Manga is the backbone of Japanese popular culture, influencing everything from television, movies, and video games to novels, art, and theater. Shojo manga (girls’ comics) has been seminal to the genre as a whole and especially formative for Japanese girls’ culture throughout the postwar era. In Straight from the Heart, Jennifer Prough examines the shojo manga industry as a site of cultural storytelling, illuminating the ways that issues of mass media, gender, production, and consumption are involved in the process of creating shojo manga. With their glittery pastel covers and focus on human relationships and romance, shojo manga are thoroughly marked by gender—as indeed are almost all manga titles, magazines, and publishing divisions. Drawing on two years of fieldwork on the production of shojo manga, Prough analyzes shojo manga texts and their magazine contexts to explain their distinctive appeal, probe the gendered dynamics inherent in their creation, and demonstrate the feedback system that links producers and consumers in a continuous cycle of "affective labor." Each chapter focuses on one facet of shojo manga production (stories, format, personnel, industry dynamics), providing engaging insights into this popular medium. Tacking between story development, interactive magazine features, and relationships between male editors and female artists, Prough examines the concrete ways in which shojo manga reflect, refract, and fabricate constructions of gender, consumption, and intimacy. Straight from the Heart thus weaves together issues of production and consumption, human relations, and gender to explain the unique world of shojo manga and to interpret its dramatic cultural and economic success on a national—and increasingly global—scale.

Straight from My Heart presents a collection of true stories and poetry written by a woman who has helped others to discover their true selves. It shares her journey as her life is touched by others. Author Jacqui DeLorenzo shares several inspiring tales of hope and courage intended to resonate with anyone who has suffered a hardship or the loss of a loved one. She considers whether there is life after death. She also ventures on journeys to the other side of the rainbowto a place where there is no pain and no illness. She goes to a place where we can fi nd love in our hearts, peace in our souls, and happiness in our lives again, even when it seems that all has been lost along the way. Each story seeks to open hearts, touch souls, and encourage all to believe in what is possible. Through the personal journeys of DeLorenzo, her friends, her hospice patients, and their caregivers, Straight from My Heart provides the opportunity to know and understand that life continues after this life on earth. We need to open our hearts to the positive energy and the spirit of loved ones who are on the other side waiting to greet us with open arms when it is our turn to journey to the other side.

WINNER OF THE 2020 GOVERNOR GENERAL'S LITERARY AWARD FOR NONFICTION “Wondrously and elegantly written in language that astonishes and moves the reader…This is an important book: an emotional and intellectual tour de force.” —Jane Urquhart An experimental memoir about Partition, immigration, and generational storytelling, This Red Line Goes Straight to Your Heart weaves together the poetry of memory with the science of embodied trauma, using the imagined voices of the past and the vital authority of the present. We begin with a man off balance: one in one thousand, the only child in town whose polio leads to partial paralysis. We meet his future wife, chanting Hai Rams for Gandhiji and choosing education over marriage. On one side of the line that divides this book, we follow them as their homeland splits in two and they are drawn together, moving to Canada and raising their children in mining towns and in crowded city apartments. And when we turn the book over, we find the daughter's tale—we see how the rupture of Partition, the asymmetry of a father's leg, the virus of a mother's rage, makes its way to the next generation. Told through the lenses of biology, physics, history and poetry, this is a memoir that defies form and convention to immerse the reader in the feeling of what remains when we've heard as much of the truth as our families will allow, and we're left to search for ourselves among the pieces they've carried with them.

From the author of 'The Secret of Jewish Femininity,' a wealth of Torah insights on motherhood. Also contains nutritional and medical information, and practical advice for nursing mothers.

This is the first in a series of devotional commentaries, which allow people to get to grips with each book of the Bible one bite at a time. Phil Moore will not cover the whole of each book, but rather focuses on key sections which together form a useful introduction. There will be 25 volumes in all: each contains about 60 readings, but this may vary from book to book. Although the tone is light, the text is full of useful application and backed by substantial scholarship. Acts - 978 1 85424 989 0 Revelation - 978 1 85424 990 6

Who do you turn to when life hurts? Someone who has "been there." Facing divorce, addiction, and abuse-both in andout of the church-Pastor Paul Coneff searched for answers to why so many Christians were not experiencing the good news Jesus offered. What Paul found was a gospel able to meet humanity in the midst of its deepest pains and darkest sins-hidden in plain sight! Now you can discover how Jesus Christ suffered "in every way" like you have, so He could help you overcome all the sins, wounds, and lies in your life.

U.S. Marshal Joanna Wyatt has to make her witness protection detail work even though the witness doesn't know he's being protected. Posing as a down-on-her-luck waitress at Ben Callahan's Texas roadhouse, she'll be able to keep a close eye on the man, which is no hardship. Falling into bed with the insanely sexy former navy SEAL with the rodeo swagger and whiskey-colored eyes is not the problem. The problem is he doesn't believe he's a target! Ben's been in plenty of dicey situations before, so he's not worried. What does worry him, however, is the sexy waitress he can't seem to keep his hands off of. He knows it's not the right time to get involved. Still, the heat between them is irresistible, inevitable. But as their guards go down, danger draws closer….

Our approach to apologetics needs to change when the very idea of “truth” is controversial. But as authors Daniel Blackaby and Mike Blackaby teach us, we can still reach people if we understand what they value most. This practical guide to our current landscape explores five effective communication pathways: Story: As people wired for narrative, we can speak through the stories we live and tell. Beauty: In an increasingly industrialized world, we can point people to “pockets of beauty” that reveal the attractiveness of God. Art: In a society that celebrates the arts, we can cultivate creativity in the church, then send artists out as cultural missionaries. Desire: To a people motivated by love, identity, and purpose, we can show how Jesus is the perfect fulfillment of our deepest longings. Community: As relational creatures where connectivity is disappearing, we can offer a community of unified diversity. Culture may be in flux, but God’s Word remains true. Straight to the Heart helps us speak to the passions that drive our culture without compromising the life-changing truth of the gospel.

Straight from the Heart is Ann Richards’s story, told with her trademark candor and spicy humor. Born in a tiny town near Waco, Texas, she entered politics when her husband wouldn’t—and went on to become state treasurer, the first woman elected to statewide office in Texas in fifty years. She’s had her victories and her battles (the breakup of a thirty-year marriage and a bout with alcohol), but it’s her love of Texas and Texas politics that has made her who she is. This extraordinary memoir by one of the nation’s leading politicians proves the wisdom of her observation that women “can have a good and wonderful life, but that it only begins when they accept responsibility for it, not when they expect someone else to make it happen.” Richards talks openly about the course her life has taken and the choices she has made on the way. Her hard-won triumphs and savvy political career provide inspiring examples for all.