A strange and compelling unkillable woman decides to leave home, and the story begins. Fleur Pillager takes her mother's name, Four Souls, for strength and walks from her Ojibwe reservation to the cities of Minneapolis and Saint Paul. She is seeking restitution from and revenge on the lumber baron who has stripped her reservation. But revenge is never simple, and she quickly finds her intentions complicated by her own dangerous compassion for the man who wronged her. The two narrators of Four Souls are from utterly different worlds. Nanapush, a "smart man and a fool," is both Fleur's savior and her conscience. He tells Fleur's story and tells his own. He would like a calm and discriminating love with his sweetheart, Margaret. He is old and would like to face death with his love beside him. Instead the two find themselves battling out their last years. When the childhood nemesis of Nanapush appears and casts his eye toward Margaret, Nanapush acts out an absurd revenge of his own and nearly ends up destroying everything. The other narrator, Polly Elizabeth Gheen, is a pretentious and vulnerable upper-crust fringe element, a hanger-on in a wealthy Minneapolis family, a woman aware of her precarious hold on those around her. To her own great surprise the entrance of Fleur Pillager into her household and her life effects a transformation she could never have predicted. In the world of interconnected novels by Louise Erdrich, Four Souls is most closely linked to Tracks. All these works continue and elaborate the intricate story of life on a reservation peopled by saints and false saints, heroes and sinners, clever fools and tenacious women. Four Souls reminds us of the deep spirituality and the ordinary humanity of this world, and is as beautiful and lyrical as anything Louise Erdrich has written.

Hailed by Utne Reader as "a visionary" and the San Francisco Chronicle as "the X-rated intellectual," Susie Bright is indisputably the sexpert of our times. Now, in a frank and intimate look at our own erotic experience, she delves into the most personal aspects of sex and shows us how our sexual passion can be a source of creativity and inspiration. By her own example and insight, she helps us to discover our own erotic story and sexual philosophy. How do talking, reading, and writing about sex affect your actual sex life What are the real differences between men's and women's sense of the eroticWhy is it so threatening to consciously address sexual desire in the first placeIs there a line to be drawn in erotic creativity--can you go too farIs the best erotic expression soulfulHow can articulate erotic expression make us better lovers and, more important, better peopleBright concludes with an "erotic manifesto" that is a call for everyone to reclaim sexuality, cast off sexual shame, overcome repression, and become true sexual beings. She offers up "rules to live by," which include debunking your own fantasy life, appreciating the simplest erotic gesture, and taking inspiration from everyone but instruction from no one. Bright's work celebrates the joy of sexual creativity--and the very uniqueness of each individual's sense of the erotic. Susie Bright is the author and editor of more than a dozen books, including The Best American Erotica series, the first three editions of Herotica, Sexwise, and The Sexual State of the Union. She has written for Esquire, Playboy, Village Voice, New York Times Book Review, and is a regular columnist for the on-line magazine Salon. She lectures and performs at theaters and universities nationwide and currently lives in Northern California. How do you really feel about sex"I want to cut through all the labels and politics, and reveal what I've learned about sex - what has been transformational for me as a lover, a parent, a daughter, and an artist. I want to argue that sexuality is the soul of the creative process, and that erotic expression of any kind is a personal revolution." -- from Full Exposure Bestselling author and erotic pioneer Susie Bright boldly crosses our culture's most private boundary--our personal eroticism--and reveals the ways in which individual sexual expression has the power to inspire, challenge, and transform all aspects of our lives. Bright explores some of the most complex questions about sexuality today, including: how our emotional and sexual lives intertwine, how we can come clean about our true desire, and what sexual expression teaches us about our bodies. She offers an erotic manifesto of seventeen straightforward guidelines for gaining erotic freedom.

"My parents may love me, but I also know they view me as a houseguest who is turning a weekend stay into an all-expense-paid, lifelong residency, and who (to their horror) constantly forgets to flush the toilet and shut off the lights." Twenty-six-year-old Frannie Hunter has just moved back home. Bright, wry, blunt, and irreverent, she invites you to witness her family's unraveling. Her Harvard-bound sister is anorexic, her mother is having an affair, her father is obsessed with the Food Network, her grandfather wants to plan her wedding (even though she has no fiancé, let alone a steady boyfriend), and, to top it off, Frannie is a waitress who wears a dirty duck apron and serves plates of fried cheese to her ex-boyfriend's parents. By turns wickedly funny and heartbreakingly bittersweet, Hunger Point chronicles Frannie's triumph over her own self-destructive tendencies, and offers a powerful exploration of the complex relationships that bind together a contemporary American family. You will never forget Frannie, a "sultry, suburban Holden Caulfield," who critics have called "the most fully realized character to come along in years," (Paper) and you'll never forget Hunger Point, an utterly original novel that stuns with its amazing insights and dazzles with its fresh, distinctive voice.

