What do a congresswoman, a soccer mom, and a personal assistant have in common?They live in a free use society, where every woman obeys every sexual request a man makes of them.This is an anthology, collecting the previously published short stories "The Interview", "Half Time", and "First Day", and also featuring a brand new tale of a woman's eventful morning with her roommate's boyfriend, named "Breakfast".

In this rich and original work, the author argues that science is the highest expression of bourgeois thought and whilst it may have liberated mankind, it has also devised new forms of repression, discipline and control.

An ALA Notable Book. A Day of Pleasure is the winner of the 1970 National Book Award for Children's Books.

The author of the classic In a Different Voice offers a brilliant, provocative book about love that has powerful implications for the way we live and love today. “Compelling ... A thrilling new paradigm.” —The Times Literary Supplement Carol Gilligan, whose In a Different Voice revolutionized the study of human psychology, now asks: Why is love so often associated with tragedy? Why are our experiences of pleasure so often shadowed by loss? And can we change these patterns? Gilligan observes children at play and adult couples in therapy and discovers that the roots of a more hopeful view of love are all around us. She finds evidence in new psychological research and traces a path leading from the myth of Psyche and Cupid through Shakespeare’s plays and Freud’s case histories, to Anne Frank’s diaries and contemporary novels.

"Engaging, evocative…[Bloom] is a supple, clear writer, and his parade of counterintuitive claims about pleasure is beguiling." —NPR Why is an artistic masterpiece worth millions more than a convincing forgery? Pleasure works in mysterious ways, as Paul Bloom reveals in this investigation of what we desire and why. Drawing on a wealth of surprising studies, Bloom investigates pleasures noble and seamy, lofty and mundane, to reveal that our enjoyment of a given thing is determined not by what we can see and touch but by our beliefs about that thing’s history, origin, and deeper nature.

The Ming dynasty was the last great Chinese dynasty before the Manchu conquest in 1644. During that time, China, not Europe, was the center of the world: the European voyages of exploration were searching not just for new lands but also for new trade routes to the Far East. In this book, Timothy Brook eloquently narrates the changing landscape of life over the three centuries of the Ming (1368-1644), when China was transformed from a closely administered agrarian realm into a place of commercial profits and intense competition for status. The Confusions of Pleasure marks a significant departure from the conventional ways in which Chinese history has been written. Rather than recounting the Ming dynasty in a series of political events and philosophical achievements, it narrates this longue durée in terms of the habits and strains of everyday life. Peppered with stories of real people and their negotiations of a rapidly changing world, this book provides a new way of seeing the Ming dynasty that not only contributes to the scholarly understanding of the period but also provides an entertaining and accessible introduction to Chinese history for anyone.

The life of Madame Claude, the brilliant and complicated and utterly amoral woman behind the most glamorous and successful escort service in the world. In post-WWII Paris, Madame Claude ran the most exclusive finishing school in the world. Her alumnae married more fortunes, titles and famous names than any of the Seven Sisters. The names on her client list were epic—Kennedy, Rothschild, Agnelli, Onassis, Niarchos, Brando, Sinatra, McQueen, Picasso, Chagall, Qaddafi, the Shah, and that's just for starters. By the 1950s, she was the richest and most celebrated self-made woman in Europe, as much of a legend as Coco Chanel. Born Fernande Grudet, a poor Jewish girl in the aristocratic chateau city of Angers, the future Madame led a life of high adventure—resistance fighter, concentration camp survivor, gun moll of the Corsican Mafia and erstwhile streetwalker—before becoming the ultimate broker between beauty and power. She harnessed the emerging postwar technology of the telephone to create the concept of the call girl. But Madame Claude wasn't just selling sex—she was the world's ultimate matchmaker, the Dolly Levi of the Power Elite. She was also one of the most controversial—and most wanted—women in the world. Now, through his own conversations with the woman herself and interviews with the great men and remarkable women on whom she built her empire, social historian and biographer William Stadiem pierces the veil of Claude’s secret, forbidden universe of pleasure and privilege.