Disclaimer

Oh man, it just had to happen. Someone had to be a bagger at a grocery store and fantasize about hitting children in the head with wine bottles. Someone had to fear a puddle floating at him from across the street. Someone had to celebrate beating up a pregnant woman. Someone just HAD to be a nanny, and stare at giant motorized spiders.

Jeez oh man!

Don't ask why a teenager in a Chicago Bulls overcoat is feeding baby rabbits to a toad. Don't ask why someone had to run around the backyard with a bedsheet cape after drinking moonshine. And don't ask why jumping down stairs feels like success.

Just sit back, drink a piss-infused Bloody Mary, and learn to hurt others.

Tenía que convencerla de que sus dudas sobre el amor habían desaparecido…

La noticia de que iba a ser padre dejó de piedra al ejecutivo Trent Crosby. Después de haber sido engañado por varias mujeres, no podía confiar en Rebecca Holley, la “madre” de su hijo. Pero cuando la bella enfermera que había recibido por error el esperma de Trent se negó a llegar a un acuerdo con él, Trent le propuso un matrimonio de conveniencia. Y no pasó mucho tiempo antes de que aquel ejecutivo desengañado del amor volviera corriendo a casa cada día para estar con Rebecca… y tenerla en sus brazos. Pero entonces ocurrió la tragedia y Trent descubrió qué debía hacer para conseguir que su vida estuviera completa: ¡hacer de Rebecca su verdadera esposa!

Cansada de ser siempre la dama de honor, Francesca Milano se apostó con su familia que en la próxima boda sería ella la novia. Para ello empezó a tomar lecciones de seducción de Brett Swenson, su irresistible vecino, y pronto descubrió que quería entregarse a él, el único hombre al que siempre había amado. Pero Brett era un soltero empedernido, ¿querría aceptarla como esposa una vez que la hiciera su amante?

Y el premio era… ¿una boda?

El apuesto Rory Kincaid provoca que los hombres hablen de él… y que las mujeres se desmayen a su paso. Después de estar fuera de circulación por los escándalos de su familia, especialmente los de su padre y su abuelo, que entre ambos suman once viudas, ha decidido volverse respetable.

Jilly Skye no es la mujer que más le conviene… ¡pero le parece tan terriblemente sexy! Está claro que ambos se sienten atraídos, aunque a Jilly no acaba de convencerla el aire anticuado de Rory.

Pero cuando son pillados en una situación, digamos «comprometida», Jilly accede a hacerse pasar por su novia, al menos hasta que la reputación del muchacho vuelva a ser honorable. Grave error: pues Cupido anda suelto repartiendo sus flechas… Un apuesto millonario y una mujer terriblemente sexy, ¿quién da más?

Lucia Perillo’s hard-edged yet vulnerable poems attempt to reconcile the comic impulse — the humorous deflection of anxiety — with the complications and tragedies of living in a mortal, fragile “meat cage.” Perillo’s surgical honesty — and biting, nourishing humor — chronicle human failings, sexuality, and the collision of nature with the manufactured world. Whether recalling her former career as a naturalist experimenting on white rats or watching birds from her wheelchair, she draws the reader into unforgettable places rich in image and story.

Lucia Perillo is the author of four books of poetry that have won the Norma Farber First Book Award, the Kate Tufts Prize, the Balcones Prize, and the Kingsley Tufts Award. Her critically acclaimed memoir, I’ve Heard the Vultures Singing: Field Notes on Poetry, Illness, and Nature, was published in 2007.

Sólo él podía protegerla…

Jack Santini pensó que la mejor manera de demostrarle a la familia real que él era el único candidato adecuado para convertirse en jefe de seguridad era romper el sistema de seguridad del estado de Roseanova. Pero no había contado con despertar a la bella princesa de cabellos de oro.

Nada más ver a aquel hombre que entró por su balcón, Karina Roseanova pensó que él la liberaría de su torre de marfil y le enseñaría el mundo real. Y aquella fantasía no tardó en convertirse en un amor que no se detendría ante nada. Pero, ¿qué tendría que hacer un plebeyo como él para entrar a formar parte de la familia real?

