For millennia, scientists thought women were inside-out versions of men, and male anxiety about female sexuality generated ludicrous ideas and perpetuated inaccurate information. The Sweetness of Venus is a provocative, straight-talking history that exposes the denial, misunderstanding, brutality, and lies endured by this taboo part of human anatomy.Much of the story of the clitoris has been defined by those who discovered and mapped her. However, even after the true anatomy of the clitoris was finally fully mapped with 3D imaging in 2005, it still hardly gets a mention in America's bestselling teen sex education book for girls, and no mention at all in the parallel book for boys. Equality when it comes to sex has not been achieved.This book challenges Western culture's definition of female sexuality and will have you laughing out loud, shouting "clitoris!" with abandon, and championing sex equality and pleasure for all.

The award-winning, New York Times bestselling literary masterpiece of Shirley Hazzard—the story of two beautiful orphan sisters whose fates are as moving and wonderful, and yet as predestined, as the transits of the planets themselves A Penguin Classic Considered "one of the great English-language novels of the twentieth century" (The Paris Review), The Transit of Venus follows Caroline and Grace Bell as they leave Australia to begin a new life in post-war England. From Sydney to London, New York, and Stockholm, and from the 1950s to the 1980s, the two sisters experience seduction and abandonment, marriage and widowhood, love and betrayal. With exquisite, breathtaking prose, Australian novelist Shirley Hazzard tells the story of the displacements and absurdities of modern life. The result is at once an intricately plotted Greek tragedy, a sweeping family saga, and a desperate love story.

It is Paris, 1815. An extraordinarily shaped South African girl known as the Hottentot Venus, dressed only in feathers and beads, swings from a crystal chandelier in the duchess of Berry’s ballroom. Below her, the audience shouts insults and pornographic obscenities. Among these spectators is Napoleon’s physician and the most famous naturalist in Europe, the Baron George Cuvier, whose encounter with her will inspire a theory of race that will change European science forever. Evoking the grand tradition of such “monster” tales as Frankenstein and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Barbara Chase Riboud, prize-winning author of the classic Sally Hemings, again gives voice to an “invisible” of history. In this powerful saga, Sarah Baartman, for more than 200 years known only as the mysterious lady in the glass cage, comes vividly and unforgettably to life.

Alessandra Cecchi is not quite fifteen when her father, a prosperous cloth merchant, brings a young painter back from northern Europe to decorate the chapel walls in the family’s Florentine palazzo. A child of the Renaissance, with a precocious mind and a talent for drawing, Alessandra is intoxicated by the painter’s abilities. But their burgeoning relationship is interrupted when Alessandra’s parents arrange her marriage to a wealthy, much older man. Meanwhile, Florence is changing, increasingly subject to the growing suppression imposed by the fundamentalist monk Savonarola, who is seizing religious and political control. Alessandra and her native city are caught between the Medici state, with its love of luxury, learning, and dazzling art, and the hellfire preaching and increasing violence of Savonarola’s reactionary followers. Played out against this turbulent backdrop, Alessandra’s married life is a misery, except for the surprising freedom it allows her to pursue her powerful attraction to the young painter and his art. The Birth of Venus is a tour de force, the first historical novel from one of Britain’s most innovative writers of literary suspense. It brings alive the history of Florence at its most dramatic period, telling a compulsively absorbing story of love, art, religion, and power through the passionate voice of Alessandra, a heroine with the same vibrancy of spirit as her beloved city.

A novel of extraordinary power from a writer to watch. In a small flat in London, a young man is turning to gold. But before he dies, before his skin and eyes and tongue harden into a golden death mask, he wants to share the amazing story of his life. Born and raised on the barren Orkney Islands off the coast of Scotland, his childhood is a brutal one, devoid of tenderness. It is a miracle when he meets Tracy, falls in love, and discovers his true gift: the merest touch of him is enough to induce visions of angels and orchids. The physical heights he is able to reach-and to which he can bring others-go far beyond any normal sensual pleasure. Armed with this inexplicable talent, he makes his way to London, where he falls in with a group of teens forced to make a living on the street. Luke Sutherland's modern-day myth about the power of love veers from stratosphere to gutter, from visions of heaven to the all-too-mortal yearning for even one glimpse of it. With Venus as a Boy Sutherland has written a moving, poetic novel that manages to imbue the harsh realities of life on the street with a mesmerizing and ethereal beauty.

When did my life start resembling a Hallmark movie? I suppose it all started when my charming fiancé turned out to be anything but, and I decided I wanted to push the reset button on my life. So, I packed up my business and moved to a small town in the Texas Hill Country, complete with the cast of small-town characters you’d expect and the ridiculously sexy new veterinarian. Being the new kids in town, Cal and I kept finding ourselves thrown togetherand even though men were the absolute last thing on my mind... one thing led to another. Now someone’s threatening my business, but I’m not the same woman I was when I arrived. And I’m ready to fight for what’s mine. Each book in the Konigsburg series is STANDALONE: * Venus in Blue Jeans * Wedding Bell Blues * Be My Baby * Long Time Gone * Brand New Me * Don’t Forget Me * Fearless Love * Hungry Heart