell to deliver them to their intended recipient, she finds herself unable to resist the town’s charm—and her attraction to the sexy owner of a local bar proves equally hard to deny. Since his divorce from his unfaithful ex-wife, Cooper Lawson has focused on what really matters: his family and the boardwalk pub they’ve owned for generations. But the first time Jessica steps into his bar, Cooper is beyond tempted to risk his heart on her. Yet as their attraction grows hotter and Jessica remains stubbornly closed off, he begins to realize it will take more than just passion to convince her there’s only one real thing in life worth fighting for….

Nick Addison has taken care of Hollister Welles since college. Though the responsible grad student and the uninhibited partier were total opposites, they had always shared an inexplicable bond. Nick knows he should stop saving the out-of-control Holly, but when Holly hits rock-bottom hard—and publicly—he can't resist coming to his rescue one last time. Can't resist the feeling of having Holly need him again. Bringing Holly back to New York City, Nick gives Holly the chance to face his demons and break his dangerous habits—while keeping Holly's presence a secret from Nick's wife. He doesn't want to face Caroline's hatred of Holly...or the reasons she might have to resent him. Then the tables are turned. Just as Holly pulls himself together, Nick's life falls apart. Now it's up to Holly to bring Nick back from the brink—and to make Nick finally face the desires he's long denied. 65,200 words

From a Washington Post weddings reporter who’s covered more than two hundred walks down the aisle comes a warm, witty, and wise book about relationships—the mystery, the science, and the secrets of how we find love and make it last. Ellen McCarthy has explored the complete journey of our timeless quest for “The One,” the Soul Mate, the Real Thing. This indispensable collection of insights—on dating, commitment, breakups, weddings, and marriage—gives us a window into enduring romance: • Go Online Already—“It’s a major time suck and a black hole of rejection and ambiguity and lies. But you know what? It also works.” • Keep It Confidential—“If you have to get something off your chest, pick someone whose wisdom you really trust, and who isn’t likely to spread the gossip to all your mutual acquaintances.” • Be Nice—“Brewing the morning coffee, touching the small of your partner’s back, filling their car with gas. These things add up to more relationship satisfaction than a fancy dinner on Valentine’s Day ever could.” The Real Thing features many more nuggets of wisdom, valuable information from the latest studies on commitment, candid testimonials from a variety of couples, and the personal story of McCarthy’s own search for “the keeper”—which begins, ironically, with a breakup the very same day she started as the Post’s full-time weddings reporter. Whether you’re looking for love or looking to strengthen your relationship, this book is a wonderful and clear-eyed map to the human heart. Praise for The Real Thing “A wise and compassionate look at how we love, along with some gentle suggestions for how we could get a little better at it . . . McCarthy has done something rare: She has written an optimistic book about love that is clear-eyed and unsentimental.”—The Washington Post “What a charming and captivating book this is! We never stop learning about love, and so many great lessons are within these pages.”—Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love “My readers often say to me, ‘If we lived next door to each other, we'd be best friends.’ That is precisely what I wanted to say to smart, funny, self-effacing Ellen McCarthy after I finished reading The Real Thing. I loved every lesson laid out in a book that wouldn’t dare to call itself a field guide to marriage but amounts to as much on every page. This is a deeply useful little book.”—Kelly Corrigan, author of Glitter and Glue “Upbeat and sweet . . . This rich collection of stories charms and edifies, is filled with quotes from couples as well as experts in the field, and serves as not just stories to sigh over but lessons to apply.”—Booklist (starred review) “A fun read full of wonderful stories . . . McCarthy delivers a welcome combination of cynicism and poignancy in this account, which reads with the ease and accessibility of a self-help book.”—Library Journal “A comforting, realistic, and endearing portrait of modern relationships . . . This book will not only charm those in decades-old marriages, but also inspire those afraid love will never arrive for them.”—Publishers Weekly “Straight-talking . . . dating advice for adults of all ages.”—Kirkus Reviews

Bakery owner Willow Dalton's friendship with Zane Walker has always been a bit complicated. Now a scrumptiously hot A-list actor, Zane's always had a reputation as a player. He's arrogant, and he's definitely not boyfriend material. Sure, he did Willow a favor by agreeing to take her virginity before college, but is that reason enough for her to go along with a fake engagement a decade later--even if it comes with a real diamond ring? Zane should have known better. Nothing involving Willow has ever been easy. Still, he knows her better than anyone, and becoming America's hottest new leading man means cleaning up his reputation. An "engagement" to curvy, sass-mouthed Willow is the perfect PR move...provided no one gets hurt. Now Zane and Willow's little white lie has turned into an irresistible recipe for sweet temptation. And soon no one will be able to tell the difference between their fake engagement and the real thing--including them.

In this classic study of the relationship between technology and culture, Miles Orvell demonstrates that the roots of contemporary popular culture reach back to the Victorian era, when mechanical replications of familiar objects reigned supreme and realism dominated artistic representation. Reacting against this genteel culture of imitation, a number of artists and intellectuals at the turn of the century were inspired by the machine to create more authentic works of art that were themselves "real things." The resulting tension between a culture of imitation and a culture of authenticity, argues Orvell, has become a defining category in our culture. The twenty-fifth anniversary edition includes a new preface by the author, looking back on the late twentieth century and assessing tensions between imitation and authenticity in the context of our digital age. Considering material culture, photography, and literature, the book touches on influential figures such as writers Walt Whitman, Henry James, John Dos Passos, and James Agee; photographers Alfred Stieglitz, Walker Evans, and Margaret Bourke-White; and architect-designers Gustav Stickley and Frank Lloyd Wright.

