Madhurima Pandey is twenty-five, single, and gradually coming to terms with the annoying 'you're next' nudges from family and friends. But soon they realize that chances of finding a groom for her are slim-mainly because she's not. At 93 kilos, she knows she isn't the ideal weight for marriage, even if her family believes she's the ideal age. Despite her reservations, the hunt begins, and so does a spree of rejections until Harsh comes along. Madhu cannot believe that a boy with no obvious flaws has agreed to marry her. Low self-esteem makes her suspect he's either impotent or a homosexual, but she doesn't turn down the proposal immediately. A negligible period of courtship and a hurried engagement follow. But does Madhurima really find her happily-ever-after? Or are there more surprises in store? Jovial, witty and unapologetically honest, Madhurima Pandey's story of struggle and survival in the run-up to her D-Day gives you a refreshingly new take on the big fat Indian wedding.

Madhurima Pandey is twenty-five, single, and gradually coming to terms with the annoying 'you're next' nudges from family and friends. But soon they realize that chances of finding a groom for her are slim-mainly because she's not. At 93 kilos, she knows she isn't the ideal weight for marriage, even if her family believes she's the ideal age. Despite her reservations, the hunt begins, and so does a spree of rejections-until Harsh comes along. Madhu cannot believe that a boy with no obvious flaws has agreed to marry her. Low self-esteem makes her suspect he's either impotent or a homosexual, but she doesn't turn down the proposal immediately. A negligible period of courtship and a hurried engagement follow. But does Madhurima really find her happily-ever-after? Or are there more surprises in store? Jovial, witty and unapologetically honest, Madhurima Pandey's story of struggle and survival in the run-up to her D-Day gives you a refreshingly new take on the big fat Indian wedding.

The author of the New York Times bestseller The Idiot Girls’ Action-Adventure Club tackles her biggest challenge yet: grown-up life. In Autobiography of a Fat Bride, Laurie Notaro tries painfully to make the transition from all-night partyer and bar-stool regular to mortgagee with plumbing problems and no air-conditioning. Laurie finds grown-up life just as harrowing as her reckless youth, as she meets Mr. Right, moves in, settles down, and crosses the toe-stubbing threshold of matrimony. From her mother's grade-school warning to avoid kids in tie-dyed shirts because their hippie parents spent their food money on drugs and art supplies; to her night-before-the-wedding panic over whether her religion is the one where you step on the glass; to her unfortunate overpreparation for the mandatory drug-screening urine test at work; to her audition as a Playboy centerfold as research for a newspaper story, Autobiography of a Fat Bride has the same zits-and-all candor and outrageous humor that made Idiot Girls an instant cult phenomenon. In Autobiography of a Fat Bride, Laurie contemplates family, home improvement, and the horrible tyrannies of cosmetic saleswomen. She finds that life doesn't necessarily get any easier as you get older. But it does get funnier.

True, the bride is fat

Flying ghosts, hopping vampires, seductive spirits, tree demons, evil sorcerers, living skeletons, possessed limbs and giant predatory tongues!

THE RUNAWAY INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER “The Bride Stripped Bare shows us the inside–out of marriage, infidelity, obsession and taxi drivers (I may never take a cab ride in London again). . . . Few books can be both dark and light. This one dances on the edge, and sometimes crosses it, with much satisfaction to be had on either side.”— Valerie Frankel, author of The Accidental Virgin An explosive novel of sex, secrecy, and escape. A woman disappears. Her car lies abandoned on a remote bluff; no body is found. Known by her family and friends as quiet and self-contained, she has left behind an incendiary diary chronicling a disturbing journey of sexual awakening. The diary opens on her honeymoon in Morocco: she believes herself to be happy—or happy enough, anyway. Swiftly, this security masquerading as love fractures in an act of massive betrayal, only to propel her into a world of desire and fantasy and recklessness. In need of guidance, she finds an unlikely heroine in the anonymous author of a dusty, rare manuscript. Written by a woman in the 1600s, it is a cry from the heart for women to live and love freely. Emboldened, she allows herself to discover the intoxicating power of knowing what she wants and how to get it. The question is, how long can her soul sustain a perilous double life? Coolly impassioned, Bride Stripped Bare tells shocking truths about love and sex. Couched in a deceptively simple style, its gorgeous, incantatory rhythms will make you question whether it is ever entirely possible to know another person.

From the bestselling author of The Handmaid's Tale and The Testaments—one of Margaret Atwood’s most unforgettable characters lurks at the center of this intricate novel like a spider in a web. The glamorous, irresistible, unscrupulous Zenia is nothing less than a fairy-tale villain in the memories of her former friends. Roz, Charis, and Tony—university classmates decades ago—were reunited at Zenia’s funeral and have met monthly for lunch ever since, obsessively retracing the destructive swath she once cut through their lives. A brilliantly inventive fabulist, Zenia had a talent for exploiting her friends’ weaknesses, wielding intimacy as a weapon and cheating them of money, time, sympathy, and men. But one day, five years after her funeral, they are shocked to catch sight of Zenia: even her death appears to have been yet another fiction. As the three women plot to confront their larger-than-life nemesis, Atwood proves herself a gleefully acute observer of the treacherous shoals of friendship, trust, desire, and power.