The Hedonist tells the true story of the quick rise and fall of J Deeh, an aspiring musician with big dreams who unintentionally became one of the top pornographers in The Great White North before organized crime, the law, and betrayal fuelled the flames of his eventual downfall. In 2006, J Deeh was hired as a video editor for "Pornobec", a mysterious adult film company based in Montreal, Quebec. By 2008, J Deeh and his partner Miguel had become two of the leading porn directors in the nation, creating an endless stream of explicit films while struggling to maintain control over a lifestyle increasingly riddled with sexual temptation, sadistic bosses, wild parties, dangerous psychopaths, clashing egos, doomed relationships, and criminal organizations. Part memoir, part true-crime novel, The Hedonist is a candid and sometimes humorous account of a man learning that the pleasures of the flesh always come at a price.
Best-selling author Mike Sager has been called "the Beat poet of American journalism, that rare reporter who can make literature out of shabby reality." The Lonely Hedonist: True Stories of Sex, Drugs, Dinosaurs and Peter Dinklage is Sager¿s sixth collection of true stories¿sixteen intimate profiles of larger-than-life Americans, both famous and obscure:The founder of a Beverly Hills sex club who has everything he ever wanted but misses his old life. The most amazing dinosaur fossil ever found¿and never seen by the public. The forgotten sixth founding member of the seminal rap group N.W.A. The whirlwind lifestyle of California¿s busiest marijuana physician. The Most Interesting Man in the World, in retirement. The former marketing man who is living off the grid on a small plot in suburbia. The secret life of a clown¿what happens when the people you¿re trying to please begin hating you?Plus, Game of Thrones' Peter Dinklage, Hollywood genius J.J. Abrams, TV pitchman Ron Popeil (Operators are standing by!), the male supermodel who spent twenty years as a member of a cult, the tiny island in the Pacific where dominating football players are made and exported in astounding numbers, and the secret community of underground hash oil makers known as Wooks.
Shapiro captures a generation through first-person reporting, interviews with refugees from the porn industry, conversations with psychologist, educators, and students, and a telling cultural critique.
This is a revised and updated edition of the book, including more recent information, footnotes, a bibliography, page numbers (print edition) and more beautiful fonts! In a groundbreaking reappraisal of European history, award-winning historian Brian M. Watson gives the secret history of smut through the literature, art, photography, and historical figures you didn't learn about in school. Watson combs the bawdy and forgotten corners of Western civilization to reveal the hidden story of a topic that still causes anger, arousal, excitement and scandal. Combining an entertaining style with brand-new research, Annals of Pornographie: How Porn Became Bad explores not only the salacious history of pornography, but also explains the evolution of Western sexuality, the 'creation' of privacy (and public life), and the 'invention of manners.' The book analyzes Western culture's tortured and rapturous relationship with erotic representation by probing the underside of its culture, art, literature, philosophy, sexology, psychology and its law. Covering everything from the fifteenth century Renaissance all the way up to the twentieth century Playboy magazine, Watson takes the reader on a grand tour of the forgotten debauchery of Western history. Along the way, we meet a variety of colorful characters who rarely get their historical due: Lord Rochester, the royal Pimp; Pietro Aretino, the Renaissance godfather of pornography; Edmund Curll, the first Hugh Hefner; along with many other tax-dodging street pornographers and radicals who roamed the streets of London, Paris, New York, and other major metropoles. Watson takes us from the hallowed halls of the Council of Trent, where Popes and kings fought over the future of the west, to Grub Street, a narrow and disgusting London alley filled with hack writers, aspiring poets and pushers of dirty French pictures and many other sights and sounds from Western Civilization's glorious and seedier locales.Annals of Pornographie: How Porn Became Bad reveals, for the first time, exactly how pornography went from being beautiful to being bad.
A jaw-dropping story of how a girl from the suburbs ends up in a prince's harem, and emerges from the secret Xanadu both richer and wiser At eighteen, Jillian Lauren was an NYU theater school dropout with a tip about an upcoming audition. The "casting director" told her that a rich businessman in Singapore would pay pretty American girls $20,000 if they stayed for two weeks to spice up his parties. Soon, Jillian was on a plane to Borneo, where she would spend the next eighteen months in the harem of Prince Jefri Bolkiah, youngest brother of the Sultan of Brunei, leaving behind her gritty East Village apartment for a palace with rugs laced with gold and trading her band of artist friends for a coterie of backstabbing beauties. More than just a sexy read set in an exotic land, Some Girls is also the story of how a rebellious teen found herself-and the courage to meet her birth mother and eventually adopt a baby boy.
