"Beautifully spare and deeply strange, Dandelions--exploring love and madness--is Kawabata's final novel, left incomplete when he committed suicide in April, 1972. The book concerns Ineko's mother and Kuno, the young man who loves Ineko and wants to marry her. The two have left Ineko at the Ikuta Mental Hospital, which she has entered for treatment of a condition that might be called "seizures of body blindness." Although her vision as a whole is...

On Thanksgiving Day a freegan couple living off the grid in Manhattan, a once prominent linguist struggling with midlife, and a New Jersey debt-collection magnate with a second chance at getting things right randomly and briefly collide as the weight of their desires ultimately undoes each of them, leaving them to pick up the pieces from what's left behind.

"It is a perfect July morning, and Elle, a fifty-year-old happily married mother of three, awakens at "The Paper Palace"—the family summer place which she has visited every summer of her life. But this morning is different: last night Elle and her oldest friend Jonas crept out the back door into the darkness and had sex with each other for the first time, all while their spouses chatted away inside. Now, over the next twenty-four hours, Elle will...

A collection of eleven critical essays on Williams's play "A Streetcar Named Desire" arranged in chronological order of publication.

"With her mega-bestseller Quiet, Susan Cain urged our society to cultivate space for the undervalued, indispensable introverts among us, thereby revealing an untapped power hidden in plain sight. Now, she employs the same mix of research, storytelling, and memoir to explore why we experience sorrow and longing, and the surprising lessons these states of mind teach us about creativity, compassion, leadership, spirituality, mortality and love. Bittersweetness...

"In this unforgettable debut novel, twenty-seven-year-old Tessa, pregnant with her third child and living in a trailer on her mother-in-law's property, encounters the woman she used to love--leading Tessa to question the very foundations of the life she's built. Abandoned by first her father and then her mother, as a girl Tessa is left to live with her abusive stepfather and stepbrother. She survives by finding reserves of strength in herself, and...

"Michael Easter, author of The Comfort Crisis and one of the world's leading experts on behavior change, shows that the problem isn't you. The problem is your scarcity mindset, left over from our ancient ancestors. They had to constantly seek and consume to survive because vital survival tools like food, material goods, information, and power were scarce and hard to find. But with our modern ability to easily fulfill our ancient desire for more, our...

Desires often come to us unbidden and unwanted, and they can have a dramatic impact, sometimes changing the course of our lives. Philosopher Irvine takes us on a wide-ranging tour of our impulses, wants, and needs, showing us where these feelings come from and how we can try to rein them in. Irvine considers the teachings of religion as well as ancient and modern philosophers, looks at what modern science can tell us about desire--what happens in...

"When Paul and Julian meet as university freshmen in early 1970s Pittsburgh, they are immediately drawn to one another. A talented artist, Paul is sensitive and agonizingly insecure, incomprehensible to his working-class family, and desolate with grief over his father's recent death. Paul sees the wealthy, effortlessly charming Julian as his sole intellectual equal - an ally against the conventional world he finds so suffocating. He idolizes his friend...

"Each of us, at certain moments in our lives, can feel lost or confused. We often don't know how to get what we want, or what we think we want, but we share these universal desires: to love and be loved; understanding, power, attention, freedom; to create, to belong, to win, to connect, to control; and we want what we shouldn't. In each of these twelve chapters, focused on one of these universal desires, psychotherapist Charlotte Fox Weber takes you...