Jill Sherer Murray lived in a dead-end relationship into her forties before she finally let it go. She was like millions of women who struggle with whether to stay in a loveless marriage, a bad relationship, or give up on dating altogether, believing love isn’t in the cards. You may be struggling with a similar decision yourself. Perhaps you’re terrified of being single, and yet you don’t truly feel you’re living the life you want. With warmth and honesty, Murray shows you how letting go—of feeling stuck, afraid, and alone, and of believing what you’ve got is all you deserve—can free you from a life that isn’t serving you. She knows this is true, because she did it herself—and ultimately attracted the love and life she wanted. Through her story, other women’s stories, surprising facts and statistics, and helpful exercises, Big Wild Love will show you the way back to the self you’ve lost. It will put you on the path to change and teach you that, wherever you are, it’s never too late to start anew and find the Big Wild Love you deserve.
After being ditched at the altar, Emmy Shaw’s heart, like her dented food truck, is definitely not open for business. Deeply in debt to her parents and evicted from her apartment, she takes a friend’s drunken dare and fills out an application for a new dating-adventure reality show. She never expects to be chosen—or to get a chance at the show’s huge cash prize, which could put her life back on track. But when she’s abandoned in the middle of the jungle two months later wearing only a bathing suit and a backpack, she questions if being on the show might be even worse than the #emmytrashtruck hate brigade she left back home. Then she meets her fellow cast members—including sexy, inscrutable Wes—and starts to reconsider, wondering if maybe money’s not all she stands to gain from this experience. After a year of abysmal failures, this summer of cave treks, jungle hikes, impromptu talent shows, and a sexy flirtmance turns out to be just the thing to help Emmy rebuild her shattered confidence. She signed up for the show to hide from the mess her life had become, but this escape from reality might be just what she needs to find herself.
An Indispensable Guide for All Writers in All Genres The bad news: even really good manuscripts have weak spots that are enough to garner rejections from agents and publishers. The good news: most of these problems are easy to fix — once the writer sees and understands them. After several years of evaluating manuscripts, literary agent Elizabeth Kracht noticed that many submissions had similar problems, so she began to make a list of the pitfalls. The Author’s Checklist offers her short, easy-to-implement bites of advice, illustrated by inspiring — and cautionary — real-world examples. Most aspiring authors yearn for a friend in book publishing. The Author’s Checklist is just that.
Sometimes, dreams do come true. There’s a lot of advice out there about how to pursue your goals, but sometimes all a dreamer needs to keep going is a true story of a dream becoming reality: proof that lows are a normal part of the process, and hope that all your hard work might still have a chance of paying off. The Little Book of Big Dreams is filled with true stories of dreamers just like you who dared to reach for the stars and actually go for the things they wanted most in life—but the most important story in this book is yours. Each uplifting tale in these pages is meant to inspire you along your dream journey, not only helping you keep going when things get hard but also reminding you that obstacles don’t mean you’re doing this wrong—they mean you’re on your way. The dreamers in this book include Oscar winner Kristen Anderson-Lopez, Disney producer Don Hahn, Pensole Lewis College founder D’Wayne Edwards, Hamilton cast member Seth Stewart, Black Girls Code founder Kimberly Bryant, actor and filmmaker Justin Baldoni, and more.
Why are we so determined to be loved rather than to love ourselves? Why is it so hard to forgive our imperfections and remember that we’re extraordinary? Why are we so willing to listen to others’ voices when our own voice is right here, screaming to be heard? Full of the stories that have brought her to this moment and the accompanying wisdom those experiences have lent her, Mighty Gorgeous is Amy Ferris’s answer—tender, fierce, irreverent—to these questions, and much more. Why? Because we are not on this earth to master suffering; we are here to create magic. Because perfection is overrated; all of our flaws and imperfections and scars are our beauty marks. Because all women deserve to speak their truth, to be heard and seen, to awaken to their own greatness. Because life is so very hard and so very brutal at times, bitter and cruel and excruciatingly difficult to navigate, and sometimes we need a light to guide us through that darkness. Because it’s time for us all to come home to ourselves—and Amy’s here to cheerlead you all the way to your own front door.
Winner of the Story Circle Network’s The Gilda (Radner) Award and the Next Generation Indie Book Award. For fans of Eat, Pray, Love and Wild comes a laughter-through-tears memoir. With heartfelt emotion and spirit, Sallie Weissinger, a late-in-life widow, recounts the highs and lows of navigating the tricky online dating world of the 2000s. Interwoven throughout her adventures in search of a new relationship are stories from her childhood as a military brat, her southern heritage, her various marriages, and the volunteer work in Central and South America that helped her move forward through it all. Weissinger keeps her sense of humor as she meets men who lie, men who try to extort money, and men with unsavory pasts. When she experiences even more loss, her search for a partner becomes less important, but—with the help of friends and dogs—she perseveres and, ultimately, develops her own approach to meeting “HIM.” Blending the deeply serious and the lighthearted, Yes, Again shows us that good things happen when we open up our minds and hearts.
