This compelling novel follows four women as they learn to balance children, estranged husbands, boyfriends, and problems at work through their faith in God. Michelle, Tonya, Mrs. Judson, and Miz Ida. African-American, white, rich, poor -- they seemingly have nothing in common. Yet every day they face the complex realities of twenty-first-century urban life as they try to balance their needs with their belief in God. Through the course of a year, these women must come to terms with the past, discover their true identities, and recognize the unexpected miracles that reveal God's all-encompassing love. These four women entertain us and invite us to join in their lives. As they welcome us, they also introduce us to the men in their lives. The men play supporting roles, adding color and zest to the lives of the Cover Girls. Bishop Jakes knows the struggles real women encounter and the losses that make it difficult to face the future. He brings compassionate insight and deep wisdom to this novel and proves that he is not only a gifted preacher, but a born storyteller.

What should Lolita look like? The question has dogged book-cover designers since 1955, when Lolita was first published in a plain green wrapper. The heroine of Vladimir Nabokov's classic novel has often been shown as a teenage seductress in heart-shaped glasses--a deceptive image that misreads the book but has seeped deep into our cultural life, from fashion to film. Lolita - The Story of a Cover Girl: Vladimir Nabokov's Novel in Art and Design reconsiders the cover of Lolita. Eighty renowned graphic designers and illustrators (including Paula Scher, Jessica Hische, Jessica Helfand, and Peter Mendelsund) offer their own takes on the book's jacket, while graphic-design critics and Nabokov scholars survey more than half a century of Lolita covers. You'll also find thoughtful essays from such design luminaries as Mary Gaitskill, Debbie Millman, Michael Bierut, Peter Mendelsund, Jessica Helfand, Alice Twemlow, Johanna Drucker, Leland de la Durantaye, Ellen Pifer, and Stephen Blackwell. Through the lenses of design and literature, Lolita - The Story of a Cover Girl tells the strange design history of one of the most important novels of the 20th century--and offers a new way for thinking visually about difficult books. You'll never look at Lolita the same way again.

She's the host of a wildly popular, top-rated morning show. Bride of a high-society golden boy. A veritable household name. An immigrant rags-to-riches story that's the American dream personified-and so perfect for Hollywood. Men want her. Women wish they could be her. But now Addison is in jail awaiting deportation and her celebrity rating is falling faster than a discount boob job. Maybe the First Lady's personal vendetta is to blame. (Addison insists that the president was pulling her onto his lap when that photo was taken.) Or perhaps everything started to go downhill when she threw exercise equipment at her husband on live TV. (Addison says the jerk had it coming.)

From the Gibson Girl to the flapper, from the vamp to the New Woman, Carolyn Kitch traces mass media images of women to their historical roots on magazine covers, unveiling the origins of gender stereotypes in early-twentieth-century American culture. Kitch examines the years from 1895 to 1930 as a time when the first wave of feminism intersected with the rise of new technologies and media for the reproduction and dissemination of visual images. Access to suffrage, higher education, the professions, and contraception broadened women's opportunities, but the images found on magazine covers emphasized the role of women as consumers: suffrage was reduced to spending, sexuality to sexiness, and a collective women's movement to individual choices of personal style. In the 1920s, Kitch argues, the political prominence of the New Woman dissipated, but her visual image pervaded print media. With seventy-five photographs of cover art by the era's most popular illustrators, The Girl on the Magazine Cover shows how these images created a visual vocabulary for understanding femininity and masculinity, as well as class status. Through this iconic process, magazines helped set cultural norms for women, for men, and for what it meant to be an American, Kitch contends.

From the trailblazing Wonder Woman of the 1940s to edgy, girl-power-driven comics series like Birds of Prey, DC Comics Covergirls takes a look at the female characters of DC Comics throughout the company's history, and features many of DC Comics' iconic comic book covers. Written by comic book writer Louise Simonson, the book examines the evolution of the comic book women of DC Comics: the 1942 introduction of the most famous DC heroine, Wonder Woman, and her various incarnations up to the present; the creation of comic book spin-offs based on characters such as Lois Lane; and the recent wealth of fierce, female character-driven comics such as Supergirl, Birds of Prey, Batgirl, and Catwoman, featuring women who have no trouble being both sexy and strong-willed. Famous featured DC Comics artists include Jim Lee, Alex Ross, Adam Hughes, J. Scott Campbell, Michael Turner, Tim Sale, and Jill Thompson.

Renee hides her life as a fashion model from her boyfriend who hates anything phony.

When struggling Hollywood actor Alex Martin rescues a woman from a mysterious, almost fatal accident, he becomes an instant star and also finds that a murderous cabal is out to kill him, too. His studio assigns some high-powered bodyguards, most notably this book's title character: wiseacre Rachel Dodd, who looks like arm candy and shoots like James Bond.