Valentine Silverton has enjoyed comfort and luxury his entire life. Then, all at once, the family fortune vanishes, and he’s a pauper. The only recourse he has is to find a wealthy heiress. But he doesn’t want to just find just any wealthy heiress. He wants to find one he can fall in love with. Since there are no suitable prospects in his area, he takes his friend’s advice and becomes a mail-order husband. Nelly Larson grew up on a farm, and she loves everything about it. She loves the life so much, in fact, that she got her own homestead. The last thing she wants is to be strapped to one of the men in town who think her place is in the kitchen. She’s going to keep her independence, and keeping her independence will require her to avoid marriage at all costs. Nelly’s sisters, however, can’t believe Nelly will truly be happy if she doesn’t get married. Romance, after all, is one of life’s most wonderful experiences. When they come upon Valentine’s ad, they know he’ll be perfect for her. So they take matters into their own hands and answer his ad on Nelly’s behalf. Valentine thinks Nelly is the one answering his ad, and at once, he’s intrigued by her. He has no idea what a homestead is, but he assumes that a young woman who owns land and runs her own business must have lots of money. Excited, he runs off to Omaha to marry her. The day comes when the two meet, and it’s at that time they realize they’ve been set up. Since Valentine has no money, he can’t leave Omaha. He has to marry Nelly. Even if she doesn’t have much, she has a place to live and food to eat. In exchange for marriage, he promises Nelly he won’t hinder her independence. Thankfully, she agrees to marry him. But Valentine kind of likes Nelly, and he’s determined to show her that some things are worth giving up total independence for…and love just happens to be one of them.

Ten years have passed since Sisters and Lovers, and Beverly, now 39, is engaged to Julian, a man her family and friends agree is the epitome of a great catch: he's gorgeous, loyal, trustworthy, successful, and very much in love with her. Since this is Beverly's third engagement in the past five years, after breaking off the previous two at the last moment, everyone's happy that she's finally settling down. For Beverly and Julian, nothing could be better than being in love and planning their wedding. That is until Beverly's oldest sister's marriage falls apart and dampens the mood of what should have been the happiest time in Beverly's life. Now, second-guessing her impending nuptials, Beverly is forced to wonder if marriage really works. Will she stick it out? Or will her fears cloud her judgment once again?

Delia Ephron brings her trademark wit and effervescent prose to a series of unforgettable, moving and provocative essays. The emotional lynchpin is the author's stirring, eloquent response to the death of Nora Ephron, her older sister and frequent writing companion. In 'Sister', she deftly captures the love, rivalry, respect and intimacy that made up her relationship with her sister in a way that is at once deeply personal and comfortingly universal. Other essays in the collection run the gamut from a hysterical piece about love and the movies - how romantic comedies completely destroyed her twenties - to the joy of girlfriends and best friendship, the magical madness and miracle of dogs, keen-eyed observations about urban survival, and a serious and affecting memoir of life with her mother - growing up the child of alcoholics. Ephron's sparkling wit and humanity is present on every emotionally resonant page.

Fowler's Concise Dictionary of Modern English Usage is an invaluable quick-reference work, providing clear, practical and up-to-date guidance on questions of grammar, spelling, style, and word choice. Jeremy Butterfield has judiciously revised the text to reflect the English usage practices and concerns of the 21st century.

Paula, Penny, Pebbles... 3 sisters, 3 lives, 1 problem! Paula wants out of her marriage of convenience! And she will do anything to accomplisg it! Her solution...Set her husband up with a woman who can step into her shoes and raise her son, so she can whisk off to be with her longtime lover! The problem...Her husband has no idea! If you have something to do, this book will prevent that! Impossible to put down! So get ready! Paula wants out! Period! But getting out isn't so easy when you have a toddler and a husband who don't deserve the betrayal! But Paula is knee deep in betrayal. And getting out is her only option. She comes up with a plan that blows the lid off of her secret and sets forth a chain of events that could tear her family apart and destroy what little is left of her relationship with her sisters. Her sister Pebbles is living her best life. One call from her long lost sister, sends her running to her aid. But Paula doesn't tell the whole story, and Pebbles scrambles to help her. Only to find out that the betrayal included her! There are many dark secrets. Many untold truths. And the biggest shocking secret of all will nearly destroy Pebbles. Read along in this forbidden romance tale of one sister's unconventional way to end her marriage. A story shrouded in secrets, lies, deceit, sex and selfish agendas. An intense page-turner! See what can happen when a man is caught between three sisters with a unforgiven things and plenty of pain. A well-written story with strong characters. Get ready!

