Chad lost everything at the casino… everything except for a few hundred bucks. Now, the bank wants to take his house, his car—everything. So Chad goes back to the one place he knows best for a chance to get it all back: the casino. He’s winning… big. Everything is going his way. The casino staff are desperately trying to end his hot streak. Chad thinks he’s unstoppable and doesn’t know when to stop. Then, after being up over thirty-thousand dollars, he finds himself broke once again, losing everything to a poker pro at the Hold’em table. Now he really has nothing—not a single dollar left to bet. But a mysterious figure approaches him on his way to his car. She’s stunningly beautiful, and she’s got a a huge stack of money that she lets Chad see before telling him that it can all be his, if he’s willing to do a little bit more gambling—this time with his body, his reputation, his humility, and his life.

Aaron, a real estate agent in Toronto, has spent man tedious months dealing with an old woman, Ms. Volkov, from rural Ukraine about a decrepit mansion in a rundown part of town. She’s unable to travel from Europe to see the property, but wants to know absolutely everything about it before making an offer. She has no phone, no internet, so communication is tedious—with penned letters. He is just about ready to give up on selling the old house to the old woman—and then she sends Aaron a huge wad of cash, to thank him for his time. With the cash is an invitation, for Aaron to travel to rural Ukraine to meet Ms. Volkov, and perhaps to sign off on the deal. He makes the trip, taking along photos and videos of the mansion and the surrounding area. It’s a multi-day trip to get to Ms. Volkov’s small castle in the middle of nowhere, to discover that Ms. Volkov is not an old woman at all, but a stunningly beautiful young woman with millions of dollars and a very mysterious lifestyle. The stay issn’t supposed to be for more than a night, but Ms. Volkov insists that Aaron stay for longer. Just how long? Well, that quickly becomes an answer that Aaron wants when he realizes he’s trapped inside of that castle.

A rollicking review of popular culture in 18th century Britain this text turns away from sentimental and polite literature to focus instead on the jestbooks, farces, comic periodicals variety shows and minor comic novels that portray a society in which no subject was taboo and political correctness unimagined.

Author's Note: Guardian Domination was written to share my actual training as a submissive in a fictional background. All the scenes are recreations of actual events. This work includes both consensual/non-consensual spankings, anal play, exhibitionism, graphic sexual scenes, and more. If you liked Fifty Shades of Grey, then this book is certainly for you. Celeste Bronston once again faces the law and the only way to avoid incarceration is to submit herself to a man she's never met-her godfather, Jace Jordon. The judge's condition is that the 18-year-old will be under Jace's authority until she turns twenty-one. Having no other choice except for jail, she accepts the court's offer. Her legal guardian is not at all what she imagined him to be! Besides being young, quite wealthy and exceedingly handsome, the man has a unique way in dealing with obstinate and naughty young woman. Failure to follow his strict rules and exercising poor behavior promptly earns the young lady and trip over his knee for a memorable bare-bottom spanking! Jace also offers her the love and respect that she had not experienced in the past. Together with his best friend, Mark, the men help Celeste learn about her value and worth as a human being. As she thrives in the environment of domestic discipline, Celeste's feelings toward Jace begin to change-along with her desire to learn more about his lifestyle as a dominant. She accepts his challenge to learn about dominance and submission, which ends up with the two of them facing a crossroad. Do they dare step over the line and experiment with romance?

Bela Lugosi may -- as the eighties gothic rock band Bauhaus sang -- be dead, but the vampire lives on. A nightmarish figure dwelling somewhere between genuine terror and high camp, a morbid repository for the psychic projections of diverse cultures, an endlessly recyclable mass-media icon, the vampire is an enduring object of fascination, fear, ridicule, and reverence. In The Vampire Lectures, Laurence A. Rickels sifts through the rich mythology of vampirism, from medieval folklore to Marilyn Manson, to explore the profound and unconscious appeal of the undead. Based on the course Rickels has taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara, for several years (a course that is itself a cult phenomenon on campus), The Vampire Lectures reflects Rickels's unique lecture style and provides a lively history of vampirism in legend, literature, and film. Rickels unearths a trove that includes eyewitness accounts of vampire attacks; burial rituals and sexual taboos devised to keep vampirism at bay; Hungarian countess Elisabeth Bathory's use of girls' blood in her sadistic beauty regimen; Bram Stoker's Dracula, with its turn-of-the-century media technologies; F. W. Murnau's haunting Nosferatu; and crude, though intense, straight-to-video horror films such as Subspecies. He makes intuitive, often unexpected connections among these sometimes wildly disparate sources. More than simply a compilation of vampire lore, however, The Vampire Lectures makes an original and intellectually rigorous contribution to literary and psychoanalytic theory, identifying the subconscious meanings, complex symbolism, and philosophical arguments -- particularly those of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche -- embeddedin vampirism and gothic literature.

Examining the social, medical and cultural history of male homosexuality in Spain, this book looks at it from the time homosexuality came to be an issue of medical, legal and cultural concern. Research into homosexuality in Spain is in its infancy. The last ten or fifteen years have seen a proliferation of studies on gender in Spain but much of this work has concentrated on women's history, literature and femininity. In contrast to existing research which concentrates on literature and literary figures, "Los Invisibles" focuses on the change in cultural representation of same-sex activity of through medicalisation, social and political anxieties about race and the late emergence of homosexual sub-cultures in the last quarter of the twentieth century. As such, this book constitutes an analysis of discourses and ideas from a social history and medical history position. Much of the research for the book was supported by a grant from the Wellcome Trust to research the medicalisation of homosexuality in Spain.

This book presents twenty chapters by experts in their fields, providing a thorough and interdisciplinary overview of the theory and practice of magic in the West. Its chronological scope extends from the Ancient Near East to twenty-first-century North America; its objects of analysis range from Persian curse tablets to US neo-paganism. For comparative purposes, the volume includes chapters on developments in the Jewish and Muslim worlds, evaluated not simply for what they contributed at various points to European notions of magic, but also as models of alternative development in ancient Mediterranean legacy. Similarly, the volume highlights the transformative and challenging encounters of Europeans with non-Europeans, regarding the practice of magic in both early modern colonization and more recent decolonization.

Presenting a revisionary reading of German, Canadian, and American texts such as Fanny Essler, Settlers of the Marsh, and Sister Carrie, Gammel (English, U. of Prince Edward Island) attributes to naturalism, a predominantly male genre, the appropriation of a disruptive female sexuality not so much to "liberate" it from Victorian repression as to contain it within the male boundaries of naturalism. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The essays in this collection use the interpretative lens to interrogate the meanings of Meyer's books, making a compelling case for the cultural relevance of Twilight and providing insights on how we can "read" popular culture to our best advantage.