Infused with southern charm, this irresistibly weird and wonderful story chronicles Slash Coleman’s upbringing in a warped but warm-hearted household of eccentric artists. Descended from a posse of off-beat immigrants--including a grandfather who danced at the Moulin Rouge--and raised near the capital of the Confederacy during the 1970s and ’80s, young Slash sets out to find true love. Unfortunately, he’s his own worst enemy. Obsessions with Evel Knievel, rock band KISS, and crisscrossing the country to find the girl of his dreams set his quest for happiness on a hapless course. Hilarious and profound, Coleman slowly comes to terms with his father, a genius sculptor and volatile alcoholic, and his mother, a Holocaust survivor who makes him promise never to reveal that he’s Jewish. A touching portrait emerges of a young artist whose passionate spirit refuses to be suppressed. A swift kick to the funny bone, The Bohemian Love Diaries and its laugh-out-loud perversity conjure Jonathan Ames and Augusten Burroughs with a tender edge, revealing what might have happened if John Hodgman raised Holden Caulfield in Chuck Palahniuk’s attic. It will leave you howling.

ÿ"Sweta Vikram captures bold raw passion, poignant reality and crafts a powerful voice for the voiceless." --Kate Campbell Stevenson, Actor & Producer Wet Silenceÿbears moving accounts of Hindu widows in India. The book raises concern about the treatment of widowed women by society; lends their stories a voice; shares their unheard tales about marriage; reveals the heavy hand of patriarchy; and, addresses the lack of companionship and sensuality in their lives. This collection of poems covers a myriad of social evils such as misogyny, infidelity, gender inequality, and celibacy amongst other things. The poems in the collection are bold, unapologetic, and visceral. The collection will haunt you.ÿ "Nothing short of sacred genius,ÿWet Silenceÿreads with a sensual and dangerous grace. It is a body of work that ushers presence into absence and love into a world that has all but done away with the word."ÿ --Slash Coleman, author ofÿThe Bohemian Love Diariesÿand blogger forÿPsychology Today. "Sweta's poems did a powerful job at highlighting the mental and sexual abuse, violence, loneliness and the pain experienced by millions of widows in India. Why I ask, is being a widow a crime?" --Shruti Kapoor, Founder of Sayfty, an organization that helps women protect themselves against violence "In a gorgeous choir of reclaimed voices, Sweta Srivastava Vikram tells the stories of women forgotten and passed over, women silenced and without choices, women who ?don't exist'--Hindu widows. Through the magical breath of her poetry Vikram not only animates these women's hopes, sorrows, dreams, and defeats, she lovingly restores them to honor." --Melissa Studdard, award-winning author ofÿI Ate the Cosmos for Breakfast. Learn more at www.SwetaVikram.com From the World Voices series at Modern History Press POE005060 Poetry : American - Asian American SOC028000 Social Science : Women's Studies - General FAM001000 Family & Relationships : Abuse - General

The action-based guide to powerful, influential organizational storytelling Circle of the 9 Muses captures the best practices of the world's most influential story consultants and knowledge workers to help you find, tell, and draw value from your organizational stories as impetus for action. This rich toolbox is loaded with fun, graphical instructions and dozens of unique, replicable, and facilitated processes that require no special training or expertise. You'll discover your organization's hidden narrative assets, use different templates and frameworks to tell the stories of your past, present, and future and then draw team members into rich meaning-making dialogue that translates into action. These activities can be exercised in endless permutations, and expert advice steers you toward the right activity for a specific purpose, including managing change, setting strategy, onboarding, defining the brand, engaging supporters or customers, merging cultures, building trust, and much more. Organizational storytelling is a powerful managerial tool and an essential change management technique. This is about your influence as a leader. Knowing the right story to tell and how to deliver it effectively gives you and your organization enormous influence, and helps connect employees to strategy by providing understanding, belief, and motivation in their personal contribution. This book is the ultimate field guide to becoming an influential storyteller, with concrete, actionable guidance toward all the storytelling fundamentals. Identify your organization's "narrative assets" Craft an elegant, well-constructed organizational story Capture, bank, and share stories with extraordinary engagement Facilitate a dialogue to draw out meaning and induce change The growing interest surrounding organizational storytelling has many change agents focused on "trying to tell better stories," but goals are useless without a plan of action. Circle of the 9 Muses helps you weave narrative wisdom into organizational development activities, engaging employees and driving change.

On my way to the studio there was an air-raid. I ran into the brick shelter in the middle of the road. There were poor little Leonard and Agnes sitting on their suitcases, having lost their all. Luckily Leonard had been wearing his best trousers at the time. Madame Arcana was there too wearing a gold brocade toque and a blanket. It was bloody cold and I wanted to pee badly, but couldn't. Leonard wouldn't give me his seat as he believes in the equality of the sexes, so I sat on the floor.

First published serially in the Yiddish daily newspaper di Varhayt in 1916–18, Diary of a Lonely Girl, or The Battle against Free Love is a novel of intimate feelings and scandalous behaviors, shot through with a dark humor. From the perch of a diarist writing in first person about her own love life, Miriam Karpilove’s novel offers a snarky, melodramatic criticism of radical leftist immigrant youth culture in early twentieth-century New York City. Squeezed between men who use their freethinking ideals to pressure her to be sexually available and nosy landladies who require her to maintain her respectability, the narrator expresses frustration at her vulnerable circumstances with wry irreverence. The novel boldly explores issues of consent, body autonomy, women’s empowerment and disempowerment around sexuality, courtship, and politics. Karpilove immigrated to the United States from a small town near Minsk in 1905 and went on to become one of the most prolific and widely published women writers of prose in Yiddish. Kirzane’s skillful translation gives English readers long-overdue access to Karpilove’s original and provocative voice.

