Toni Sands excites with her trademark other-worldly romance. Known for her ability to transport the reader to other times, Toni Sands takes a trip to an Huxley-esque future. Twenty Fourth century Zia lives a pampered life below ground. Her commune controls emotions and reproduction, allowing only gentle petting until she's selected for sex with hunky stud Conall. She visits his strange world where she and her 'wild man' find passion so potent that they yearn to see each other again. A tempestuous second meeting convinces them they belong together but Zia must re-enter her world. A vital discovery prompts her to escape before it's too late, despite risking the commune's fury. Will the prospect of bliss within Conall's arms give Zia the courage to take what she really wants?

Toni Sands excites with her trademark other-worldly romance. Known for her ability to transport the reader to other times, Toni Sands takes a trip to an Huxley-esque future. Twenty Fourth century Zia lives a pampered life below ground. Her commune controls emotions and reproduction, allowing only gentle petting until she’s selected for sex with hunky stud Conall. She visits his strange world where she and her ‘wild man’ find passion so potent that they yearn to see each other again. A tempestuous second meeting convinces them they belong together but Zia must re-enter her world. A vital discovery prompts her to escape before it’s too late, despite risking the commune’s fury. Will the prospect of bliss within Conall’s arms give Zia the courage to take what she really wants?

Why the modern world forgot how to sleep Why is sleep frustrating for so many people? Why do we spend so much time and money managing and medicating it, and training ourselves and our children to do it correctly? In Wild Nights, Benjamin Reiss finds answers in sleep's hidden history -- one that leads to our present, sleep-obsessed society, its tacitly accepted rules, and their troubling consequences. Today we define a good night's sleep very narrowly: eight hours in one shot, sealed off in private bedrooms, children apart from parents. But for most of human history, practically no one slept this way. Tracing sleep's transformation since the dawn of the industrial age, Reiss weaves together insights from literature, social and medical history, and cutting-edge science to show how and why we have tried and failed to tame sleep. In lyrical prose, he leads readers from bedrooms and laboratories to factories and battlefields to Henry David Thoreau's famous cabin at Walden Pond, telling the stories of troubled sleepers, hibernating peasants, sleepwalking preachers, cave-dwelling sleep researchers, slaves who led nighttime uprisings, rebellious workers, spectacularly frazzled parents, and utopian dreamers. We are hardly the first people, Reiss makes clear, to chafe against our modern rules for sleeping. A stirring testament to sleep's diversity, Wild Nights offers a profound reminder that in the vulnerability of slumber we can find our shared humanity. By peeling back the covers of history, Reiss recaptures sleep's mystery and grandeur and offers hope to weary readers: as sleep was transformed once before, so too can it change today.

In thirteenth-century China, a Daoist monk named Gao Daokuan (1195-1277) composed a series of illustrated poems and accompanying verse commentary known as the Daoist Horse Taming Pictures. In this annotated translation and study, Louis Komjathy argues that this virtually unknown text offers unique insights into the transformative effects of Daoist contemplative practice. Taming the Wild Horse examines Gao's illustrated poems in terms of monasticism and contemplative practice, as well as the multivalent meaning of the "horse" in traditional Chinese culture and the consequences for both human and nonhuman animals. The Horse Taming Pictures consist of twelve poems, ten of which are equine-centered. They develop the metaphor of a "wild" or "untamed" horse to represent ordinary consciousness, which must be reined in and harnessed through sustained self-cultivation, especially meditation. The compositions describe stages on the Daoist contemplative path. Komjathy provides opportunities for reflection on contemplative practice in general and Daoist meditation in particular, which may lead to a transpersonal way of perceiving and being.

Death is a way of life outside of the safety of Inner Tulsa, and Jade means to keep flipping Mother Nature off until old age claims her. With one eye always on the sky, the last thing she needs is a pack of bounty hunters out for her living head. With no idea of why anyone would want her, her wits might keep her free, assuming she can resist the charming lures of Sandro, one of the men out to claim her as his own. Left with the choice of being the evening snack of a tornado or taking shelter with the bounty hunter, she does what she does best: she lives on the edge. Striking a bargain with the handsome bounty hunter buys her another day of life, but it also dumps her into the heart of a sinister plot, one meant to enslave the residents of the storm-tossed city—and the others brave and foolish enough to call the Alley home.

R. M. Ballantyne is best known for his westerns. As a young boy Ballantyne spent few years on American continent learning the local customs, trading for fur with Native Americans, sleighing and canoeing across the America. These experiences served as a source for his western novels that span from cowboy tales and gold mining stories to tales from Canadian wilderness._x000D_ Content:_x000D_ Snowflakes and Sunbeams (The Young Fur Traders)_x000D_ The Dog Crusoe and his Master_x000D_ The Golden Dream_x000D_ Away in the Wilderness_x000D_ The Wild Man of the West_x000D_ Silver Lake_x000D_ Over the Rocky Mountains _x000D_ Digging for Gold_x000D_ The Pioneers_x000D_ Fort Desolation_x000D_ The Red Man's Revenge_x000D_ The Prairie Chief_x000D_ Charlie to the Rescue_x000D_ The Buffalo Runners_x000D_ Wrecked but not Ruined

An exploration of the way English literature has interacted with architectural edifices and the development of landscape as a national style from the Middle Ages to the 19th Century. Analyzing texts in relation to cultural artefacts, each chapter demonstrates the self-conscious production of English consciousness as its most enduring history.