A refreshingly honest, wonderfully humorous, and entirely inspiring exploration of change, fear, and what it really means to be alone from everyone’s favorite TikTok oracle, Devrie Donalson. Dear Reader Just Doing Your Best, I can’t say I know a lot, but my life has been one of many lessons. The small amount of wisdom I’ve managed to collect while the universe desperately chased me down, clobbering me with things to learn while I scurried around like a little rat dodging feet to reach an abandoned slice of pizza on the street, I now happily share with you. I’ll tell you about my junior high soulmate, my haunted house, and running away to Scotland to lose my virginity. I’ll tell you about my ardent belief in the power of cheese, the rules for attending my funeral, and my struggle to reconcile feminism with Brazilian bikini waxes. I’ll tell you about my greatest failures and the many ways I suffered because of my fear. I’ll tell you about my greatest triumphs and exactly how I figured out how to become a person I am proud of. If you’ve ever felt the visceral fear of being abandoned or the anxious anticipation of impending change, you might find something here like hope or validation. If you’ve ever wondered if you had it in you to start over, or if you’ve found yourself questioning what you’ve always believed, you might find a road map to navigating both. I hope you find in these pages a little laughter, a little healing, and permission to be okay. I hope you find the courage to embrace sudden change. I hope I can convince you to reimagine what it means to be alone. Sincerely,Devrie
Release The Butterfly is a fast-paced, geo-political, science-based, military thriller drawn from real life in a piece of literary work author Richard Rose has dubbed 'Science Faction.' In his debut novel, the veteran journalist channels H.G Wells and Tom Clancy to tell the story that appears ripped from the headlines. America has just elected its first woman president, independent candidate Lydia Cortez-Simpson. The daughter of a conservative Texas cattleman and his 'illegal' mexican domestic, Cortez-Simpson's vicious political campaign toughens her for the fight of her life against an out-of-control military dictator who has seized control of China and launched a pre-emptive invasion of Taiwan. 'General X' is a misguided, philosophically minded 'patriot' determined to restore China's past glory. Ruthless to the core, General X 'demonstrates' China's nuclear prowess in horrifying fashion and President Cortez-Simpson quickly finds herself in an eyeball-to-eyeball nuclear confrontation. Worse yet, General X has schemed with the disillusioned chief scientist of the Geneva Institute to obtain a fearsome new weapon borne from the world's most powerful particle collider. President Cortez-Simpson turns to Parker James, a spy who can beat you with both his fists and his brains. In a race against time, James teams up with brilliant Taiwanese-American scientist, Doctor Lillian Tong, to thwart Doctor Z's plans to place this planet-killing weapon in General X's hands. In the end, nature itself provides a surprising, decisive twist as the reader is taken on a journey into cutting-edge science and military hardware. Dark matter energy is discovered even as time itself is 'unraveled' in a world where DNA satellite trackers can find terrorists anywhere in the world by just their DNA, essentially ending the war on terror but only beginning the possibilities for humankind to discover new ways to destroy life as we know it.
From the author of the bestselling Prozac Nation comes one of the most entertaining feminist manifestos ever written. In five brilliant extended essays, she links the lives of women as demanding and disparate as Amy Fisher, Hillary Clinton, Margaux Hemingway, and Nicole Brown Simpson. Wurtzel gives voice to those women whose lives have been misunderstood, who have been dismissed for their beauty, their madness, their youth. Bitch is a brilliant tract on the history of manipulative female behavior. By looking at women who derive their power from their sexuality, Wurtzel offers a trenchant cultural critique of contemporary gender relations. Beginning with Delilah, the first woman to supposedly bring a great man down (latter-day Delilahs include Yoko Ono, Pam Smart, Bess Myerson), Wurtzel finds many biblical counterparts to the men and women in today's headlines. She finds in the story of Amy Fisher the tragic plight of all Lolitas, our thirst for their brief and intense flame. She connects Hemingway's tragic suicide to those of Sylvia Plath, Edie Sedgwick, and Marilyn Monroe, women whose beauty was an end, ultimately, in itself. Wurtzel, writing about the wife/mistress dichotomy, explains how some women are anointed as wife material, while others are relegated to the role of mistress. She takes to task the double standard imposed on women, the cultural insistence on goodness and society's complete obsession with badness: what's a girl to do? Let's face it, if women were any real threat to male power, "Gennifer Flowers would be sitting behind the desk of the Oval Office," writes Wurtzel, "and Bill Clinton would be a lounge singer in the Excelsior Hotel in Little Rock." Bitch tells a tale both celebratory and cautionary as Wurtzel catalogs some of the most infamous women in history, defending their outsize desires, describing their exquisite loneliness, championing their take-no-prisoners approach to life and to love. Whether writing about Courtney Love, Sally Hemings, Bathsheba, Kimba Wood, Sharon Stone, Princess Di--or waxing eloquent on the hideous success of The Rules, the evil that is The Bridges of Madison County, the twisted logic of You'll Never Make Love in This Town Again--Wurtzel is back with a bitchography that cuts to the core. In prose both blistering and brilliant, Bitch is a treatise on the nature of desperate sexual manipulation and a triumph of pussy power.
What does a free-spirited, fifty-something professional do when she breaks up with her non-committal boyfriend and longs for a life partner? She challenges herself to go on fifty first dates, promises herself steamy sex along the way, and voila, finding Mr. Right becomes a sexy dating project! Winner of 10 awards in the areas of relationships, sexuality, women’s issues, and memoir, Fifty First Dates after Fifty: A Memoir celebrates female sexuality and offers an uplifting and inspirational view of dating as an enjoyable journey of self-discovery and self-love. Set in the world of personal growth workshops and spiritual ceremonies, Carolyn Lee Arnold transforms her quest for love into a sensual adventure as she searches for a man who matches her spirit. Navigating the highs and lows of dating, she avoids settling for the wrong guy, discovers the type of man she wants, reconciles a love of independence and sex with her desire for commitment and emotional connection, and finds the unique partner for her. Erotic in places, funny in others, this upbeat memoir about a successful search for a partner in midlife provides an entertaining smorgasbord of dating ideas for any woman searching for her own Mr. Right.