American children's book illustrator Irina McGovern enjoys a secure, settled life in London with her smart, loyal, disciplined partner, Lawrence until the night she finds herself inexplicably drawn to kissing another man, a passionate, extravagant, top-ranked snooker player. Two competing alternate futures hinge on this single kiss, as Irina's decision to surrender to temptation or to preserve her seemingly safe partnership with Lawrence will have momentous consequences for her career, her friendships and familial relationships, and the texture of her daily life.

Gabe Figaret, an ex-psychologist turned writer, now works in a bookshop in Paris. He lives a quiet life as he attempts to rehabilitate his psyche from the ravages of his past. While he'd prefer to probe his own mind rather than a stranger's, he cannot refuse when Reynard, a doctor and one of his regular customers, asks Gabe to mentor a patient, a mysterious young woman named Angelina.Angelina is shy. She is mute and delusional. At first, she appears to be terrified of Reynard. But Gabe quickly discovers that Angelina is not quite what she seems. As his relationship with the enigmatic Angelina deepens, Gabe's life in Paris becomes increasingly unstable. He senses a presence watching, lurking, following his every move.When Angelina tells Gabe that he must kill her, and then flee to a fantastical realm she calls Morgravia, he is aghast. But Angelina gives him proof that Morgravia is not a delusion; it is real. Soon, Gabe's world will be turned upside down, and he will learn shocking truths about his past, and the perilous trials in his future.

Written in radiant prose and with stunning psychological acuity, award-winning author Sarah Cornwell's What I Had Before I Had You is a deeply poignant story that captures the joys and sorrows of growing up and learning to let go.Olivia Reed was fifteen when she left her hometown of Ocean Vista on the Jersey Shore. Two decades later, divorced and unstrung, she returns with her teenage daughter, Carrie, and nine-year-old son, Daniel, recently diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Distracted by thoughts of the past, Olivia fails to notice when Daniel disappears from her side. Her frantic search for him sparks memories of the summer of 1987, when she exploded out of the cocoon of her mother's fierce, smothering love and into a sudden, full-throttle adolescence, complete with dangerous new friends, first love, and a rebellion so intense that it utterly recharted the course of her life.Olivia's mother, Myla, was a practicing psychic whose powers waxed and waned along with her mercurial moods. Myla raised Olivia to be a guarded child, and also to believe in the ever-present infant ghosts of her twin sisters, whom Myla took care of as if they were alive—diapers, baby food, an empty nursery kept like a shrine. At fifteen, Olivia saw her sisters for the first time, not as ghostly infants but as teenagers on the beach. But when Myla denied her vision, Olivia set out to learn the truth—a journey that led to shattering discoveries about herself and her family.Sarah Cornwell seamlessly weaves together the past and the present in this riveting debut novel, as she examines the relationships between mothers and daughters, and the powerful forces of loss, family history, and magical thinking.

"Mr. S: My Life with Frank Sinatra, by former valet-aide George Jacobs with an oh-so-able assist by William Stadiem, has at least five quotable and shocking remarks about the famous on every page. The fifteen years Jacobs toiled for Frank produces a classic of its genre -- a gold-star gossip-lover's dream.... "The rest is showbiz history as it was, and only Ava Gardner, Humphrey Bogart, and Betty Bacall are spared. Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland, Juliet Prowse, Noel Coward, Cole Porter, Mia Farrow, Elvis Presley, Swifty Lazar, Dean Martin, Peggy Lee, Sammy Davis Jr., Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Jimmy van Heusen, Edie Goetz, Peter Lawford, and all of the Kennedys come in for heaping portions of 'deep dish,' served hot. Sordid, trashy, funny, and so rat-a-tat with its smart inside info and hip instant analysis that some of it seems too good to be true....

Michael Gerber, the world's top business guru and bestselling author, shows would-be entrepreneurs how to get started, operationalize their winning idea, and design a business that will thrive. Got a great idea to start a businessSo now whatThe E-Myth Enterprise explores the requirements that any new business must meet: the satisfaction of its four primary influencers its employees, customers, suppliers, and investors through four fundamental categories visual, emotional, functional, and financial. Together these form the twin strategies every entrepreneur must use to design a business. The latest book in the Gerber franchise, The E-Myth Enterprise, fits neatly into a training program all entrepreneurs can use to fulfill their dreams. The E-Myth Enterprise is an indispensable follow-up to Awakening the Entrepreneur Within, as it shows would-be entrepreneurs how to put a promising idea to work. Next, readers can turn to The E-Myth Revisited for tried-and-true advice about avoiding the pitfalls that prevent most small business owners from succeeding. Following this, The E-Myth Manager provides essential guidance for the management of any business. Finally, for advice on how to take an existing business to the next level of growth and opportunity, there's E-Myth Mastery. In The E-Myth Enterprise, Gerber completes the E-Myth series, to help transform every entrepreneur's dream into a reality.

