I cannot write any sort of story, said Williams unless there is at least one character in it for whom I have physical desire. These transgressive "Tales of Desire" show the iconic playwright at his outrageous best.
Death and pleasure. Freud's Todestrieb, his statement that "libido has the task of making the destroying instinct innocuous, and it fulfills the task by diverting that instinct to a great extent outwards.... The instinct is then called the destructive instinct, the instinct for mastery, or the will to power." Few authors have spun stories of Thanatos and Eros as skillfully and powerfully as Livia Llewellyn. In his introduction to this volume, Laird Barron writes, "Scant difference exists between exquisite pleasure and pain." An orphan girl with a mind for anthracite falls into the hands of a cult worshipping an entombed god. In the Pacific Northwest, evergreens lull prepubescent girls into their trunks to serve as wombs. A suburban housewife troubled by her present encounters the sixteen-year-old girl she ached to touch in her dreams. These ten stories promise to indulge a reader's sensibilities, fears, and desires. A finalist for the Shirley Jackson Award in two categories: Best Novella and Best Collection!
Thrones of Desire is a captivating collection of fantasy-themed erotica based upon the hugely popular book series and HBO TV show Game of Thrones. Readers will be transported to the imagined world of knights and renegades, heroes and villains, maidens and princesses, all tied up in battles of danger, honour, love, hate, good and evil. The stories in this collection glow with the magic of medieval myth and lore; whilst simmering with forbidden lusts and boundless desires. Szereto's anthology of steamy tales is the perfect escape into a lush fantastical realm.
“A debut story collection of the rarest kind ... you wish that every single entry could be an entire novel." —Entertainment Weekly Fresh, intimate stories of women’s lives from an extraordinary new literary voice, laying bare the unexpected beauty and irony in contemporary life A college freshman, traveling home, strikesup an odd, ephemeral friendship with the couple next to her on the plane. A mother prepares for her son’s wedding, her own life unraveling as his comes together. A long-lost stepbrother’s visit to New York prompts a family’s reckoning with its old taboos. A wife considers the secrets her marriage once contained. An office worker, exhausted by the ambitions of the men around her, emerges into a gridlocked city one afternoon to make a decision. In these eleven powerful stories, thrilling desire and melancholic yearning animate women’s lives, from the brink of adulthood to the labyrinthine path between twenty and thirty, to middle age, when certain possibilities quietly elapse. Tender, lucid, and piercingly funny, Objects of Desire is a collection pulsing with subtle drama, rich with unforgettable scenes, and alive with moments of recognition each more startling than the last—a spellbinding debut that announces a major talent.
A compilation of fifty essays from the popular "Modern Love" column in "The New York Times" explores the intricacies and complications of negotiating love and loss in the twenty-first century.
Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is a discourse of desire. Beyond the many pilgrims' stories taking desire as their topic, Elizabeth Scala argues that desire operates in structurally significant ways found in the signifying chains that link the tales to each other. Desire in the Canterbury Tales coordinates the compulsions of desire with the act of misreading to define the driving force of Chaucer's story collection. With Chaucer's competitive pilgrimage as an important point of departure, this study examines the collection's manner of generating stories out of division, difference, and contestation. It argues that Chaucer's tales are produced as misreadings and misrecognitions of each other. Looking to the main predicate of the General Prologue's famous opening sentence ("longen") as well as the thematic concerns of a number of tale-tellers, and working with a theoretical model that exposes language as the product of such longing, Scala posits desire as the very subject of the Canterbury Tales and misrecognition as its productive effect. In chapters focusing on both the well-discussed tales of fragment 1 and the marriage group as well as the more recalcitrant religious stories, Desire in the Canterbury Tales offers a comprehensive means of accounting for Chaucer's poem.
God of Desire presents Sanskrit tales of the Indian deity Kāmadeva as he battles the ascetic god Śiva, assists the powerful goddess Devī, and incarnates as the charming son of Kṛṣṇa. Exploring the imagery and symbolism of the god of desire in art and ritual, Catherine Benton reflects on the connection of Kāmadeva to parrots, makaras (gharials), and apsarases (celestial nymphs), and to playful devotional rituals designed to win his favor. In addition to examining the Hindu literature, Benton also highlights two Buddhist forms of Kamadeva, the demonic Māra, who tries to persuade the Buddha to trade enlightenment for the delights of a woman, and the ever-youthful Mañjuśri, who cuts through ignorance with the bodhisattva sword of wisdom. Tales of Kāmadeva from the Hindu and Buddhist traditions present desire as a powerful force continually redefining the boundaries of chaos and order and gently pulling beyond the ephemeral lure of passionate longings.
Who is not captivated by tales of Islanders earnestly scanning their watery horizons for great fleets of cargo ships bringing rice, radios and refrigerators - ships that will never arrive? Of all the stories spun about the island peoples of Melanesia, tales of cargo cult are among the most fascinating. The term cargo cult, Lamont Lindstrom contends, is one of anthropology's most successful conceptual offspring. Like culture, worldview and ethnicity, its usage has steadily proliferated, migrating into popular culture where today it is used to describe an astonishing roll-call of people. It's history makes for lively and compelling reading. The cargo cult story, Lindstrom shows, is more significant than it at first appears, for it recapitulates in summary form three generations of anthropological theory and Pacific studies. Although anthropologists' enthusiasm for the notion of cargo cult has waned, it now colors outsiders' understanding of Melanesian culture, and even Melanesians' perceptions of themselves. The repercussions for contemporary Islanders are significant: leaders of more than one political movement have felt the need to deny that they are any kind of cargo cultist. Of particular interest to this history is Lindstom's argument that accounts of cargo cult are at heart tragedies of thwarted desire, melancholy anticipation and crazy unrequited love. He makes a convincing case that these stories expose powerful Western scenarios of desire itself—giving cargo cult its combined titillation of the fascinating exotic and the comfortably familiar.
Polly Young-Eisendrath´s Women and Desire: Beyond Wanting to Be Wanted was first published by Harmony Books in 1999. Since then, it has become a classic read for those readers– to use a cinematographic expression – who want to use analytical psychology to shed light on what women want. This book, when first published, was described (and still is) as “provocative and vital.” More than 20 years after its publication, this book still shows effectively “how to break out of this double bind so that” women “can encounter the challenges of choice and responsibility for our own desires.” The author “wisely uses mythological and personal stories to help us take control of our sexual, relational, material, and spiritual lives.” Therefore, “If you feel confused, resentful, or trapped in a life that does not seem to be fully yours, then you can find a clear path to your true self, once and for all, with the help of Women and Desire.” This book is the second of the series titled Jungianeum: Re-Covered Classics in Analytical Psychology curated by Stefano Carpani.