Reconnect to your inner sense of pleasure and joy through embodiment practices, which put you in touch with the natural wisdom of your body and enhance your ability to connect with others. In this time of increased fatigue, loneliness, and anxiety, disconnection from our bodies and from each other is at the core of our personal pain and our collective suffering. Women in particular are rewarded for, and expected to participate in self-denial. By weaving together historical and cultural commentary, humorous and poignant anecdotes, and experiential tools backed by science, The Pleasure Is All Yours is a step-by-step guide to help you release barriers to receiving life’s pleasures and deeper connections with others. In this timely guide, holistic psychologist, relationship and sex therapist, and yoga teacher Dr. Rachel Allyn introduces bodyfulness, an embodiment method she developed to help you to awaken into your body's own capacity for healing and deeper connection. Allyn explains how bodyfulness can connect you to four essential and overlooked types of pleasure—sensual, playful, lively, and erotic— which overlap in many ways, and helps you identify what can inspire your own pleasure in each category. Through bodyful activities such as breathing exercises, mindfulness, yoga, auditory release, and dynamic movements, this book helps you reunite with your inherent wisdom and soulful delight.

Where women are created for the pleasure of men, beauty is the first duty of every girl. In Louise O'Neill's world of Only Every Yours women are no longer born naturally, girls (called "eves") are raised in Schools and trained in the arts of pleasing men until they come of age. Freida and Isabel are best friends. Now, aged sixteen and in their final year, they expect to be selected as companions--wives to powerful men. All they have to do is ensure they stay in the top ten beautiful girls in their year. The alternatives--life as a concubine, or a chastity (teaching endless generations of girls)--are too horrible to contemplate. But as the intensity of final year takes hold, the pressure to be perfect mounts. Isabel starts to self-destruct, putting her beauty--her only asset--in peril. And then into this sealed female environment, the boys arrive, eager to choose a bride. Freida must fight for her future--even if it means betraying the only friend, the only love, she has ever known.

Love letters are potent. They breathe. They speak. They can arouse, comfort, captivate. They can also cut deep. The powerful, deeply personal letters collected here reveal the painful underside of love. Witness Winston Churchill 'growl with anger to be treated with benevolent indifference' and Edith Piaf reel in the throes of a 'terrible' passion. Through the letters of literary icons Charlotte Brontë, Oscar Wilde and Virginia Woolf, Hollywood stars Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton and statesmen Henry VIII and Franklin D. Roosevelt, Yours Always offers an unusually intimate insight into the lives of such illustrious figures. Love is revealed here in its many shades of disharmony and confusion: unrequited, uncertain, imbalanced, unconventional, thwarted, failed and forbidden. Love is not always rose-tinted, and Yours Always illuminates the sorrows that can accompany falling in, falling out, and staying in love. Includes letter to and from: Charlotte Brontë, Richard Burton, Lord Byron, Winston Churchill, Marie Curie, Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway, Henry VIII, Ted Hughes, Graham Greene, Franz Kafka, Marilyn Monroe, Iris Murdoch, Edith Piaf, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Elizabeth Taylor, Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, W.B. Yeats

Chilly Gonzales is one of the most exciting, original, hard-to-pin-down musicians of our time. Filling halls worldwide at the piano in his slippers and a bathrobe—in any one night he can be dissecting the musicology of an Oasis hit, giving a sublime solo recital, and displaying his lyrical dexterity as a rapper. In his book about Enya, he asks: Does music have to be smart or does it just have to go to the heart? In dazzling, erudite prose Gonzales delves beyond her innumerable gold discs and millions of fans to excavate his own enthusiasm for Enya's singular music as well as the mysterious musician herself, and along the way uncovers new truths about the nature of music, fame, success and the artistic endeavour.

