Hurt people hurt people. Say there was a novel in which Holden Caulfield was an alcoholic and Lolita was a photographer’s assistant and, somehow, they met in Bright Lights, Big City. He’s blinded by love. She by ambition. Diary of an Oxygen Thief is an honest, hilarious, and heartrending novel, but above all, a very realistic account of what we do to each other and what we allow to have done to us.
The New York Times bestselling author of Diary of an Oxygen Thief and Chameleon in a Candy Store is back with the spellbinding conclusion to the series. You’ve never seen romance do this before. So brutally honest and breathtakingly perverse you’ll want to throw this book at the wall, but you’ll also want to know if it can possibly get any more disturbing (it can and it does). And as you start to wonder whether men and women were ever even meant to be together, a surprise ending brings the trilogy full circle and provides unexpected closure to an issue raised by a certain photographer's assistant in the first book. Eunuchs and Nymphomaniacs is about how we love today and how increasingly we try to avoid it altogether.
The ghosts that haunt our sexual pleasure were born in the Stone Age. Sex and gender taboos were used by tribes to differentiate themselves from one another. These taboos filtered into the lives of Bronze and Iron Age men and women who lived in city-states and empires. For the early Christians, all sex play was turned into sin, instilled with guilt, and punished severely. With the invention of sin came the construction of women as subordinate beings to men. Despite the birth of romance in the late middle ages, Renaissance churches held inquisitions to seek out and destroy sex sinners, all of whom it saw as heretics. The Age of Reason saw the demise of these inquisitions. But, it was doctors who would take over the roles of priests and ministers as sex became defined by discourses of crime, degeneracy, and sickness. The middle of the 20th century saw these medical and religious teachings challenged for the first time as activists, such as Alfred Kinsey and Margaret Sanger, sought to carve out a place for sexual freedom in society. However, strong opposition to their beliefs and the growing exploitation of sex by the media at the close of the century would ultimately shape 21st century sexual ambivalence. Book Two of this two-part publication traces the history of sex from the Victorian Era to present day. Interspersed with ‘personal hauntings’ from his own life and the lives of friends and relatives, Knowles reveals how historical discourses of sex continue to haunt us today. This book is a page-turner in simple and plain language about ‘how sex got screwed up’ for millennia. For Knowles, if we know the history of sex, we can get over it.
Jay was a sweet, bright high school student who cared about his grades and his friends. He had ambitions. He was happy. And he thought he could handle anything. He was wrong. When Jay falls in with a crowd that's dabbling in drugs and the occult, he finds himself in over his head and doing things he never thought possible. Fascinated by the dark arts and in love with a dangerous girl, Jay falls deeper and deeper into a life he no longer recognizes...and sees no way out.
Reveals tales of sex and love from ancient Greece, Rome, and other Mediterranean cultures, offering insight into these civilizations' beliefs about contraception, bisexuality, cross-dressing, nymphomania, and erotic practices.
CAUTION: Reading this book will forever change the way you peruse the racks at Bergdorf's or flip through the pages of Vogue. Taking the reader through six months in a designer's life, Fashion Babylon follows an anonymous A-list British fashion designer looking to break out across the pond. Structured around three of the annual "must" industry events, this irresistible work of reportage goes inside the well-cut seams of the fashion world, where women are paid tens of thousands of dollars for simply getting dressed and where a wrong skirt length can cost you your career. You'll find out how a collection is put together -- from the objects of inspiration to the catwalk, into the shops and, hopefully, onto the cover of a magazine -- and learn who goes to the shows and where they sit...and whose backside they have to kiss to get there. Witty, naughty and jam-packed with celebrity gossip, Fashion Babylon decodes the markups and the comedowns, the fabulous extremes and the shoddy shortcuts behind one of the most lucrative and secretive businesses in the world.
"Makes MAD MEN look like SAD MEN"Welcome to the age of Anti-Social Media.Exchanging alcoholism for sex-addiction the controversial writer of underground cult classic DIARY OF AN OXYGEN THIEF retools his advertising skills to seduce women online. It's a pursuit that quickly turns into an obsession requiring even more creativity than his award-winning ad campaigns, but don't worry there are plenty of breaks. For commercials. Dazzling, daunting and darkly hilarious CHAMELEON ON A KALEIDOSCOPE is a spectacular indictment of modern media and our increasing reliance on it."SO FEROCIOUS IT'S ALMOST IMPOSSIBLE TO PUT DOWN."Patrick Trotti, JMWW Literary Magazine"A CINEMATIC DREAM-CAPSULE, SOMEONE WILLSNAP THIS UP AND MAKE A MOVIE OUT OF IT"Barry Alexander Brown, Oscar-nominated filmmaker and editor
Looking back at the last thirty-five years of Vanity Fair stories on women, by women, with an introduction by the magazine’s editor in chief, Radhika Jones Gail Sheehy on Hillary Clinton. Ingrid Sischy on Nicole Kidman. Jacqueline Woodson on Lena Waithe. Leslie Bennetts on Michelle Obama. And two Maureens (Orth and Dowd) on two Tinas (Turner and Fey). Vanity Fair’s Women on Women features a selection of the best profiles, essays, and columns on female subjects written by female contributors to the magazine over the past thirty-five years. From the viewpoint of the female gaze come penetrating profiles on everyone from Gloria Steinem to Princess Diana to Whoopi Goldberg to essays on workplace sexual harassment (by Bethany McLean) to a post–#MeToo reassessment of the Clinton scandal (by Monica Lewinsky). Many of these pieces constitute the first draft of a larger cultural narrative. They tell a singular story about female icons and identity over the last four decades—and about the magazine as it has evolved under the editorial direction of Tina Brown, Graydon Carter, and now Radhika Jones, who has written a compelling introduction. When Vanity Fair’s inaugural editor, Frank Crowninshield, took the helm of the magazine in 1914, his mission statement declared, “We hereby announce ourselves as determined and bigoted feminists.” Under Jones’s leadership, Vanity Fair continues the publication’s proud tradition of highlighting women’s voices—and all the many ways they define our culture.
"Intersectionality, a term coined in 1989, is rapidly increasing in importance within the academy, as well as in broader civic conversations. It describes the study of overlapping or intersecting social identities such as race, gender, ethnicity, nationality, and sexual orientation alongside related systems of oppression, domination, and discrimination. Together, these frameworks are used to understand how systematic injustice or social inequality occurs. In this book, Roland Betancourt examines the presence of marginalized identities and intersectionality in the medieval era. He reveals the fascinating, little-examined conversations in medieval thought and visual culture around matters of sexual and reproductive consent, bullying, non-monogamous marriages, homosocial and homoerotic relationships, trans and non-binary gender identifications, representations of disability, and the oppression of minorities. In contrast to contemporary expectations of the medieval world, this book looks at these problems from the Byzantine Empire and its neighbors in the eastern mediterranean through sources ranging from late antiquity and early Christianity up to the early modern period. In each of five chapters, Betancourt provides short, carefully scaled narratives used to illuminate nuanced and surprising takes on now-familiar subjects by medieval thinkers and artists. For example, Betancourt examines depictions of sexual consent in images of the Virgin; the origins of sexual shaming and bullying in the story of Empress Theodora; early beginnings of trans history as told in the lives of saints who lived portions of their lives within different genders; and the ways in which medieval authors understood and depicted disabilities. Deeply researched, this is a groundbreaking new look at medieval culture for a new generation of scholars"--
