Exploring the role of legal discourse in shaping sexual experience, sexual expression, and sexual identity this book focuses on three topics: anti-gay hate crime laws, same-sex sexual harassment, and same-sex marriage.

A mysterious tale-within-a-tale of family secrets by the most prominent Syrian author working today The world is so strange, The strangest things are the stories you overhear. When a hapless bureaucrat finds himself stranded in the countryside during a raging storm, he seeks refuge in a grand yet isolated mansion, inhabited by only an elderly gentleman and his unwelcoming servant. The tale of family secrets he encounters while sheltering there begins with a faded photograph in yellowed newspaper, of a beautiful woman stepping off a train at Aleppo station many years ago. It transports him to Syria's golden age, to the heart of the mysterious, unconventional banat al-ishreh – the infamous women who live, dance and play music together – and into a tangled web of forbidden love. Nihad Sirees was born in Aleppo, Syria in 1950. After working as an engineer, he became an acclaimed novelist, playwright and screenwriter, but found himself under increasing surveillance and pressure from the Syrian government. In 2012, he left for Egypt and now lives and works in exile. Pushkin Press also publish The Silence and the Roar, banned in Syria, and his first novel to be published in English. He now lives in Berlin, Germany.

In States of Passion: Law, Identity and the Social Construction of Desire, Professor Yvonne Zylan explores the role of legal discourse in shaping sexual experience, sexual expression, and sexual identity. The book focuses on three topics: anti-gay hate crime laws, same-sex sexual harassment, and same-sex marriage, examining how sexuality is socially constructed through the institutionally-specific production of legal discourse. States of Passion argues that law's power to authorize specific discourses and practices of love, desire, hatred, fear, and vulnerability remain grounded in the powerful discourses and institutional practices that mark law as dispassionate, cerebral, and fundamentally procedural. States of Passion contends that those states of passion we experience in our daily lives as particularly significant-to our sense of self, to our collective and social identities, and to our ideas about the body and its dictates-increasingly have as much to do with the state as they do with passion.

Kate is only eighteen when she meets Tom Harper, one of America's biggest pro-football stars. They share an idyllic and glamorous first love. But the bullet that suddenly ends Tom's career also ends their life together. A failed suicide attempt will leave him mentally and physically disabled forever. Kate will be left alone, heartbroken, and pregnant with their son. Soon she will have another chance at love, but it will mean learning to let go of the past and learning to trust again.

"A gripping and unsettling new novel by the award-winning author of The Loney that asks how much we owe to tradition, and how far we will go to preserve it"--

In a mix of story and history, we follow the lives of artists Romy March and Augustine Marks.