I'm nothing but a bonsai kitten! thought Divya despairingly. Bonsai kitten ? a pervert's contention that just as plants can be stunted, so can living beings.And wasn't that the guiding principle behind procuring a suitable girl? Catch her young when she is malleable like playdough, so she can be twisted and mangled to your liking. This way, she knows her place and stays there. At the lowest stratum. But little does Divya suspect that the Cosmic Jester ? that celestial imp who specializes in tripping up humans ? has other plans for her. Plans that include a roller-coaster ride from Delhi to Mumbai to Singapore, with tears and laughter, betrayal and friendship, loss and rebirth, as her companions. And through it all, she would have to fence with that master puppeteer to reclaim her destiny. Lakshmi Narayan makes a spunky literary debut with a novel that will find Äseveral echoes and resonances, not just with women but also from men who want to understand us a little better. Shobhaa De

"A straightforward, accessible guide to help young men navigate sex, relationships, consent, gender identity, sexual orientation, sexual health and more." —USA Today An all-encompassing guide to help guys navigate sex, relationships, and consent in the post-#MeToo world. The world has changed, and the revelations of the #MeToo movement have raised serious questions about how men are raised to understand consent and their own sexuality. Respect is the first guide to sexual health and relationships built around consent. Inti Chavez Perez draws on his vast experience as a sex educator to lay out how to build positive, respectful relationships with friends and partners, and how consent factors in at every stage from introducing yourself to having healthy sexual relationships with others, all with the same frankness that guys have talking about sex with their friends. From gender identity and sexual orientation to body image and sexual health and more, Respect tells you everything you should know, and everything you would want to know—a book for guys to learn from and then go back to.

The volume contributes to historical pragmatics an important chapter on what has so far not been paid adequate attention to, i.e. historical metapragmatics. More particularly, the collected papers apply a meta-communicative approach to historical texts by focusing on lexis that either directly or metaphorically identifies or characterizes entire forms of communication or single acts and act sequences or minor units. Within the context of their use, such lexical expressions, in fact, provide a key for disclosing historical forms of communication; taken out of context, they build the meta-communicative lexicon. The articles follow three principal distinctions in that they investigate the meta-communicative profile of genres, meta-communicative lexical sets and meta-communicative ethics and ideologies. They cover a broad spectrum of text types that span the entire history of the English language from Anglo-Saxon chronicles to computer-mediated communication.

Written for reasonable risk takers and suburban dads who want to add more excitement to their lives, this daring combination of science, history, and DIY projects explains why danger is good for you and details the art of living dangerously. All of the projects--from throwing knives, drinking absinthe, and eating fugu to cracking a bull whip, learning baritsu, and building a flamethrower--have short learning curves; are human-focused, as opposed to technology-centric; are affordable; and demonstrate true but reasonable risk. The guide maintains that risk takers are more successful, more interesting individuals who lead more fulfilling lives. "What would the world be like if Thomas Edison retired after 30 years" "working for the railroad," it asks, "instead of getting fired for blowing up a rail car with one of his experiments?" Though the manual doesn't advocate getting fired, it does reveal that making black powder is pure excitement. Unlike watching an action movie or playing a video game, real, edgy life experience changes a person. Each potentially life-altering project includes step-by-step directions and illustrations along with sidebar tips from experts in the field.

In a world of lip synching, breast implants, and staged reality shows, it's hard to know the real from the fake. Now "hoaxpert" Boese offers the essential field guide to today's "Misinformation Age."

This cultural history reveals how cats became the undisputed mascot of the internet—“an essential look at life online” (Ryan Milner, author of The World Made Meme). Journalists and their readers seem to need no explanation for the line, “The internet is made of cats.” Everyone understands the joke, but few know how it started. A Unified Theory of Cats on the Internet is the first book to explore the history of how the cat became the internet’s best friend. Internet cats can differ in dramatic ways, from the goth cats of Twitter to the glamourpusses of Instagram to the giddy, nonsensical silliness of Nyan Cat. But they all share common traits and values. Bringing together fun anecdotes, thoughtful analyses, and hidden histories of the communities that built the internet, Elyse White shows how japonisme, punk culture, cute culture, and the battle among different communities for the soul of the internet informed the sensibility of online felines. Internet cats offer a playful and useful way to understand how culture shapes—and is shaped by—technology. Western culture has used cats for centuries as symbols of darkness, pathos, and alienation. The communities that helped build the internet represented themselves as outsiders, with snark and alienation at the core of their identity. Thus cats became the sine qua non of cultural literacy for the Extremely Online, as well as an everyday medium of expression for the rest of us. Whatever direction the internet takes next, the “series of tubes” is likely to remain cat-shaped.