Originally published in 1954, The Wilder Shores of Love is the classic biography of four nineteenth-century European women who leave behind the industrialized west for Arabia in search of romance and fulfillment. Hailed by The Daily Telegraph as "enthralling to read," Lesley Blanch’s first book tells the story of Isabel Burton, the wife and traveling companion of the explorer Richard Burton; Jane Digby, who exchanged European society for an adventure in loving; Aimée Dubucq de Rivery, a Frenchwoman captured by pirates who became a member of the Turkish sultan’s harem; and Isabelle Eberhardt, a Swiss woman who dressed as a man and lived among the Arabs of Algeria.

The social system of 'courtly love' soon spread after becoming popularized by the troubadours of southern France in the twelfth century. This book codifies life at Queen Eleanor's court at Poitiers between 1170 and 1174 into "one of those capital works which reflect the thought of a great epoch, which explain the secret of a civilization."

“The remarkable Veronica Varlow seizes life with both hands and bends it to her will. Learn from her.” —Neil Gaiman In Bohemian Magick, Veronica Varlow, the last daughter in a line of Bohemian witches, weaves together witchcraft knowledge and ancient secret spells with an exotic rock-and-roll magick style that has earned her a devoted following worldwide. This beguiling grimoire-style guide is filled with potent, never-before-revealed spells, hand-written rituals, magick ephemera, hand-drawn sigils, potions, charms, and rhyming incantations that will call your power back to you and electrify your life! With more than 150 illustrations—drawings, photography, and vintage art—and text written in her own hand, this sumptuous companion is brimming with spells for everlasting confidence, radiant self-love, healing, manifesting your dreams, and love with a desired partner. Veronica calls upon the ancient and hidden Czech-Romani magic passed down to from her grandmother Helen’s lineage and infuses it with her own signature sorcery to help you awaken and amplify your truest self. Each spell that you cast, each potion that you brew, and each chant you speak into the universe will rouse the most powerful part of your being! In Part I, The School of Spectaculus, Veronica reveals, step by step, her personally crafted steps to spellcasting with power. She shares her secrets regarding writing and preparing for spells, calling on ancestors to give your spells oomph, and writing your own badass spells. She also provides information on when to cast spells and other basics that you need to know to perform the mind-blowing rituals she introduces in Part II. In Part II, Initiations, she introduces you to the hidden magick of Bohemia. She leads you on five initiations, each focused on specific themes including self-love, sizzling confidence, healing, juicy mojo, and love. Each initiation begins with an experiential journey of discovery, a story in which you are the protagonist, whether following a trail of candles through a dark wood to a river filled with tiny message-filled paper boats or venturing into a tarot parlor on a hot, sultry night to meet a Witch who has come back from the Afterlife to help you find true love. And, of course, each initiation includes spells with a rock and roll vibe, such as: Hello, I Love You: Use mirror magick to boost your confidence and magnetism. Return to Sender: Create a magick candle and burn it upside down to protect you and send bad vibes back to where they came from. Search and Destroy: Literally pulverize the false stories you tell yourself by writing them on china plates and smash those poisonous words to bits with a hammer! Bohemian Rhapsody: A secret knot-tying spell to do with a partner to increase passion and intimacy For each badass bewitching enchantment, Veronica explains its importance, the purpose of practice, and the necessary tools and preparation you’ll need to cast it correctly. With Bohemian Magick, you’ll discover your adventurous side and your own unique magick. Get ready to rise up, call your power back to you, realize your purpose, and make your life story truly legendary!

Marie Bashkirtseff's diary is one of the great journals of all time: a Russian girl, transplanted to France, begins a little diary at the age of fourteen. Eleven years later, upon her death, she has written thousands and thousands of pages, creating an obsessively detailed monument to her own life. "...because I hope that I will be read...I am absolutely sincere. If this hook is not the exact, absolute, strict truth, it has no reason to be". But Bashkirtseff was betrayed by her own family. The diary, published posthumously in 1887, was expurgated, sanitized, and denuded. Marie's mother made sure that none of her daughter's more radical opinions - and more importantly, their strange family history - appeared in the diary's pages. Even so, it was hailed as the true portrait of a woman by the French press, and Bashkirtseff was alternately canonized as a misunderstood genius and damned as a self-absorbed misfit. Now, in this new translation, Phyllis Howard Kernberger has returned to the original text - Marie's notebooks, held in the Bibliotheque Nationale. Her scrupulous, decades-long research has unearthed the true self-portrait that Marie Bashkirtseff hoped to reveal. Marie was enraptured with her own beauty, enraged by the constraints of society (especially for women), and determined to achieve success and fame at any cost, and her diary is a vivid portrait of a free-thinking woman born before her time. Working straight from the source, Kernberger has revived the honest image of Marie - in a seductively funny, warmly personal, and thoroughly mesmerizing account of a life lived to its fullest.