Remember your very first, very best friend? Remember the feeling of being tucked in at night? Or the loyalty of a chilhood pet? So many kinds of love recreates the discovery of a precious and beautiful world filled with love.

A sharp and entertaining essay collection about the importance of multiple forms of love and friendship in a world designed for couples, from a laser-precise new voice. Sometimes it seems like there are two American creeds, self-reliance and marriage, and neither of them is mine. I experience myself as someone formed and sustained by others' love and patience, by student loans and stipends, by the kindness of strangers. Briallen Hopper's Hard to Love honors the categories of loves and relationships beyond marriage, the ones that are often treated as invisible or seen as secondary--friendships, kinship with adult siblings, care teams that form in times of illness, or various alternative family formations. She also values difficult and amorphous loves like loving a challenging job or inanimate objects that can't love you back. She draws from personal experience, sharing stories about her loving but combative family, the fiercely independent Emerson scholar who pushed her away, and the friends who have become her invented or found family; pop culture touchstones like the Women's March, John Green's The Fault in Our Stars, and the timeless series Cheers; and the work of writers like Joan Didion, Gwendolyn Brooks, Flannery O'Connor, and Herman Melville (Moby-Dick like you've never seen it!). Hard to Love pays homage and attention to unlikely friends and lovers both real and fictional. It is a series of love letters to the meaningful, if underappreciated, forms of intimacy and community that are tricky, tangled, and tough, but ultimately sustaining.

In March 2020, Michael Rosen became unwell. Soon he was struggling to breathe, and he was admitted to hospital with coronavirus. What followed was months on the wards: a month in an induced coma, and weeks of rehab and recovery as the NHS saved his life, and then got him back on his feet. Throughout it all, a notebook lay at the end of Michael's bed, where his nurses wrote him letters of hope and support. And as soon as he was awake, he was ready to start writing his own story. Combining stunning new prose poems by one of Britain's best loved poets and the moving coronavirus diaries of his nurses, and featuring original illustrations by Chris Riddell, this is a beautiful book about love, life and the NHS that celebrates the power of community and the indomitable spirits of the people who keep us well.

Analyzes the feelings and problems involved in different types of human love, including familial affection, friendship, passion, and charity.

Christina Chapman and her husband Cornelius, both past seventy, are "summer people"—people who come to rural New England for the summer months and go home to the city when the cold weather comes. This year, however, Christina and Cornelius have decided to stay on. May Sarton's Willard is a small town in the rocky hills of New Hampshire, a place that attracts "the untameable, the wild, the gentle." As Sarton takes us into the lives of the people who live there, we encounter a rich tapestry of characters and relationships. In the center are the deep, prickly friendship between Christina, an old Bostonian, and Ellen, the daughter of a farmer, and the unfolding process by which Christina and her husband "come into their own" in their marriage and become winter people at last.

The revered author's classic work that examines the four types of human love: affection, friendship, erotic love, and the love of God.? In this work Lewis examines four varieties of love, as approached from the Greek language: storge, the most basic form; philia, the rarest and perhaps most insightful; eros, passionate love; and agape, the love of God, the greatest and least selfish. ?Throughout this compassionate and reasoned study, he encourages readers to open themselves to all forms of love—the key to understanding that brings us closer to God.? "There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable . . . draw nearer to God, not be trying to avoid the sufferings inherent in all loves, but by accepting them and offering them to Him; throwing away all defensive armor. If our hearts need to be broken, and if He chooses this as the way in which they should break, so be it."? In Four Loves, C. S. Lewis explores love to help you · Strengthen your interpersonal relationships · Understand the different between needed pleasures and appreciation pleasures and need-love and gift-love · Care for the people in your life, avoid pitfalls, and improve your relationship God The Four Loves holds a mirror to our current society and leaves no doubt that our modern understanding of love is heavily misunderstood.

A mob boss hires an ex-cop to find his mistress’s killer in “the kind of tight lipped, hard mouthed story . . . which Chandler initiated and which Bogart immortalized” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review). Six months ago, Mitchell Tobin lost his career—and with it, his identity. An honest cop drummed out of the force because of one terrible mistake, Tobin has spent six months watching his savings dwindle and his family fall apart. But no matter how badly he needs work, he doesn’t want anything to do with Ernie Rembeck, a crime boss whose mistress has just turned up dead. The killer can only be someone inside the organization, and Rembeck wants him identified. Tobin agrees, under assurances that nothing illegal will be asked of him, but he soon finds that without a badge, right and wrong are nothing but words. Mitch Tobin is about to take on every heavy in the New York mob scene. He’s finally found a purpose, but his safety is in serious jeopardy.