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.

It's a tough life for witch Rachel Morgan, sexy, independent bounty hunter, prowling the darkest shadows of downtown Cincinnati for criminal creatures of the night.She can handle the leather-clad vamps and even tangle with a cunning demon or two. But a serial killer who feeds on the experts in the most dangerous kind of black magic is definitely pressing the limits.Confronting an ancient, implacable evil is more than just child's play -- and this time, Rachel will be lucky to escape with her very soul.

In 1936 the Schwarts, an immigrant family desperate to escape Nazi Germany, settle in a small town in upstate New York, where the father, a former high school teacher, is demeaned by the only job he can get: gravedigger and cemetery caretaker. After local prejudice and the family's own emotional frailty result in unspeakable tragedy, the gravedigger's daughter, Rebecca, begins her astonishing pilgrimage into America, an odyssey of erotic risk and imaginative daring, ingenious self-invention, and, in the end, a bittersweet—but very "American"—triumph. "You are born here, they will not hurt you"—so the gravedigger has predicted for his daughter, which will turn out to be true. In The Gravedigger's Daughter, Oates has created a masterpiece of domestic yet mythic realism, at once emotionally engaging and intellectually provocative: an intimately observed testimony to the resilience of the individual to set beside such predecessors as The Falls, Blonde, and We Were the Mulvaneys.

Two brothers, as different as night and day: one, charming and ruthless, buys his way into Harvard, Wall Street, and high society; the other brother remains by his mother's side and makes his way to the top without the influence of money or prestige.Raised in separate worlds, these brothers are bound by a bitter rivalry for riches and power, but mostly, for the exciting, wildly captivating woman they fight all their lives to possess, a woman whose passion for one destroys her love for the other.Their story consumes an American century, spanning decades of splendor, struggle, upheaval, and war. It's an absorbing saga of innocent dreams and green desire corrupted by gilded temptation.

Nora and Blanche are conjoined twins. Nora is strong, funny, and deeply independent, thirsting for love and adventure. Blanche, by contrast, has been asleep for twenty years. Sick of carrying her sister's dead weight, Nora wants her other half gone for good—a desire that takes her from San Francisco to London in search of the Unity Foundation, a mysterious organization that promises to make two one. But once in England, Nora's past begins to surface in surprising and disturbing ways, pushing her to the brink of insanity and forcing her to question her own—and Blanche's—grip on the truth.

One of the most renowned figures in science fiction, C.J. Cherryh has been enthralling audiences for nearly thirty years with rich and complex novels. Now at the peak of her career, this three-time Hugo Award winner launches her most ambitious work in decades, Hammerfall, part of a far-ranging series, The Gene Wars, set in an entirely new universe scarred by the most vicious of future weaponry, nanotechnology. In this brilliant novel -- possibly Cherryh's masterwork -- the fate of billions has come down to a confrontation between two profoundly alien cultures on a single desert planet."The mad shall be searched out and given to the Ila's messengers. No man shall conceal madness in his wife, or his son, or his daughter, or his father. Every one must be delivered up." -- The Book of the Ila's Au'itMarak has suffered the madness his entire life. He is a prince and warrior, strong and shrewd and expert in the ways of the desert covering his planet. In the service of his father, he has dedicated his life to overthrowing the Ila, the mysterious eternal dictator of his world. For years he has successfully hidden the visions that plague him -- voices pulling him eastward, calling Marak, Marak, Marak, amid mind-twisting visions of a silver tower. But when his secret is discovered, Marak is betrayed by his own father and forced to march in an endless caravan with the rest of his world's madmen to the Ila's city of Oburan.Instead of death, Marak finds in Oburan his destiny, and the promise of life -- if he can survive what is surely a suicidal mission. The Ila wants him to discover the source of the voices and visions that afflict the mad. Despite the danger sof the hostile desert, tensions within the caravan, and his own excruciating doubts, Marak miraculously reaches his goal -- only to be given another, even more impossible mission by the strange people in the towers.According to these beings who look like him yet act differently than anyone he has ever known, Marak has a slim chance to save his world's people from the wrath of Ila's enemies. But to do so, he must convince them all -- warring tribes, villagers, priests, young and old, as well as the Ila herself -- to follow him on an epic trek across the burning desert before the hammer of the Ila's foes falls from the heavens above.Written with deceptive simplicity and lyricism, this riveting, fast-paced epic of war, love, and survival in a brave new world marks a major achievement from the masterful C.J. Cherryh.

There's no peace for Mason Hawke from the ghosts of his past. A drifter and a loner, he's not looking for trouble when he rides into Wyoming Territory –– but it's waiting for him nonetheless. Coming to the rescue of a wealthy landowner's daughter who was kidnapped by a pair of inept outlaws, Hawke finds himself an unlikely hero in a town called Green River. But his unsought celebrity has earned him some powerful enemies, including a land–hungry lady with a crooked official in her pocket and a ruthless killer on a leash. Justice, it seems, is an illusion in this place where fraud and fortune hunting dance with cold–blooded murder. But all that is about to change in a brutal hail of gunfire now that Hawke has come to play.

