Lakshmi, a bright student who grew up in poverty, marries and immigrates to the United States from India to provide a better life for herself and her family. Clinging to her cultural realities, she forces her American daughter, Pooja, into an arranged marriage, creating a rift of resentment. Pooja's daughter, Deepa, is an out lesbian to everyone but her family. The woman Deepa loves presents an ultimatum-come out to Pooja or break up-and Deepa is forced to confront her greatest fear. Three generations of Indian and Indian-American woman navigate the harsh slums of Chennai to the bustle of New York City, struggling through a cathartic generational collision to try to come together as a family."

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • A Good Morning America Recommended Book • A LitReactor Best Book of the Year • A BuzzFeed Most Anticipated Book of the Year • A Lit Hub Most Anticipated Book of the Year • A Rumpus Most Anticipated Book of the Year • A Bustle Most Anticipated Book of the Month "A pathbreaking feminist manifesto, impossible to put down or dismiss. Gina Frangello tells the morally complex story of her adulterous relationship with a lover and her shortcomings as a mother, and in doing so, highlights the forces that shaped, silenced, and shamed her: everyday misogyny, puritanical expectations regarding female sexuality and maternal sacrifice, and male oppression." —Adrienne Brodeur, author of Wild Game Gina Frangello spent her early adulthood trying to outrun a youth marked by poverty and violence. Now a long-married wife and devoted mother, the better life she carefully built is emotionally upended by the death of her closest friend. Soon, awakened to fault lines in her troubled marriage, Frangello is caught up in a recklessly passionate affair, leading a double life while continuing to project the image of the perfect family. When her secrets are finally uncovered, both her home and her identity will implode, testing the limits of desire, responsibility, love, and forgiveness. Blow Your House Down is a powerful testimony about the ways our culture seeks to cage women in traditional narratives of self-sacrifice and erasure. Frangello uses her personal story to examine the place of women in contemporary society: the violence they experience, the rage they suppress, the ways their bodies often reveal what they cannot say aloud, and finally, what it means to transgress "being good" in order to reclaim your own life.

Pride and Prejudice continued from the original book when Elizabeth Bennet refuses Mr. Darcy's proposal at Hunsford.

A New York Times Notable Book of 2011 A Publisher's Weekly Top 10 Book of 2011 A Kirkus Reviews Top 25 Best Fiction of 2011 Title One of Library Journal's Best Books of 2011 A Salon Best Fiction of 2011 title One of The Telegraph's Best Fiction Books of the Year 2011 It's the early 1980s—the country is in a deep recession, and life after college is harder than ever. In the cafés on College Hill, the wised-up kids are inhaling Derrida and listening to Talking Heads. But Madeleine Hanna, dutiful English major, is writing her senior thesis on Jane Austen and George Eliot, purveyors of the marriage plot that lies at the heart of the greatest English novels. As Madeleine tries to understand why "it became laughable to read writers like Cheever and Updike, who wrote about the suburbia Madeleine and most of her friends had grown up in, in favor of reading the Marquis de Sade, who wrote about deflowering virgins in eighteenth-century France," real life, in the form of two very different guys, intervenes. Leonard Bankhead—charismatic loner, college Darwinist, and lost Portland boy—suddenly turns up in a semiotics seminar, and soon Madeleine finds herself in a highly charged erotic and intellectual relationship with him. At the same time, her old "friend" Mitchell Grammaticus—who's been reading Christian mysticism and generally acting strange—resurfaces, obsessed with the idea that Madeleine is destined to be his mate. Over the next year, as the members of the triangle in this amazing, spellbinding novel graduate from college and enter the real world, events force them to reevaluate everything they learned in school. Leonard and Madeleine move to a biology Laboratory on Cape Cod, but can't escape the secret responsible for Leonard's seemingly inexhaustible energy and plunging moods. And Mitchell, traveling around the world to get Madeleine out of his mind, finds himself face-to-face with ultimate questions about the meaning of life, the existence of God, and the true nature of love. Are the great love stories of the nineteenth century dead? Or can there be a new story, written for today and alive to the realities of feminism, sexual freedom, prenups, and divorce? With devastating wit and an abiding understanding of and affection for his characters, Jeffrey Eugenides revives the motivating energies of the Novel, while creating a story so contemporary and fresh that it reads like the intimate journal of our own lives.

