Designer Minami Kusaga’s first project with his new employer Tomato Design is a big one—planning the interiors for a successful chain of hotels, owned by the mysterious and attractive Shinya Asakura. Tomato Design’s continued success rides on the rookie Minami satisfying his client, but just as Asakura’s hotels aren’t your average homes away from home—they’re love hotels, where couples can enjoy themselves in luxurious privacy—Shinya Asakura is definitely not your ordinary entrepreneur. He’s not just a fan of Minami’s work, he’s after Minami himself! Asakura’s aggressive seduction tactics paint a portrait of a man who has—and gets—everything he wants in life. Minami is overwhelmed and confused by his attentions, and unable to resist them. Suddenly every phone call and every meeting with Asakura draws Minami deeper into his web of control, leaving Minami torn between the new feelings Asakura inspires in him and his loathing of the hotelier’s selfish, relentless behavior—but is he really as awful as he seems? Can Minami keep his client happy while staying out of his bed? Can he resist Asakura’s charms—or does he even want to?

In Dreadful Desires Charlie Yi Zhang examines how the Chinese state deploys affective notions of love to regulate the population and secure China’s place in the global economy. Zhang shows how the state frames love as a set of desires that encompass heteronormative intimacy, familial and communal attachment, upward mobility, and private property ownership. These desires—as circulated in performance in the nationalistic ceremony, same-sex romantic fan fiction, the wildly popular reality television dating show If You Are the One, and the cult of patriarchal personality around Xi Jinping—are explicitly based in oppressive systems of gender, class, and sexuality. Zhang contends that such desires connect love to economic survival and gender normativity in ways that underwrite Chinese neoliberalism at the expense of individual flourishing. By outlining how state-framed forms of love create desires that cannot be fulfilled, Zhang places China at the forefront of using affective attachments to nation, leader, and family in the global shifts toward exploitation and authoritarianism.

The Condition of the Working Class in England is one of the best-known works of Friedrich Engels. Originally written in German as Die Lage der arbeitenden Klasse in England, it is a study of the working class in Victorian England. It was also Engels' first book, written during his stay in Manchester from 1842 to 1844. Manchester was then at the very heart of the Industrial Revolution, and Engels compiled his study from his own observations and detailed contemporary reports. Engels argues that the Industrial Revolution made workers worse off. He shows, for example, that in large industrial cities mortality from disease, as well as death-rates for workers were higher than in the countryside. In cities like Manchester and Liverpool mortality from smallpox, measles, scarlet fever and whooping cough was four times as high as in the surrounding countryside, and mortality from convulsions was ten times as high as in the countryside. The overall death-rate in Manchester and Liverpool was significantly higher than the national average (one in 32.72 and one in 31.90 and even one in 29.90, compared with one in 45 or one in 46). An interesting example shows the increase in the overall death-rates in the industrial town of Carlisle where before the introduction of mills (1779–1787), 4,408 out of 10,000 children died before reaching the age of five, and after their introduction the figure rose to 4,738. Before the introduction of mills, 1,006 out of 10,000 adults died before reaching 39 years old, and after their introduction the death rate rose to 1,261 out of 10,000.

In his young life, Takeyuki has never really known hardship. The youngest son of a wealthy family, he has never had any difficulty getting anything he desired. Now, though, Takeyuki is enjoying his last month of freedom before he begins working at his father’s import company in Tokyo, and he has decided to spend that time with his brother and his sister-in-law in Cassina, a small country in the Middle East. Little does Takeyuki know that his prideful manner will soon land him in hot water! In Cassina, some dangers are very real and some people are not who they seem. For example, who exactly is the charming, majestic man who won’t stop staring at Takeyuki during their flight to Cassina, and why do his blue eyes make Takeyuki feel like his chest will burst?

When Tsukasa meets a mysterious man in a hotel lobby, and ends up spending a maddening night of pleasure with him. Afterwards, he accepts to meet him again in the same room the following week, despite the fact he doesn't even know his name. As their secret encounters continue, he finds himself falling in love and is worried that it may not last. Simultaneously, he's scouted by a business-talent head-hunter and receives an interesting work offer. But when he goes to meet them... his new boss is none other than his secret lover!

Taboo upon taboo is what Hikaru and Shima have to overcome if they want to pursue their feelings for one another. Uikaru, a second year high school student, is obsessed with Shima, a male teacher. Surprisingly, Shima is not averse to the boy's affections. He even convinces Hikaru to study hard so that when he graduates, they would openly become lovers. However, Amamiya, an ex-lover of Shima, steps into the picture and tries to win him back. Will Hikaru and Shima's passion prove great enough to hurdle all the obstacles stacked against them?

Shortlisted for the Penderyn Music Book Prize Sticky Fingers is the story of how one man's ego and ambition captured the 1960s youth culture of rock and roll and turned it into a hothouse of fame, power, politics, and riches that would last for fifty years. Drawn from dozens of hours of interviews with Jann Wenner, who granted Joe Hagan exclusive access to his vast personal archive, this biography reveals how Wenner manufactured an unforgettable cultural mythology in story and image every other week for five decades. Hagan captures in stunning detail the extraordi­nary stories behind Rolling Stone, the magazine that reinvented youth culture, and marketed the libertine world of late-sixties San Francisco. He chronicles Wenner's marksmanship as an editor, his instinctive un­derstanding of the zeitgeist, his endless pursuit of fame and power and his capacity for betrayal that would earn him as many enemies as friends. Featuring on-the-record interviews with Mick Jagger, Bruce Springsteen, Paul McCartney, Elton John, Keith Richards, Pete Townsend, Yoko Ono, Billy Joel, Tom Wolfe, Cameron Crowe, Lorne Michaels, David Geffen, Dan Aykroyd, Bette Midler, and many others, Hagan describes Wenner with intimacy, nuance, and complexity. Like a real life Clash of the Titans, STICKY FINGERS captures the spirit of the age and paints an unforgettable portrait of one of the most signif­icant cultural forces of our time.