"Anellia" is a young student who, though gifted with a penetrating intelligence, is drastically inclined to obsession. Funny, mordant, and compulsive, she falls passionately in love with a brilliant yet elusive black philosophy student. But she is tested most severely by a figure out of her past she'd long believed dead.Astonishingly intimate and unsparing, and pitiless in exposing the follies of the time, I'll Take You There is a dramatic revelation of the risks—and curious rewards—of the obsessive personality as well as a testament to the stubborn strength of a certain type of contemporary female intellectual.

The first and only vampire book to be declassified by the federal government . . .Felix Gomez went to Iraq a soldier. He came back a vampire. Now he finds himself pulled into a web of intrigue when an old friend prompts him to investigate an outbreak of nymphomania at the secret government facilities in Rocky Flats. He'll find out the cause of all these horny women or die trying! But first he must contend with shadowy government agents, Eastern European vampire hunters, and women who just want his body . . .Skewering sexual myths, conspiracy fables, and government bureaucracy, The Nymphos of Rocky Flats reveals the bizarre world of the undead with a humorous slant and a fresh twist.

A genius, hairless, seven-foot-tall psychopath, Leonard Land is many people wired into the cyber-subculture of Satanism and Death Metal. He is smart and cunning. He is quick, brutal and deadly. And he is everywhere. A renegade U.S. customs agent, a brilliant and beautiful forensic phychologist and a streetwise convict master hacker are on the trail of the maniac who is methodically slaughtering innocent women -- a hunt that is leading a trio of unlikely heroes across an imperiled nation...and deep into the darkest corridors of cyberspace. But there is no system the maniac cannot infiltrate, no secrets he cannot access. He knows he is being hunted...and by whom. And he's determined to strike first -- in ways too terrible to anticipate.

A spellbinding voice in historical fiction makes her remarkable debut in a moving and beautifully rendered tale of love and politics, loyalty and duplicity -- and the extreme lengths to which such forces drive us The year 1198. All of Wales is in turmoil.King Maelgwyn ap Cadwallon, known to his people as Noble, is struggling to protect his small kingdom from treacherous Welsh princes and Roger Mortimer, an ambitious English baron who murdered Noble's father years earlier. Desperate to secure a peace treaty, the king grimly agrees to a political marriage with Isabel Mortimer, Roger's niece. Isabel, not yet twenty, is confounded by the intimacy and informality of the Welsh court, which to her foreign eyes looks barbaric and backward. As determined and willful as she is na?ve, she eventually earns the respect and affection of her husband and his subjects -- with the notable exception of Gwirion, the king's oldest and oddest friend, who has a particular, private reason to hate Mortimers. Gwirion's rascally tricks and diversions are expected -- and relished -- by all at Cymaron Castle. But a disastrous prank played during the royal wedding ignites a volatile competition between queen and confidant for the king's affection, with most unexpected consequences. As Mortimer makes it apparent that he has no intention of honoring the peace treaty, the bond between Noble and Isabel grows strained. And when Gwirion and Isabel's mutual animosity is abruptly transformed, Noble finds himself as threatened by those he loves best as by the enemies who menace his crown. A masterful debut novel by a gifted storyteller, The Fool's Tale combines vivid historical fiction, compelling political intrigue, and passionate romance to create an intimate drama of three individuals bound -- and undone -- by love and loyalty.

Ellen isn't sure true love exists. That is until she landscapes the estate of the widower next door, Adrian Sinclair. Adrian has it all at least on the surface. A successful businessman, he's engaged to a beautiful woman and he'll soon have a stepmom for his troubled son, Pete. Yet from the moment Ellen rescues a stranded Adrian on her Harley, his well-ordered world turns upside down. With his business under investigation for espionage and his son pushing for the tomboy next door as his new mom, Adrian's facade of happiness shatters. As Ellen and Pete bond, she realizes that Adrian is about to marry the wrong woman. Despite her resolve to remain neighbors only, Ellen is drawn to Adrian. But how can she be the one when he's engaged to a sophisticated beauty who is everything Ellen isn'tAs Ellen's three best friends step in to help her navigate this uncharted territory, Ellen must ask herself whether she's ready to risk the heart that she's always held close. Will Ellen trust that God brought this family into her life for a reasonOr will fear cause her to turn away from God's plan and her one true chance at love?

The men of Force 5 Recon have been given a new mission and it's taking them to the Philippines. A Muslim extremist organization, Abu Sayyaf, has been using kidnappings and terrorist techniques to make their political goals known on a world stage. Mac Rainey and his team of elite Marin operators is assigned to assist and advise Fillipino Marines in how to combat terrorists.But everything goes horribly wrong when the Marines walk into an ambush, and half of the men of Force 5 are captured by terrorists. Rainey escapes, but knows that he only has a small window of time to save his men before the terrorists make an example of them. But to save his men, Rainey will have to enlist the help of a CIA agent he can't completely trust. He knows that attempting a rescue his men alone would be suicide, but to place his faith in the intelligence operative might lead him down the same road.