“After years of debate and inquiry, the key to a great marriage remained shrouded in mystery. Until now...”—Carol Dweck, author of Mindset: The New Psychology of Success Eli J. Finkel's insightful and ground-breaking investigation of marriage clearly shows that the best marriages today are better than the best marriages of earlier eras. Indeed, they are the best marriages the world has ever known. He presents his findings here for the first time in this lucid, inspiring guide to modern marital bliss. The All-or-Nothing Marriage reverse engineers fulfilling marriages—from the “traditional” to the utterly nontraditional—and shows how any marriage can be better. The primary function of marriage from 1620 to 1850 was food, shelter, and protection from violence; from 1850 to 1965, the purpose revolved around love and companionship. But today, a new kind of marriage has emerged, one oriented toward self-discover, self-esteem, and personal growth. Finkel combines cutting-edge scientific research with practical advice; he considers paths to better communication and responsiveness; he offers guidance on when to recalibrate our expectations; and he even introduces a set of must-try “lovehacks.” This is a book for the newlywed to the empty nester, for those thinking about getting married or remarried, and for anyone looking for illuminating advice that will make a real difference to getting the most out of marriage today.

Are you loving, joyful, peaceful, patient, kind, good, faithful, gentle, AND self-controlled? Most of the time? Sometimes? How about when life gets hard or marriage gets tough? Whatever your answer may be, the good news is that you are not alone. Best-selling author, mother, and wife Hayley DiMarco understands the challenges we all face and answers the question at hand: How can you be the woman God is calling you to be, a woman who bears the fruit of the Spirit in your marriage and in the daily grind of life? To help you grow, Hayley explores the biblical significance of all 9 fruits of the Spirit, explaining how each fruit first begins to grow and then how each impacts your day-to-day life and marriage. She writes like a wise friend and is readily transparent about her own failures to be spiritually fruitful as well as her relational struggles for control, authority, and respect. Ultimately, Hayley teaches us how even the rockiest of marriages can blossom and generate the fruit God intends to produce.

Your marriage is on one of two paths: The Path of Intimacy or The Path of Separation. When it comes to passion and connection in your marriage, you are either growing toward each other or growing apart. We aren't intended to live together as roommates but as two people who are deeply connected on an emotional, spiritual and physical level. In fact, the Bible makes it clear that, in marriage, a husband and wife are one, which is why disconnection is so distressing and painful.God has hardwired all of us with a deep-seated need for intimacy and connection. Yet couples everywhere struggle to attain and sustain the strong, close relationship they long for.In The Path of Intimacy, Scott Means gives you a roadmap for your journey into deeper intimacy and greater passion in your marriage. Along with insight into God's heart for marriage, he offers both invaluable wisdom and practical steps you can take to quickly get off The Path of Separation and to stay on the Path of Intimacy.

Therapists Linda and Charlie Bloom have been married more than 35 years. To understand what makes a happy marriage, they interviewed 29 couples who have been married more than 20 years, who seem as happy as newlyweds--and share their findings.

A concise research-oriented textbook which traces individuals from the time they meet to the point when they decide to marry. It starts with a brief history of theories of marital chocie noting how these have changed since the 19th century. Next the social-cultural determinants of marital choice are considered, including age, birth-order, education, ethnicity, physical attractiveness, socioeconomic class, sex drive, propinquity, race, and religion. Dating and courtship are considered, first from a historical framework, then from a developmental one, and finally from a tactical one; what tactics are most successful in wooing? flattery, playing hard to get, etc. Going steady, engagement, cohabitation and breakup are covered as well as a comprehensive review of love. Also, extra dyadic factors pushing the individuals toward marriage are analyzed, including readiness to marry, parental and friend network influences, job, and critical incidents. Following are the theories of marital choice focusing on the interactions between the members of couples. These include Freud's psychoanalytic theory, Winch's complementary needs theory, Center's instrumental theory, Kerckhoff and Davis' filter theory, and Murstein's stimulus-value role theory, whcih combines exchanges and filter approaches. The strength and weakness of each theory are carefully spelled out. Finally, the data on marital choice are summarized, and future trends are predicted.