Raising the Perfect Child Through Guilt and Manipulation is not one of those traditional, all-too-earnest parenting guides that, for generations, have sucked all the fun out of child rearing. The foundation of Elizabeth Beckwith's Guilt and Manipulation family philosophy is simple: We do things a certain way, and everyone else is an a**hole. Is that something you should put on a bumper sticker and slap on your minivanOf course not that would be trashy. But in the privacy of your own home, you can employ these essential components of Guilt and Manipulation to mold the little runts ruthlessly yet effectively into children you won't be embarrassed to admit are yours: Creating a Team: "Us" vs. "Them" How to Scare the Crap Out of Your Child (in a Positive Way) Don't Be Afraid to Raise a Nerd Mind Control: Why It's a Good Thing

A highly personal and moving true story of friend-ship and remembrance from the New York Times bestselling author of Duty and Be True to Your School Growing up in Bexley, Ohio, population 13,000, Bob Greene and his four best friends -- Allen, Chuck, Dan, and Jack -- were inseparable. Of the four, Jack was Bob's very best friend, a bond forged from the moment they met on the first day of kindergarten. They grew up together, got into trouble together, learned about life together -- and were ultimately separated by time and distance, as all adults are. But through the years Bob and Jack stayed close, holding on to the friendship that had formed years before.Then the fateful call came: Jack was dying. And in this hour of need, as the closest of friends will do, Bob, Allen, Chuck, and Dan put aside the demands of their own lives, came together, and saw Jack through to the end of his journey.Tremendously moving, funny, heart-stirring, and honest, And You Know You Should Be Glad is an uplifting exploration of the power of friendship to uphold us, sustain us, and ultimately set us free.

College soccer star Mark Zupan had been out drinking one night and had passed out in the back of his best friend's pickup truck when his friend got in the driver's seat, decided to take the truck for a spin, and accidentally crashed it. Thrown into a canal and stuck in frigid water for fourteen hours, Mark was finally rescued and learned soon after that he'd broken his neck. He'd most likely be a quadriplegic and spend the rest of his life in a wheelchair, doctors told him. At first Mark's only goal was to walk again. When that proved impossible, he fell into the depths of anger and despair, retreating from the world and the people closest to him. But love, friendship, and a new sport, quad rugby (a.k.a. "murderball"), helped Mark create a new existence that's truly exceptional.Gimp, the no-holds-barred memoir of a Paralympic athlete and the star of the Academy Award–nominated documentary Murderball, is an inspiring, defiant, and revealing celebration of spirit and will that confounds readers' prejudices by offering proof that a guy in a chair can still do amazing things: have sex with his girlfriend, party with his friends . . . even crowd-surf at Pearl Jam shows.

I've never had anorexia, but I know it well. I see it on the street, in the gaunt and sunken face, the bony chest, the spindly arms of an emaciated woman. I've come to recognize the flat look of despair, the hopelessness that follows, inevitably, from years of starvation. I think: That could have been my daughter. It wasn't. It's not. If I have anything to say about it, it won't be.Millions of families are affected by eating disorders, which usually strike young women between the ages of fourteen and twenty. But current medical practice ties these families' hands when it comes to helping their children recover. Conventional medical wisdom dictates separating the patient from the family and insists that "it's not about the food," even as a family watches a child waste away before their eyes. Harriet Brown shows how counterproductive and heartbreaking this approach is by telling her daughter's story of anorexia. She describes how her family, with the support of an open-minded pediatrician and a therapist, helped her daughter recover using family-based treatment, also known as the Maudsley approach.Chronicling her daughter Kitty's illness from the earliest warning signs, through its terrifying progression, and on toward recovery, Brown takes us on one family's journey into the world of anorexia nervosa, where starvation threatened her daughter's body and mind. But hope and love of the ordinary, family-focused kind shine through every decision and action she and her family took. Brave Girl Eating is essential reading for families and professionals alike, a guiding light for anyone who's coping with this devastating disease.

The foremost contemporary choreographer in the history of ballet, George Balanchine extended the art form into radical new paths that came to seem inevitable under his direction. He transformed movement and dance in classical and modern ballet, on the Broadway stage, and in the cinema.George Balanchine chronicles the life and achievements of this visionary artist from his early, almost accidental career in Russia, where his lifelong collaboration with Igor Stravinsky was forged, to his extraordinary accomplishments in America. The editor and writer Robert Gottlieb, one of the most knowledgeable dance critics in America, offers a superb and loving portrait of a genius who, though married many times to many ballerinas, remained truest to his greatest love, Terpischore, the Greek Muse of dance.