For many people the greatest artist, and the quintessential Renaissance man, Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519) was a painter, architect, theatre designer, engineer, sculptor, anatomist, geometer, naturalist, poet and musician. His Last Supper in Milan has been called the greatest painting in Western art. Illegitimate, left-handed and homosexual, Leonardo never made a straightforward career. But from his earliest apprenticeship with the Florentine painter and sculptor Andrea Verrochio, his astonishing gifts were recognised. His life led him from Florence to militaristic Milan and back, to Rome and eventually to France, where he died in the arms of the King, Francis I. As one of the greatest exponents of painting of his time, Leonardo was celebrated by his fellow Florentine Vasari (who was nevertheless responsible for covering over the great fresco of the Battle of Anghiari with his own painting). Vasari's carefully researched life of Leonardo remains one of the main sources of our knowledge, and is printed here together with the three other early biographies, and the major account by his French editor Du Fresne. Personal reminiscences by the novelist Bandello, and humanist Saba di Castiglione, round out the picture, and for the first time the extremely revealing imagined dialogue between Leonardo and the Greek sculptor Phidias, by the painter and theorist Lomazzo, is published in English. An introduction by the scholar Charles Robertson places these writings and the career of Leonardo in context. Approximately 50 pages of colour illustrations, including the major paintings and many of the astonishing drawings, give a rich overview of Leonardo's work and mind.
National Bestseller Now a major motion picture starring Tom Holland and directed by the Russo Brothers. A young medic returns from deployment in Iraq to two things: the woman he loves, and the opioid crisis sweeping across the Midwest. In this “miracle of literary serendipity” (The Washington Post), after finding himself deep in the thrall of heroin addiction, the soldier arrives at what seems like the only logical solution: robbing banks. Written by a singularly talented, wildly imaginative debut novelist, Cherry is a bracingly funny and unexpectedly tender work of fiction straight from the dark heart of America. A PEN/HEMINGWAY AWARD FINALIST A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: THE NEW YORKER • ENTERTAINMENT WEEKLY • VULTURE • VOGUE • LIT HUB
An absurd account of a ridiculously absurd young man who goes to college, bringing nothing with him but a hedonistic bag of sex, drugs, rock n' reggae, and the surf culture (oxymoron). In college, he broadens his horizons, learns how to study, and to go through the motions of becoming a respectable citizen in American Society.
“A fast start to what promises to be an exciting, innovative fantasy series” from the World Fantasy Award–winning author of Night’s Master (Publishers Weekly). In the hedonistic atmosphere of an eighteenth-century Venice Carnival, gaiety turns deadly when Furian Furiano happens upon a mask of Apollo floating in the murky waters of the canals. The mask hides a sinister art, and Furian finds himself trapped in a bizarre tangle of love, obsession, and evil, stumbling into a macabre society of murderers. The beautiful but elusive Eurydiche holds the key to these murders and leads him further into a labyrinth of black magic and ancient alchemy. Why do secrets from Furian’s past seem tied to the mysterious Eurydiche? In Tanith Lee’s brilliantly imagined world of violence and terror, Furian must find a way to survive and stem the obsession driving him toward his hidden destiny.
In the tradition of Sue Monk Kidd and Julia Glass comes a stirring and soulful novel about an American woman accused of murdering her husband in Africa and the series of events that led her to that point, compellingly told via the alternating perspectives of her four teenage daughters. Christina Meldrum has already won praise from critics and fans with her young adult novel Madapple, which was an ALA Best Book for Young Readers in 2009 and earned starred reviews across the board. Now, in Amaryllis in Blueberry, her first adult novel, she tells the gripping story of the seemingly ordinary Slepy family—who fled their Midwestern town to do missionary work in a small village Africa. Meldrum has been an aid worker in Africa, bringing an authenticity to this richly atmospheric novel which explores many universal themes including family, religion, and culture. Meet Dick, his wife Seena, and their four daughters, each named Mary: Mary Catherine, Mary Grace, Mary Tessa, and their youngest Amaryllis (aMARYillis). Seena has felt unloved and unvalued most of her adult life, so she escapes into her books, particularly Greek mythology, to satisfy her desire to find meaning. Her life has been built on secrets and lies and she wants to protect her daughters from the truth she knows will destroy their happy home. Mary Catherine seems to be the strong, faithful one, who in deference to St. Catherine, cuts off all of her hair, but she’s also a lost soul who desperately needs love and attention. Mary Grace is the eldest and the most beautiful—the one who easily seduces but is also easily seduced, especially when she’s faced with an exotic and fascinating culture so unlike her own. Mary Tessa is the inquisitive one who claims to be the most reliable when it comes to the facts of her mother’s case, and then there’s Amaryllis, who was born with an extrasensory gift of seeing things other can’t see, of knowing when bad things are about to happen, and of telling when those who profess to know the truth are the biggest liars of them all…. Opening with the dramatic scene of Seena on trial for murdering her husband Dick, this engrossing and lyrical novel flashes back to the year before her family left for missionary work in Africa—and how the buried secrets of their past came back to haunt and heal them all.
