It’s no secret that Sylvia is a little crazy. People have thought so ever since she first came to town when she was a teenager. But outside her own family, no one knows the depth of her mental illness. For her daughter, Mercy, Sylvia’s illness is at once a source of agony and fascination. Mercy’s mother is absent from her life on several occasions. First, she is taken away to a mental hospital for treatment. Later, on a summer night in the early 1980s, Sylvia disappears entirely, never to be seen again. Her absence is pivotal in Mercy’s life. Populated by an array of compelling characters the mad mother, the lovelorn father, the crossdressing younger brother, the quirky grandmother Love Object is a gripping account of the coming-of-age of a teenage girl in rural Ontario in the 1980s.

Collected here for the first time are stories spanning five decades of writing by the "short story master" (Harold Bloom). As John Banville writes in his introduction to The Love Object, Edna O'Brien "is, simply, one of the finest writers of our time." The thirty-one stories collected in this volume provide, among other things, a cumulative portrait of Ireland, seen from within and without. Coming of age, the impact of class, and familial and romantic love are the prevalent motifs, along with the instinct toward escape and subsequent nostalgia for home. Some of the stories are linked and some carry O'Brien's distinct sense of the comical. In "A Rose in the Heart of New York," the single-mindedness of love dramatically derails the relationship between a girl and her mother, while in "Sister Imelda" and "The Creature" the strong ties between teacher and student and mother and son are ultimately broken. "The Love Object" recounts a passionate affair between the narrator and her older lover. The magnificent, mid-career title story from Lantern Slides portrays a Dublin dinner party that takes on the lives and loves of all the guests. More recent stories include "Shovel Kings" -- "a masterpiece of compression, distilling the pain of a lost, exiled generation" (Sunday Times) -- and "Old Wounds," which follows the revival and demise of the friendship between two elderly cousins. In 2011, Edna O'Brien's gifts were acknowledged with the most prestigious international award for the story, the Frank O'Connor Short Story Award. The Love Object illustrates a career's worth of shimmering, potent prose from a writer of great courage, vision, and heart. "The most striking aspect of Edna O'Brien's short stories, aside from the consistent mastery with which they are executed, is their diversity."-John Banville

Acclaimed historian and museum curator Richard Rabinowitz tells the story of his immigrant Jewish family through the everyday objects in their lives, from chairs and bottle openers to bottles of perfume. Vivid, absorbing, and powerfully honest, this is a story of one family and one community but also of emotional touchstones that anchor us all.

Love Objects is the first anthology on the concept of 'love' to interrogate across a range of contexts its design and other material manifestations.

A stunning novel of great compassion and insight, from the author of the Stella Prize-shortlisted An Isolated Incident. 'Bold, furious, unapologetic and deeply insightful.' Sofie Laguna, author of Infinite Splendours 'A stunning, immersive novel that will change the conversation about class and about what possessions mean. It's important and funny and sad and beautiful and I absolutely adored it.' Kathryn Heyman, author of Storm and Grace and Fury 'One of the most big-hearted novels I've ever read. Each person fully formed, each scene and new catastrophe rooted in truth.' Bri Lee, author of Eggshell Skull Nic is a forty-three-year-old trivia buff, amateur nail artist and fairy godmother to the neighbourhood's stray cats. She's also the owner of a decade's worth of daily newspapers, enough clothes and shoes to fill Big W three times over and a pen collection which, if laid end-to-end, would probably circle her house twice. The person she's closest to in the world is her beloved niece Lena, who she meets for lunch every Sunday. One day Nic fails to show up. When Lena travels to her aunt's house to see if Nic's all right, she gets the shock of her life, and sets in train a series of events that will prove cataclysmic for them both. By the acclaimed author of An Isolated Incident, Love Objects is a clear-eyed, heart-wrenching and deeply compassionate novel about love and family, betrayal and forgiveness, and the things we do to fill our empty spaces.

Book examines relationship between love, gaze and the sexes

Widely respected as one of today's wisest and most articulate Christian ethicists, Oliver O'Donovan here explores the nature of personal and political behavior as it is -- or should be -- informed by Christian love. This profound look at contemporary life focuses on how moral reflection upon common objects of love has an effect on organized community -- in grandest terms, political society itself. O'Donovan begins with some lighthearted puzzles about teaching ethics and ends with an intense critique of the role of publicity in late-modern liberal culture. Showing, as Augustine believed, that we know only as we love, O'Donovan takes readers on a journey of thought through a series of current and historical issues ranging from the iconoclastic controversy of the ninth century to the terrible events of September 11, 2001. Based on the 2001 Stob Lectures at Calvin College, this volume will help readers learn how to think "from truths of Christian faith to conclusions in Christian action."

Whom do we choose when we fall in love? How do we make the love-object into what we want? These are questions which only became important at the end of the nineteenth century, as Freud began to formulate a new discipline which would be called psycholanalysis. Freud argues Klaus Theweleit, was the first theoretician of the new situation: boy versus girl in the world series of love. Theweleit looks at a number of relationships: Alfred Hitchcock and Alma Reville; the triangle of Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger and Elfriede Heidegger; Jung and Sabina Spierlrein. But the key figure is Freud himself. Who would, who could Freud choose? As it happened, Freud proposed to Martha Bernays. The 1,500 letters of Freud’s courtship became something like the first psychoanalysis; without knowing it, Martha Bernays became an analytic-instance. But Object-Choice is not only a study of the founder of psychoanalysis, it is also an illuminating lexicon of love in the twentieth century. Freud is accompanied here by Jimi Hendrix, the Kinks and the Velvet Underground. Like Theweleits’s Male Fantasies, this is a collage book, mixing auto-biography, theory and pop culture, and always haunted by history, above all the history of Nazism. As an epilogue, Theweleit brings Freud back to the scene of his courtship, and the Beatles back to Hamburg, in an exploration of that city’s Wandsbek district, once home to an important Jewish community. His comments on the transformations and destruction that Wandsbek has endured form an elegiac tribute to German Jewry, and a powerful conclusion to this remarkable book.

In the city of Memphis, eighteen-year-old Lee and her boyfriend Vincent make a popular podcast on artists in love, but Lee learns that stories of happily-ever-after love do not always mirror real life.

With contributions from Cheryl Strayed, Mark Cuban, Ta-Nahesi Coates, Melinda Gates, Joss Whedon, James Patterson, and many more -- this fascinating collection gives us a peek into 150 personal treasures and the secret histories behind them. All of us have that one object that holds deep meaning--something that speaks to our past, that carries a remarkable story. Bestselling author Bill Shapiro collected this sweeping range of stories--he talked to everyone from renowned writers to Shark Tank hosts, from blackjack dealers to teachers, truckers, and nuns, even a reformed counterfeiter--to reveal the often hidden, always surprising lives of objects.