One of today's bestselling and most critically acclaimed writers of science fiction and fantasy, C. J. Cherryh has been entertaining readers for more than thirty years with beautifully imagined, complex novels of intrigue and adventure. With Hammerfall she began an entirely new universe -- her first in three decades -- and an enthralling tale of mystery and survival on a desert world devastated by nanotechnology. Now she returns to the captivating universe of The Gene Wars in a brilliant, visionary story that reaches from the desert to the stars.

MAN OF ACTION Aidan Campbell instinctively flew into the fray when the authorities rallied the troops to catch a gang of escaped convicts. Yet, as the adventurous bounty hunter scoured the storm-swept terrain with his teammates, he unexpectedly found himself rescuing a blond beauty dangling precariously from a cliff. His protective nature kicked into high gear when Kaitlyn Wilson's fragmented memories recalled a grisly crime carried out by the very militia members he hunted. After Aidan spirited the fiercely independent investigative reporter away to a safe house, it seemed pointless to battle their potent attraction in the passionate afterglow. But when Kaitlyn's nose for the news lured her to trouble, could a heroic, high-speed helicopter chase prevent a full-scale catastrophe?

THE DEMON WARRIOR Deep in the most remote Central American jungle, mercenary Jon Lassiter found solitude if not solace. He was trained to be a supersoldier and wasn't in the market to protect anything other than his own interests. But when Melanie Stark penetrated his personal domain…he had to come out of the shadows to save her from herself. HIS ANGEL SAVIOR Determined to recover her past, Melanie had to reveal her darkest secret to Jon. In doing so she faced an even more confounding mystery…one of the heart. How could she be falling for her dark guardian? With evil forces closing in, they'd have to face a devil in the flesh to discover an unspeakable plot of horror.

HE LIVED BY THE CODE OF THE WEST Fledgling reporter Cara Hamilton had just landed the story of her life. But it was the aggravating–yet oh-soappealing–Deputy Mitch Steele trailing her every step of the way, insisting they share information, that had her heart racing. Mitch swore all he wanted was to keep her safe. Or so he tried to tell her…. It was Mitch's job to protect the feisty journalist. After all, a killer was loose and Cara had stumbled upon the most recent victim. Mitch would let nothing, and no one, harm beautiful Cara. Even if ensuring her safety meant spending night and day holding her in his arms….

When Brooke O’Toole’s sister and brother-in-law die in a tragic accident, her only priority is the emotional well-being of her one-year-old nephew, Connor. Unfortunately, that means making nice with the man she holds responsible for her mother’s murder. Hunter Stone. Allowing Hunter into her life is the opposite of easy. Brooke’s never understood why her sister forgave him—and worse, became his neighbour and friend. But even she can’t deny the bond between the man and child, or how much she’s come to rely on both of them. Despite her instinct to fight this ex-cop who’s challenging her right to custody, Brooke suspects the best thing for Connor is a life with both of them in it.

For Anne Olsen, new and improved is the only way to live. So how'd she fall for a secondhand man? Charlotte had the Malibu Barbie with a full wardrobe, Emily inherited a slightly used Barbie with two outfits and Anne was left with a one-armed, bald Barbie who enjoyed nudist colonies. It's little wonder that at twenty-nine, Anne drives a new car, eats only from freshly opened packages and thinks antique is a euphemism for moldy. After growing up in the shadows of her older sisters–one a swimsuit model, the other a pop-feminist–Anne's personality is one part sibling rivalry and two parts VD (stands for Vague Dissatisfaction, and yes, it itches). Now she's the self-professed underachiever in the family, determined to find happiness on her own terms. But when her sister's ex-boyfriend–seemingly perfect, potentially interested–reenters her life, Anne's got to ask: Could she possibly fall in love with a hand-me-down man?

You can take the girl out of Queens… Or can you? Because for five years, fashion assistant Ellie Levine was taking a halfhearted stab at it, commuting to Manhattan by day, trying desperately to keep secret her outerborough existence–that accent, that hair…that daughter. Until the day fate landed her back in her Richmond Hill neighborhood 24/7, the very place she'd sworn to escape. Now she has a business to run there–not the business she had in mind, perhaps, but a business nonetheless. And the boy next door, who for years had been the married-man-next-door, is suddenly available. And interested? Maybe there really is no place like home. So even if you can take the girl out of Queens, would you?

Dinah Nichols, PR chick for Green World International, knows how to spin a story. She has to, otherwise how else would rescuing loons get the media attention it deserves? But a visit from Higher Management guru Ian Trutch means she'll have to put some spin on the "fabulous work" she and the staff have been doing. Sure, her latest hobby of haranguing a cocky colleague is worthwhile, but it isn't part of GWI's mission statement or anything. So, how to convince the higher-ups she and the others are working hard for their higher purpose? Hmm. Dating Trutch seemed the obvious move, but now she's not so sure he is what he says he is, and the office is turned upside down as acts of local ecoterrorism are suddenly on the rise, and Dinah's famed mother–a bona fide well-known Jacques Cousteau type–makes an unforgettable appearance, putting Dinah's entire career in jeopardy. Will Dinah navigate her eclectic crew to safety, or will they have to swim for it?