Something to Be Desired


Book Description

A funny, rueful, and beautifully rendered portrait of American manhood on the rocks from the highly acclaimed author of Cloudbursts and Ninety-two in the Shade In life Lucien Taylor has made several mistakes, but the two most grievous are as follows: leaving his wife and son to take up with his old flame, Emily; and putting up Emily's bail when she is arrested for murder. The upshot is that Lucien is left stranded in Montana, with a malodorous hot spring and a squandered sense of purpose. As told by Thomas McGuane, Lucien's attempt to recoup his losses makes for a book that says volumes about the lives of dogs and falcons, the yearnings of sons for fathers, and the skeptical truce that men and women sometimes reach when they get tired of fighting.




Objects of Desire


Book Description

“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.




Three Faces of Desire


Book Description

To desire something is a condition familiar to everyone. It is uncontroversial that desiring has something to do with motivation, something to do with pleasure, and something to do with reward. Call these "the three faces of desire." The standard philosophical theory at present holds that the motivational face of desire presents its unique essence--to desire a state of affairs is to be disposed to act so as to bring it about. A familiar but less standard account holds the hedonic face of desire to reveal to true nature of desire. In this view, to desire something is to tend to pleasure if it seems that the desired state of affairs has been achieved, or displeasure if it seems otherwise, thus tying desire to feelings instead of actions. In Three Faces of Desire, Schroeder goes beyond actions and feelings to advance a novel and controversial theory of desire that puts the focus on desire's neglected face, reward. Informed by contemporary science as much as by the philosophical tradition, Three Faces of Desire discusses recent scientific discoveries that tell us much about the way that actions and feelings are produced in the brain. In particular, recent experiments reveal that a distinctive system is responsible for promoting action, on the one hand, and causing feelings of pleasure and displeasure, on the other. This system, the brain's reward system, is the causal origin of both action and feeling, and is the key to understanding the nature of desire.







Something to Be Desired


Book Description

A funny, rueful, and beautifully rendered portrait of American manhood on the rocks from the highly acclaimed author of Cloudbursts and Ninety-two in the Shade In life Lucien Taylor has made several mistakes, but the two most grievous are as follows: leaving his wife and son to take up with his old flame, Emily; and putting up Emily's bail when she is arrested for murder. The upshot is that Lucien is left stranded in Montana, with a malodorous hot spring and a squandered sense of purpose. As told by Thomas McGuane, Lucien's attempt to recoup his losses makes for a book that says volumes about the lives of dogs and falcons, the yearnings of sons for fathers, and the skeptical truce that men and women sometimes reach when they get tired of fighting.




A Desired Past


Book Description

In this book, the author combines a vast array of scholarship on supposedly discrete episodes in American history into a story of same-sex desire across the country and the centuries.




Desire/Love


Book Description

"There is nothing more alienating than having your pleasures disputed by someone with a theory," writes Lauren Berlant. Yet the ways in which we live sexuality and intimacy have been profoundly shaped by theories - especially psychoanalytic ones, which have helped to place sexuality and desire at the center of the modern story about what a person is and how her history should be read. At the same time, other modes of explanation have been offered by popular and mass culture. In these domains, sexual desire is not deemed the core story of life; it is mixed up with romance, a particular version of the story of love. In this small theoretical novella-cum-dictionary entry, Lauren Berlant engages love and desire in separate entries. In the first entry, Desire mainly describes the feeling one person has for something else: it is organized by psychoanalytic accounts of attachment, and tells briefly the history of their importance in critical theory and practice. The second entry, on Love, begins with an excursion into fantasy, moving away from the parent-child structure so central to psychoanalysis and looking instead at the centrality of context, environment, and history. The entry on Love describes some workings of romance across personal life and commodity culture, the place where subjects start to think about fantasy on behalf of their actual lives. Whether viewed psychoanalytically, institutionally, or ideologically, love is deemed always an outcome of fantasy. Without fantasy, there would be no love. Desire/Love takes us on a tour of all of the things that sentence might mean.