"A carefully researched, concise, readable, and entertaining account of an institution that remains a part of the Western imagination."--Los Angeles Times

Nobody has had an answer for why people with addictions continue to repeat them -- until now.For more than twenty years, distinguished psychiatrist Dr. Lance Dodes has been successfully helping people master their addictions -- alcoholism, compulsive gambling, smoking, sexual addiction, and more with a radical approach. Dr. Dodes describes how all addictions have, at their heart, unrecognized emotional factors that explain: Why we feel the impulse Why we feel it when we do What alternatives (really) work in that critical moment In this refreshing book filled with compelling case studies, Dr. Dodes debunks several such widely accepted myths as:Addictions are fundamentally a physical problem. People with addictions are different from other people. You have to hit bottom before you can get well. You are wasting your time if you ask "why" you have an addiction.

In the predawn hours of a gloomy February day in 1994, two thieves entered the National Gallery in Oslo and made off with one of the world's most famous paintings, Edvard Munch's Scream. It was a brazen crime committed while the whole world was watching the opening ceremonies of the Winter Olympics in Lillehammer. Baffled and humiliated, the Norwegian police turned to the one man they believed could help: a half English, half American undercover cop named Charley Hill, the world's greatest art detective.The Rescue Artist is a rollicking narrative that carries readers deep inside the art underworld -- and introduces them to a large and colorful cast of titled aristocrats, intrepid investigators, and thick-necked thugs. But most compelling of all is Charley Hill himself, a complicated mix of brilliance, foolhardiness, and charm whose hunt for a purloined treasure would either cap an illustrious career or be the fiasco that would haunt him forever.

A Stirring Invitation to Accept God's Unfathomable Tenderness

When Jane Elliott was four years old, the nightmare began. She became the helpless victim of a sociopath bullied, dominated, and sexually abused by a man only fourteen years her senior: her stepfather. For nearly two decades she was held prisoner, both physically and emotionally. But at the age of twenty-one she escaped . . . and then she fought back.The Little Prisoner is the shocking, astonishing, and ultimately uplifting true story of one woman's shattering twenty-year ordeal and how she triumphed against an evil and violent human monster when honesty and bravery were her only weapons.

Fifty years ago Robert H. Schuller founded a church on the idea that with faith, focus, and follow-through all of our dreams can become realities. A tireless advocate of this positive message, he built the Crystal Cathedral into one of America's most popular and beloved centers of worship. Dedicating his life to both his family and his ministry, Dr. Schuller has gone on to teach millions the power of belief. A gifted and moving storyteller, he now offers the wisdom he's gained over a lifetime of optimism and devotion. In this personal and inspirational book, Schuller shows us how the universal principles that have formed his life and his work can guide ours as well. Starting with the message of "Don't Throw Away Tomorrow!" this landmark book discusses powerful and universal ideals such as starting with optimism, choosing positive values, keeping focused, clearing the channels of communication, and most important looking to the Ultimate Authority.For fifty years Americans have been listening to Schuller's thoughtful guidance and have been inspired by his love of humanity and God. Don't Throw Away Tomorrow is a culmination of his wisdom, delivered directly to the reader a tribute to the power of possibility thinking.

Rudy Giuliani emerged from the smoke of 9/11 as the unquestioned hero of the day: America's Mayor, the father figure we could all rely on to be tough, to be wise, to do the right thing. In that uncertain time, it was a comfort to know that he was on the scene and in control, making the best of a dire situation.But was he really?Grand Illusion is the definitive report on Rudy Giuliani's role in 9/11 the true story of what happened that day and the first clear-eyed evaluation of Giuliani's role before, during, and after the disaster.While the pictures of a soot-covered Giuliani making his way through the streets became very much a part of his personal mythology, they were also a symbol of one of his greatest failures. The mayor's performance, though marked by personal courage and grace under fire, followed two terms in office pursuing an utterly wrongheaded approach to the city's security against terrorism. Turning the mythology on its head, Grand Illusion reveals how Giuliani has revised his own history, casting himself as prescient terror hawk when in fact he ran his administration as if terrorist threats simply did not exist, too distracted by pet projects and turf wars to attend to vital precautions.Authors Wayne Barrett and Dan Collins also provide the first authoritative view of the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, recounting the triumphs and missteps of the city's efforts to heal itself. With surprising new reporting about the victims, the villains, and the heroes, this is an eye-opening reassessment of one of the pivotal events and politicians of our time.

Bestselling author Elizabeth George has spent years teaching writing, and in Write Away she shares her knowledge of the creative process. George combines clear, intelligent, and functional advice on fiction writing with anecdotes from her own life, the story of her journey to publication, and inside information on how she meticulously researches and writes her novels. George's solid understanding of craft is conveyed in the enticing manner of a true storyteller, making Write Away not only a marvelous, interesting, and informative book but also a glimpse inside the world of a beloved writer.