Love is impossible to understand in its entirety, especially when we are in love with someone else. Distant lover is a walk through three stages of love and how we find ourselves trapped in its grip, struggling to make sense of where to go and how to get there.

Set in the Rose City of Portland, Oregon, the All-4-Love series evolves around Alley's wacky relationship toggles and family issues. Sure, typical family problems can be repeated snores when it comes to reading, but I've taken it to wild and crazy heights and it should keep all readers glued to the end. Distant Lover is about protagonist Alley's yearning for someone that seems hard to reel in. He yearns for Lavida Jones, but she is entangled in parenting, job, and ex-fiancé problems. The story opens with Alley being the ultimate, unemployed, and complete loser. Not only is Alley suddenly blessed with finding job security, he meets his distant lover on a bus. Together, Alley and Lavida survive all the wacky challenges: A stalking bum that eventually cleans up his alcoholic behaviors, returns to the bottle, and ends up dead by the end of Distant Lover. The gangster son of Lavida, who threatened to shoot Alley if marriage came up, ends up shot and finds that Jesus is his best friend. The ex-fiancé and part time Jamaican pimp, Robert, ends up the most hated villain you'll ever read about.

Tandi Crawford feels trapped in a sexless, loveless marriage to her husband Jared. She begins to fantasise about a boy she dated when she was seventeen, turning a blind eye to the good man her husband is. She takes her son and flees her marriage, ending up on her father's doorstep - a place she vowed never to return to. Old grudges are ignited and Tandi is forced to send her son home to her husband, becoming trapped in her father's home when the old man has a stroke. Tandi turns to her best friend Evonne for support - but Evonne is after Tandi's husband.

Love and family life in the global age: grandparents in Salonika and their grandson in London speak together every evening via Skype. A U.S. citizen and her Swiss husband fret over large telephone bills and high travel costs. A European couple can finally have a baby with the help of an Indian surrogate mother. In their new book, Ulrich Beck and Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim investigate all types of long-distance relationships, marriages and families that stretch across countries, continents and cultures. These long-distance relationships comprise so many different forms of what they call ‘world families’, by which they mean love and intimate relationships between individuals living in, or coming from, different countries or continents. In all their various forms these world families share one feature in common: they are the focal point in which different aspects of the globalized world become embodied in the personal lives of individuals. Whether they like it or not, lovers and relatives in these families find themselves confronting the world in the inner space of their own lives. The conflicts between the developed and developing worlds come to the surface in world families- they acquire faces and names, creating confusion, surprise, anger, joy, pleasure and pain at the heart of everyday life. This path-breaking book will appeal to a wide readership interested in the changing character of love in our times.

Does it count as a long-distance relationship if you live together? Whenever Morgan Shultz contemplates marriage, she totally freaks out. Oh, she has her reasons, and they have nothing to do with love. Or sex. Seriously, rabbits would be jealous of how often she and Cooper do it. But relationships require more than the hot and heavy, and there’s another important aspect that’s seriously lacking in their relationship. If things don’t change, she won’t have to worry about their future anymore because her relationship status will change from practically-long-distance to seriously single. Cooper Youngblood is a numbers guy. His life is filled with identifying risks and probable outcomes, but on his latest business trip, he quickly learns just how badly he miscalculated everything. Something is off with his girlfriend, and the new prospective client is interested in more than his spreadsheets. Morgan turns up the heat, but Cooper is busy dodging the fire.

Franz Schubert's song cycles Schone Mullerin and Winterreise are cornerstones of the genre. But as Richard Kramer argues in this book, Schubert envisioned many other songs as components of cyclical arrangements that were never published as such. By carefully studying Schubert's original manuscripts, Kramer recovers some of these "distant cycles" and accounts for idiosyncrasies in the songs which other analyses have failed to explain. Returning the songs to their original keys, Kramer reveals linkages among songs which were often obscured as Schubert readied his compositions for publication. His analysis thus conveys even familiar songs in fresh contexts that will affect performance, interpretation, and criticism. After addressing problems of multiple settings and revisions, Kramer presents a series of briefs for the reconfiguring of sets of songs to poems by Goethe, Rellstab, and Heine. He deconstructs Winterreise, using its convoluted origins to illuminate its textual contradictions. Finally, Kramer scrutinizes settings from the Abendrote cycle (on poems by Friedrich Schlegel) for signs of cyclic process. Probing the farthest reaches of Schubert's engagement with the poetics of lieder, Distant Cycles exposes tensions between Schubert the composer and Schubert the merchant-entrepreneur.