One of New York Times bestselling author Samantha Young's most beloved couples returns for the first time in a brand new novella set ten years after her blockbuster bestseller Before Jamaica Lane... Nate and Liv have a great life together but they miss the spontaneity and freedom they enjoyed early on in their romance. Careers and their children have inevitably kept them busy, so when Nate discovers Liv is feeling disconnected from him, he plans an anniversary trip to the idyllic seaside town of Hartwell, Delaware. There he hopes they will have the opportunity they've been craving--a chance to reinvent themselves and fall in love all over again. With each new day comes a new adventure, from wedding crashing at the five-star boardwalk hotel to pretending they are two strangers having a chance encounter at the boardwalk bar. In the midst of this daring, sexually-charged game of romantic rediscovery, Nate and Liv discover the only constant they need is each other.

This perfectly wrought little tale of a painter struggling with his muse brings together a number of the most important themes that renowned American writer Henry James returned to again and again in his work -- the difficulty of artistic expression, the meaning of truth, and conflict between socioeconomic classes.

A starred review in Library Journal says this about Eventually One Dreams the Real Thing: “Only a poet as accomplished as Boruch could make such beautiful verse while leading us through the everyday, of life’s subtle, steady shiftings (‘the bird’s hunger, seeking shape’). If the opening image of a pool filled with cruelly dredged up roses bespeaks quiet assent (‘I stood before them the way an animal/ accepts sun’), the next poem turns immediately to progress (and hence progression) as a modern invention beyond the heaven-and-hell alternatives; finally, the poet concedes, ‘I lose track of my transitions.’ In fact, transition defines us. Here, a static painting gives way to ‘between and among,’ a simple typeface never yields a perfect copy, and even in a medieval score, two exquisite quavers are connected by a slur. Highly recommended.” "Marianne Boruch's work has the wonderful, commanding power of true attention: She sees and considers with intensity."—The Washington Post "Boruch refuses to see more than there is in things—but her patience, her willingness to wait for the film of familiarity to slip, allows her to see what is there with a jeweler's sense of facet and flaw."—Poetry In her tenth volume of poetry, Marianne Boruch displays a historical omnipresence, as she converses with Dickinson, envisions Turner painting, and empathizes with Arthur Conan Doyle. She looks unabashedly at the brutality of recent history, from drone warfare to the disaster in New Orleans from Hurricane Katrina. Poems that turn her gaze towards childhood, nature, animals, and her own poetics are patches of light in the collection's chiaroscuro. From "Before and Every After": Eventually one dreams the real thing. The cave as it was, what we paid to straddle a skinny box-turned-seat down the middle, narrow boat made special for the state park, the wet, the tricky passing into rock and underground river. A single row of strangers faced front, each of us behind another close as dominoes to fall or we were angels lined up politely, pre-flight… Marianne Boruch is the author of ten collections of poetry. She is the 2013 recipient of the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, and has taught at Purdue University since the inception of their MFA program. She lives in West Lafayette, Indiana.

Steiner (English, Univ. of Pennsylvania) delivers a lucidly written elaboration of "interactive aesthetics" first broached in her examination of the revival of beauty in contemporary art, Venus in Exile (2001). Here the focus is the artist's model, broadly conceived as a paradoxical site of reality/artificiality and power/lack of power. Steiner incorporates a wide range of material to explain early history (the Pygmalion myth, Galatea, Eve, and Pandora), the postmodernist turn (Edie Sedgwick, muse of Andy Warhol and Bob Dylan), and recent developments (Second Life, blogging, Wikipedia, bioethics). Concepts (mimesis, spectacle), literature (Kathleen Rooney's Live Nude Girl of 2008, J. M. Coetzee's Diary of a Bad Year of 2007, Milton, Keats, Henrik Ibsen, Virginia Woolf, Vladamir Nabokov, Nathaniel Hawthorne); art (Michelangelo, Picasso, Henri Matisse, Marcel Duchamp, Robert Mapplethorpe, Hannah Wilke, Vanessa Beecroft, Gillian Wearing, Oron Catts, Helena Almeida, Ann Hamilton, Sylvia Plachy, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Frederick Hart, John Kindness, Peter Eisenman, Rachel Whiteread), theory (Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Frederic Jameson, Judith Butler, Rene Girard), and art history (Michael Fried, Sir Kenneth Clark) are woven into a rich tapestry informed by Steiner's favorite semioticians, Roman Jakobson and Jan Mukarovsky. Summing Up: Recommended. Upper-level undergraduates and above; general readers. General Readers; Upper-division Undergraduates; Graduate Students; Researchers/Faculty; Professionals/Practitioners. Reviewed by E. K. Mix.

Patty Murphy is facing that pivotal point in a woman's life when her biological clock ticks as insistently as a beating heart. Will she find Mr Right and start a family? But Patty is in love - with a man who is not only attractive and financially sound, but sensitive and warmhearted. There's just one small problem: He is also gay. Against her better judgment, and pleas from family and friends, Patty refuses to give up on Ethan. Every man she dates ultimately leaves her aching for the gentle comfort and intimacy she shares with him. But even as she throws eligible bachelors to the wayside to spend yet another platonic night with Ethan, Patty longs more and more for the consolation of loving and being loved. In the meantime she must content herself with waiting - until the real thing comes along . . .