The story of how Victoria’s Secret skyrocketed from a tiny chain of boutiques to a retail phenomenon with more than $8 billion in annual sales at its peak—all while defining an impossible beauty standard for generations of American women—before the brand’s tight grip on the industry finally slipped Victoria’s Secret is one of the most influential and polarizing brands to ever infiltrate the psyche of the American consumer. Almost right at its start in the late 1970s, the company developed a cult following for its glamorous catalogs. Back then, shoppers had few alternatives to the stodgy department stores that sold most of the nation’s intimate apparel. By 1982, the founders of Victoria’s Secret avoided bankruptcy by selling to Les Wexner, the fast-fashion pioneer behind the Limited, whose empire of mall brands would go on to dominate American retail for forty years. Wexner turned Victoria’s Secret into a multibillion-dollar business, and the brand’s cultural influence soared thanks to its airbrushed advertisements and annual televised fashion show, which drew millions of viewers each year. Its supermodel spokeswomen, the sweet but sultry Angels, personified a new American beauty standard. But as our definition of beauty expanded, Victoria’s Secret failed to evolve and reached a crisis point. Meanwhile, Wexner became increasingly known for his complicated relationship with sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, his former financial adviser and confidant. Selling Sexy expertly draws from sources within Victoria’s Secret and across the industry to examine the unprecedented rise of one of the most innovative brands in retail history—a brand that today, under new ownership, is desperately trying to seduce shoppers again.

Bestselling author David Shields analyzed over a decade's worth of front-page war photographs fromTheNew York Timesand came to a shocking conclusion: the photo-editing process ofthe "paper of record,"by way of pretty, heroic, and lavishly aesthetic image selection, pullsthe woolover the eyes of its readers; Shields forces us to face not only the the media's complicity in dubious and catastrophic military campaigns but our own as well.This powerful media mouthpiece, the mightyTimes, far from being a check on governmental power, is in reality a massive amplifier for its dark forces by virtue of the way it aestheticizeswarfare. Anyone baffled by the willful American involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan can't help but see in this book how eagerly and invariably theTimesled the way in making the case for these wars through the manipulation of its visuals. Shields forces the reader to weigh the consequences of our own passivity in the face of these images' opiatic numbing. The photographs gathered inWar Is Beautiful, often beautiful and always artful, are filters of reality rather than the documentary journalism they purport to be.

The Impressive Jewels Book Club is more than a literary discussion group. The woman share their inner most secrets, thoughts and desires about their favorite subject, “Men.” The fact of how to get one, keep one, and how to get over one and then their thoughts about the book of the month. Estelle Marie Fountanie, a real estate executive, has been told she’s too mean to get a man. She has quite a few awakening moments, after experiencing the perils of internet dating, but she finally meets “The Man.” During a book club meeting one rainy afternoon she tells the girls she’ll bring back some sunshine from Jamaica. “This story is witty and full of life. The characters represent a sense of realism as their relationship of sisterhood and support evolve for each other.” Cassis A. Levy, Contributing Author “Violets, Inspirational Poems by Women of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc.”

Soulful and with the sweetest taboo voice, STARR is an exceptional songbird, born to sing. A star rising in the Philadelphia music scene, she is always fresh with new lyrics as the microphone fits comfortably in her, coffee brown hands. Full lips part to expose her pearly whites as, her voice releases influences of Jazz, Soul, Gospel, R&B, Hip - Hop and Neo Soul. Rofiki, STARRS manager and Rastafarian boyfriend of ten years, has been away for a few weeks in New York City, supposedly putting together a new deal for her. But upon his return, STARR discovers that Sneaky Rofiki believes, her style and genre of music isnt what the music industry seeks. Unknown to her, he is investing, his interest on a new artist, a new freaky, a new Kandi Gyal. Bluesy with the bluest eyes, a U.S. Marine returning from war and the new owner of a coffee shop. Where he notices the intense discussion that left STARR ready to battle. He comes to the rescue or is she just in time to save him? The beat goes on with BearLove, the bad-est and wicked-est drummer internationally that inspires, STARR to sing and groove to new tunes.

Hired to manage a neglected bookshop, Anna works to escape her demanding stepkids and hyper Dalmatian and transforms the shop, her customers, and her employer through her love of classics, which impart wisdom when trouble arrives.

In Puta Life, Juana María Rodríguez probes the ways that sexual labor and Latina sexuality become visual phenomena. Drawing on state archives, illustrated biographies, documentary films, photojournalistic essays, graphic novels, and digital spaces, she focuses on the figure of the puta—the whore, that phantasmatic figure of Latinized feminine excess. Rodríguez’s eclectic archive features the faces and stories of women whose lives have been mediated by sex work's stigmatization and criminalization—washerwomen and masked wrestlers, porn stars and sexiles. Rodríguez examines how visual tropes of racial and sexual deviance expose feminine subjects to misogyny and violence, attuning our gaze to how visual documentation shapes perceptions of sexual labor. Throughout this poignant and personal text, Rodríguez brings the language of affect and aesthetics to bear upon understandings of gender, age, race, sexuality, labor, disability, and migration. Highlighting the criminalization and stigmatization that surrounds sex work, she lingers on those traces of felt possibility that might inspire more ethical forms of relation and care.