The Wife Desired


Book Description

The role of the girl in life is the most glamorous and fascinating in all the world. To the nomads of the East she is the “little gazelle” and to the Japanese the “plum blossom.” In the Book of Proverbs she is the “dearest hind and most agreeable fawn.” Jewels, sapphires and rubies, are her eyes and lips. The softness of a spring morning are in her words. Her smile is as the splendor of the rising sun. Of all the creatures in the world she is made by God the most beautiful. She is the incarnation and summation of all the flowers of nature. No man ever spoke more truth than when he whispered into the ear of his beloved that she was divine. She is an image, a spark of divinity given to us in life as a preview of things to come. She is yielding, helpless, yet divine. To whom God has given much, from her much is expected. Of no other creature is so much demanded. She is to be the helpmate of man the mother of his children. She is to keep his home to comfort him in loneliness and weariness, and to bring him back to health when sick. This appraisal of the part a girl plays in life may seem to some flattering. Yet, it is sincerely made. Actually this judgment of the ladies is more challenging than flattering, for what girl could fail to desire to measure up to this appraisal in the eyes of her husband? Countless young wives have merited from their husbands the esteem that they were the most glamorous and fascinating creatures in all the world. Unfortunately too many girls have failed to do so, and thus experience the misery of an unhappy, if not broken, marriage. The purpose of this book is to show the girl, the young wife how she may easily have success and happiness in marriage, being in the eyes of her husband “the dearest hind and most agreeable fawn.” This classic includes the following chapters: 1. The Wife Desired Is an Inspiration to Her Husband 2. The Wife Desired Has Personality 3. The Wife Desired Is Patient 4. The Wife Desired Is a Physical Being 5. The Wife Desired Has a Sense of Humor 6. The Wife Desired Is a Companion to Her Husband 7. The Wife Desired Is Religious




Yale Classics (Vol. 2)


Book Description

This collection is based on the required reading list of Yale Department of Classics. Originally designed for students, this anthology is meant for everyone eager to know more about the history and literature of this period, interested in poetry, philosophy and rhetoric of Ancient Rome. Latin literature is a natural successor of Ancient Greek literature. The beginning of Classic Roman literature dates to 240 BC. From that point on, Latin literature would flourish for the next six centuries. Latin was the language of the ancient Romans, but it was also the lingua franca of Western Europe throughout the Middle Ages. Consequently, Latin Literature outlived the Roman Empire and it included European writers who followed the fall of the Empire, from religious writers like Aquinas, to secular writers like Francis Bacon, Baruch Spinoza, and Isaac Newton. This collection presents all the major Classic Roman authors, including Cicero, Virgil, Ovid and Horace whose work intrigues and fascinates readers until this day. Content: Plautus: Aulularia Amphitryon Terence: Adelphoe Ennius: Annales Catullus: Poems and Fragments Lucretius: On the Nature of Things Julius Caesar: The Civil War Sallust: History of Catiline's Conspiracy Cicero: De Oratore Brutus Horace: The Odes The Epodes The Satires The Epistles The Art of Poetry Virgil: The Aeneid The Georgics Tibullus: Elegies Propertius: Elegies Cornelius Nepos: Lives of Eminent Commanders Ovid: The Metamorphoses Augustus: Res Gestae Divi Augusti Lucius Annaeus Seneca: Moral Letters to Lucilius Lucan: On the Civil War Persius: Satires Petronius: Satyricon Martial: Epigrams Pliny the Younger: Letters Tacitus: The Annals Quintilian: Institutio Oratoria Juvenal: Satires Suetonius: The Twelve Caesars Apuleius: The Metamorphoses Ammianus Marcellinus: The Roman History Saint Augustine of Hippo: The Confessions Claudian: Against Eutropius Boethius: The Consolation of Philosophy Plutarch: The Rise and Fall of Roman Supremacy: Romulus Poplicola Camillus Marcus Cato Lucullus Fabius Crassus Coriolanus Cato the Younger Cicero




Desired


Book Description

Set in the backdrop of the Louisiana bayou in 1854, Dayne Templeton succumbs to forbidden desire with her most formidable adversary, Flint Rutledge, but dark secrets, deadly enemies, and revenge threaten to destroy their passion.