Professor Lévi-Strauss’s first major work, Les Structures élémentaires de la Parenté, has acquired a classic reputation since its original publication in 1949; and it has become the constant focus of academic debate about central theoretical concerns in social anthropology. It is, however, a long and difficult book for many students to read in French, and its arguments have consequently become known, even among professional anthropologists, largely through critical analysis. It was republished in a revised French edition in 1967 with a new foreword by the author, and it is this text with his further emendations that has been used in this translation. Lévi-Strauss applies his intellectual powers to the perennial problem of incest, which he elucidates by means of the concept of exchange as formulated by Marcel Mauss in his famous analysis of the gift (Essai sur le don, 1925). He distinguishes two elementary modes of exchange which govern not only the conventional variety of goods and services but also the transfer of women in marriage: these are “restricted” and “generalized” exchange. With a mass of ethnographic evidence he demonstrates how the formidable intricacy of marriage customs, comprising moral and jural ideas and institutions (which appear to be essentially arbitrary), can be seen as local and historical rules of exchange. Charles Lévi-Strauss traces these rules throughout a vast range of simple societies, chiefly in Australia and mainland Southeast Asia but also in the Americas, in Oceania, and in other parts of the world. To this survey he adds two extended sections on the great civilizations of China and India. He continues with a briefer consideration of the passage from elementary to complex structures, with particular reference to African societies, and concludes with a stimulating chapter on the principles of kinship, exchange as the universal basis for marriage prohibitions, and the formal relations between the sexes as part of a universe of communication. Although much of the work is technical, consisting of detailed analyses of types of social organization with which social anthropologists will be most familiar, it also contains much that will be of interest to psychologists, linguists, and philosophers, and to all who are interested in the possibility and the technique of the structural analysis of human activity. After the successes, moreover, of Lévi-Strauss’s subsequent books—notably Structural Anthropology, Tristes Tropiques, Totemism, and The Savage Mind—this new edition of the work which founded his present outstanding reputation will have additional value as a further means of contact with one of the original minds of this century. The translation has been made by James Harle Bell and John Richard von Sturmer, of the University of New England, Australia, and by Rodney Needham, of the University of Oxford. Dr. Needham also acted as general editor and supplied the work with a new general index. He is the translator of Lévi-Strauss’s Le Totemisme aujourd’hui and author of Structure and Sentiment (1962) and numerous papers which have contributed to the recognition of Professor Lévi-Strauss’s work in the English-speaking world.

GOLD MEDALIST OF FOREWORD REVIEWS' 2015 INDIEFAB AWARDS IN WOMEN'S STUDIES What's wrong with black women? Not a damned thing! The Sisters Are Alright exposes anti–black-woman propaganda and shows how real black women are pushing back against distorted cartoon versions of themselves. When African women arrived on American shores, the three-headed hydra—servile Mammy, angry Sapphire, and lascivious Jezebel—followed close behind. In the '60s, the Matriarch, the willfully unmarried baby machine leeching off the state, joined them. These stereotypes persist to this day through newspaper headlines, Sunday sermons, social media memes, cable punditry, government policies, and hit song lyrics. Emancipation may have happened more than 150 years ago, but America still won't let a sister be free from this coven of caricatures. Tamara Winfrey Harris delves into marriage, motherhood, health, sexuality, beauty, and more, taking sharp aim at pervasive stereotypes about black women. She counters warped prejudices with the straight-up truth about being a black woman in America. “We have facets like diamonds,” she writes. “The trouble is the people who refuse to see us sparkling.”