"Perillo has long lived with, and written about, her struggle with debilitating multiple sclerosis. Her bracing sixth book of poems, published concurrently with her debut story collection, takes an unflinching, though not unsmiling, look at mortality. Perillo has a penchant for dark humor, for jokes that stick." — , starred review

"Perillo's poetic persona is funny, tough, bold, smart, and righteous. A spellbinding storyteller and a poet who makes the demands of the form seem as natural as a handshake, she pulls readers into the beat and whirl of her slyly devastating descriptions." —

"Whoever told you poetry isn't for everyone hasn't read Lucia Perillo. She writes accessible, often funny poems that border on the profane." —

"Lucia Perillo's much lauded writing has been consistently fine — with its deep, fearless intelligence; its dark and delicious wit; its skillful lyricism; and its refreshingly cool but no less embracing humanity." — Open Books: A Poem Emporium

The poetry of Lucia Perillo is fierce, tragicomic, and contrarian, with subjects ranging from coyotes and Scotch broom to local elections and family history. Formally braided, Perillo gathers strands of the mythic and mundane, of media and daily life, as she faces the treachery of illness and draws readers into poems rich in image and story.

you have more than the usual chances to disgust yourself—

this is the problem of the body, not that it is mortal

but that it is mortifying. When we were young they taught us

do not touch it, but who can keep from touching it,

from scratching off the juicy scab? Today I bit

a thick hangnail and thought of Schneebaum,

who walked four days into the jungle

and stayed for the kindness of the tribe—

who would have thought that cannibals would be so tender?

As the eldest of six siblings and deputy chief of the Fitzgerald Bay police department, Ryan Fitzgerald is a protector. Of his family. Of his community. But staying in control means keeping his distance…until Meghan Henry comes to town. Seeking justice for her murdered cousin, and safety for an orphaned-and missing-child, the daring journalist is not afraid to face danger head-on. And when she uncovers a dark Fitzgerald secret, Ryan's left with a devastating choice. Which will he protect-his family, or the woman he's started to love?

And bonus story by Jillian Hart

Dorothy is a retired schoolteacher who has recently moved to a housing estate in a small village. Solomon is a night-watchman, an immigrant from an unnamed country in Africa. Each is desperate for love. And yet each harbors secrets that may make attaining it impossible.

With breathtaking assurance and compassion, Caryl Phillips retraces the paths that lead Dorothy and Solomon to their meeting point: her failed marriage and ruinous obsession with a younger man, the horrors he witnessed as a soldier in his disintegrating native land, and the cruelty he encounters as a stranger in his new one. Intimate and panoramic, measured and shattering, charts the oceanic expanses that separate people from their homes, their hearts, and their selves.

Callum Ironstone didn't do guilt. Even so, the millionaire did feel responsible enough for struggling chef Miranda Owen to offer her a job. She could cater his holiday dinner party – an important affair where he planned to propose to the appropriate woman. Except somehow he'd ended up with Miranda in his bed.

He tried to blame it on the mistletoe. But Callum knew Miranda's transformation from dowdy wallflower to sensual beauty had hit him right where it counted. Perhaps she could be made into the hostess his position demanded – provided Miranda forgave him for destroying her family.

Cambridge

When Deborah Rudacille learned that a close friend had decided to transition from female to male, she felt compelled to understand why.

Coming at the controversial subject of transsexualism from several angles–historical, sociological, psychological, medical–Rudacille discovered that gender variance is anything but new, that changing one’s gender has been met with both acceptance and hostility through the years, and that gender identity, like sexual orientation, appears to be inborn, not learned, though in some people the sex of the body does not match the sex of the brain.

Informed not only by meticulous research, but also by the author’s interviews with prominent members of the transgender community, is a sympathetic and wise look at a sexual revolution that calls into question many of our most deeply held assumptions about what it means to be a man, a woman, and a human being.

From an acclaimed, award-winning novelist comes this brilliant hybrid of reportage, fiction, and historical fact: the stories of three black men whose tragic lives speak resoundingly to the problem of race in British society.

With his characteristic grace and forceful prose, Phillips describes the lives of three very different men: Francis Barber, “given” to the 18th-century writer Samuel Johnson, whose friendship with Johnson led to his wretched demise; Randolph Turpin, a boxing champion who ended his life in debt and decrepitude; and David Oluwale, a Nigerian stowaway who arrived in Leeds in 1949 and whose death at the hands of police twenty years later was a wake up call for the entire nation. As Phillips weaves together these three stories, he illuminates the complexities of race relations and social constraints with devastating results.