Love is impossible to understand in its entirety, especially when we are in love with someone else. Distant lover is a walk through three stages of love and how we find ourselves trapped in its grip, struggling to make sense of where to go and how to get there.

Set in the Rose City of Portland, Oregon, the All-4-Love series evolves around Alley's wacky relationship toggles and family issues. Sure, typical family problems can be repeated snores when it comes to reading, but I've taken it to wild and crazy heights and it should keep all readers glued to the end. Distant Lover is about protagonist Alley's yearning for someone that seems hard to reel in. He yearns for Lavida Jones, but she is entangled in parenting, job, and ex-fiancé problems. The story opens with Alley being the ultimate, unemployed, and complete loser. Not only is Alley suddenly blessed with finding job security, he meets his distant lover on a bus. Together, Alley and Lavida survive all the wacky challenges: A stalking bum that eventually cleans up his alcoholic behaviors, returns to the bottle, and ends up dead by the end of Distant Lover. The gangster son of Lavida, who threatened to shoot Alley if marriage came up, ends up shot and finds that Jesus is his best friend. The ex-fiancé and part time Jamaican pimp, Robert, ends up the most hated villain you'll ever read about.

Tandi Crawford feels trapped in a sexless, loveless marriage to her husband Jared. She begins to fantasise about a boy she dated when she was seventeen, turning a blind eye to the good man her husband is. She takes her son and flees her marriage, ending up on her father's doorstep - a place she vowed never to return to. Old grudges are ignited and Tandi is forced to send her son home to her husband, becoming trapped in her father's home when the old man has a stroke. Tandi turns to her best friend Evonne for support - but Evonne is after Tandi's husband.

Franz Schubert's song cycles Schone Mullerin and Winterreise are cornerstones of the genre. But as Richard Kramer argues in this book, Schubert envisioned many other songs as components of cyclical arrangements that were never published as such. By carefully studying Schubert's original manuscripts, Kramer recovers some of these "distant cycles" and accounts for idiosyncrasies in the songs which other analyses have failed to explain. Returning the songs to their original keys, Kramer reveals linkages among songs which were often obscured as Schubert readied his compositions for publication. His analysis thus conveys even familiar songs in fresh contexts that will affect performance, interpretation, and criticism. After addressing problems of multiple settings and revisions, Kramer presents a series of briefs for the reconfiguring of sets of songs to poems by Goethe, Rellstab, and Heine. He deconstructs Winterreise, using its convoluted origins to illuminate its textual contradictions. Finally, Kramer scrutinizes settings from the Abendrote cycle (on poems by Friedrich Schlegel) for signs of cyclic process. Probing the farthest reaches of Schubert's engagement with the poetics of lieder, Distant Cycles exposes tensions between Schubert the composer and Schubert the merchant-entrepreneur.

Presents the complete lyrics to over one hundred Motown love songs, grouped into such categories as lessons of love, the joy of love, and love lost, and including "I'll Be There," "My Girl," and "Please Mr. Postman."

Love is impossible to understand in its entirety, especially when we are in love with someone else. Distant lover is a walk through three stages of love and how we find ourselves trapped in its grip, struggling to make sense of where to go and how to get there.