From critically acclaimed New York Times best-selling author Jami Attenberg comes a novel of family secrets: think the drama of Big Little Lies set in the heat of a New Orleans summer. “If I know why they are the way they are, then maybe I can learn why I am the way I am,” says Alex Tuchman of her parents. Now that her father, Victor, is on his deathbed, Alex—a strong-headed lawyer, devoted mother, and loving sister—feels she can finally unearth the secrets of who Victor is and what he did over the course of his life and career. (A power-hungry real estate developer, he is, by all accounts, a bad man.) She travels to New Orleans to be with her family, but mostly to interrogate her tight-lipped mother, Barbra. As Barbra fends off Alex’s unrelenting questions, she reflects on her tumultuous life with Victor. Meanwhile Gary, Alex’s brother, is incommunicado, trying to get his movie career off the ground in Los Angeles. And Gary’s wife, Twyla, is having a nervous breakdown, buying up all the lipstick in drugstores around New Orleans and bursting into crying fits. Dysfunction is at its peak. As family members grapple with Victor’s history, they must figure out a way to move forward—with one another, for themselves, and for the sake of their children. All This Could Be Yours is a timely, piercing exploration of what it means to be caught in the web of a toxic man who abused his power; it shows how those webs can entangle a family for generations, and what it takes to—maybe, hopefully—break free. With her signature “sparkling prose” (Marie Claire) and incisive wit, Jami Attenberg deftly explores one of the most important subjects of our age.

Prate Marshbanks proposed to his future wife on a muggy July night at Pete's Drive-in back in '52. "She said yes to me between bites of a slaw burger all-the-way." A college graduate and daughter of a prominent lawyer, Irene was an unlikely match for Prate, a high school dropout. He lived his married life aware of the question on people's minds: How in the world did a tall, thin, fair-skinned beauty and one of the most respected high school English teachers in all of Greenville County, in all of South Carolina for that matter, wind up married to a short, dark, fat-faced, jug-eared house painter? That their marriage not only survived for fifty years, but flourished, is a source of constant wonder to Prate. Now he faces a new challenge with Irene. From the author of In The Family Way, a novel the Atlanta Constitution called "an instant classic" and the Charlotte Observer praised as "a lovely, moving book," comes a powerful story of hard-earned hope. The Pleasure Was Mine takes place during a critical summer in the life of Prate Marshbanks, when he retires to care for his wife, who is gradually slipping away. To complicate things, Prate's son, Newell, a recently widowed single father, asks Prate to keep nine-year-old Jackson for the summer. Though Prate is irritated by the presence of his moody grandson, during the summer Jackson helps tend his grandmother, and grandfather and grandson form a bond. As Irene's memory fades, Prate, a hardworking man who has kept to himself most of his life, has little choice but to get to know his family. With elegance and skillful economy of language, Tommy Hays renders an unforgettable character in Prate Marshbanks. The Pleasure Was Mine is at once a quietly wrenching portrayal of grief, a magical and romantic story about the power of love, and an unexpectedly moving take on the resilience of family.

When Detective Sergeant Bill Kunkel blacks out in the gallery where he's investigating an art theft, it's the first clue that this is no ordinary burglary. Kunkel and his partner, Detective Kathy Thompson, soon plunge into a near-future underground in pursuit of a mad genius. Their quarry is Stephen Carter, a brilliant researcher bent on exacting revenge from the corporation that betrayed him. Carter has unlocked a gateway to an alternate universe. His shadowy "partners" have ideas of their own for Carter’s dimension--and will kill to possess its secrets for themselves. For Kunkel and Kathy to get their man, they'll have to confront reawakened demons from their pasts, form an unlikely alliance with a computer criminal, navigate the mean streets of Southern California's Special Economic Zone and the near-orbit hub of New Chicago, deal with their hidden feelings for each other--and discover why each of Kunkel's recurring blackouts coincide with each of Carter's thefts.

A harrowing search for the long-lost treasure of America’s most infamous gangster—Al Capone—ensnares insurance investigator Adam Gold, pulling him into the web of a vicious Miami mobster and a confrontation with Cuban spies. A hair-raising climax in the Florida Everglades will have readers wondering whether to laugh or cry in their headlong rush to see how it all ends.