My name is Sophie. This book is about me. It tells the heart-stoppingly riveting story of my first love. And also of my second. And, okay, my third love, too. It's not that I'm boy crazy. It's just that even though I'm almost fifteen I've been having sort of a hard time trying to figure out the difference between love and lust. It's like my mind and my body and my heart just don't seem to be able to agree on anything.

The last thing I want is to share my beautiful office with an uptight, unfriendly new English professor. I don't care if he's incredibly hot. He's still the worst office mate in the world. We're stuck together for a year, and that might be too long for me to resist discovering what's hiding beneath his buttoned-up appearance. Office Mate is the second book in the Milford College series, novellas about the faculty and staff of a small liberal arts college.

From the author of the New York Times Bestseller Crenshaw How can you take the guy your best friend loves . . . when your best friend’s going to die? Alison Chapman has always believed she’d fall in love hard. And she does—with Sam Cody, a new guy with a gorgeous face and brooding eyes, a guy who’s impossible to resist. When Sam asks her to the Valentine’s Day dance, Alison is elated . . . until she finds out that her best friend, Isabella Cates-Lopez, has fallen for Sam, too . . . until she finds out that Isabella is dying. Now Alison wants Isabella’s last days to be her happiest ever—even if she and Sam have to hide their love. Even if, by sharing Sam, Alison risks losing him forever.

Capitalist Nigger is an explosive and jarring indictment of the black race. The book asserts that the Negroid race, as naturally endowed as any other, is culpably a non-productive race, a consumer race that depends on other communities for its culture, its language, its feeding and its clothing. Despite enormous natural resources, blacks are economic slaves because they lack the 'devil-may-care' attitude and the 'killer instinct' of the Caucasian, as well as the spider web mentality of the Asian. A Capitalist Nigger must embody ruthlessness in pursuit of excellence in his drive towards achieving the goal of becoming an economic warrior. In putting forward the idea of the Capitalist Nigger, Chika Onyeani charts a road to success whereby black economic warriors employ the 'Spider Web Doctrine' – discipline, self-reliance, ruthlessness – to escape from their victim mentality. Born in Nigeria, Chika Onyeani is a journalist, editor and former diplomat.

An engrossing autobiographical exploration of black masculinity as a mode of racial and verbal performance. In Your Average Nigga, Vershawn Ashanti Young disputes the belief that speaking Standard English and giving up Black English Vernacular helps black students succeed academically. Young argues that this assumption not only exaggerates the differences between two compatible varieties of English but forces black males to choose between an education and their masculinity, by choosing to act either white or black. As one would expect from a scholar who is subject to the very circumstances he studies, Young shares his own experiences as he exposes the factors that make black racial identity irreconcilable with literacy for blacks, especially black males. Drawing on a range of interdisciplinary scholarship in performance theory and African American literary and cultural studies, Young shows that the linguistic conflict that exists between black and white language styles harms black students from the inner city the most. If these students choose to speak Standard English they risk alienating themselves from their families and communities, and if they choose to retain their customary speech and behavior they may isolate themselves from mainstream society. Young argues that this conflict leaves blacks in the impossible position of either trying to be white or forever struggling to prove that they are black enough. For men, this also becomes an endless struggle to prove that they are masculine enough. Young calls this constant effort to display proper masculine and racial identity the burden of racial performance. Ultimately, Young argues that racial and verbal performances are a burden because they cannot reduce the causes or effects of racism, nor can they denaturalize supposedly fixed identity categories, as many theorists contend. On the contrary, racial and verbal performances only reinscribe the essentialism that they are believed to subvert. Scholars and teachers of rhetoric, performance studies, and African American studies will enjoy this insightful volume.

“Fiendishly inventive.” —The Wall Street Journal Chengdu, China: The vibrant capital of Sichuan Province is suddenly held hostage when a shocking manifesto is released by an anonymous vigilante known as Eumenides. It is a bold declaration of war against a corrupt legal system, with Eumenides acting as judge and executioner. The public starts nominating potential targets, and before long hundreds of names are added to his kill list. Eumenides's cunning game has only just begun. First, he publishes a “death notice,” announcing his next target, the crimes for which the victim will be punished, and the date of the execution. The note is a deeply personal taunt to the police. Everyone knows who is going to die and when it's going to happen, but the police fail to stop the attack. The 4/18 Task Force, an elite group of detectives and specialists, is assembled to catch Eumenides before he strikes again. In the process, they discover alarming connections to an eighteen-year-old cold case, and they find out that some members of the team have much to hide.

Bislama is the national language of Vanuatu, the world's most linguistically diverse nation with at least 80 actively spoken Oceanic languages used by about 200,000 people. Bislama began as a plantation pidgin based on English in the nineteenth century, but it has since developed into a unique language with a grammar and vocabulary very different from English. It is one of very few national languages for which there is no readily available reference grammar. This book aims to fill this gap by providing an extensive account of the grammar of Bislama as it is used by ordinary Ni-Vanuatu. It does not, therefore, aim to describe any kind of artificial written norm but sets out to capture a range of different kinds of ways that Ni-Vanuatu will say things in various contexts, both written and spoken, formal and informal. The thrust of this volume is to show that Bislama has a grammar—an unfamiliar concept for those educated in Vanuatu. It also shows that Bislama is a language of considerable complexity, which will come as a surprise to many of its users, who have been taught to view their language as somehow "simple" and even "deficient."