Dear Diary Does This Cancer Make My Ass Look Fat A Heartfelt Memoir With A Pinch Of Sarcasm

What, you've never seen someone dressed as a vampire in the chemo ward? At thirty-six, Kimberly lived a blissfully carefree existence. Her biggest worry revolved around running out of hot sauce or coffee. Then she got "the news." Ovarian cancer. Stage Three. Months of chemo. Major surgery. And a slew of uncertainty about her future. But rather than accept her diagnosis with a sense of defeat, Kimberly chose to combat the darkness with laughter, costumes, colorful wigs, and positivity. As she put it, "You can't be scared of chemo when you're wearing a coconut bra."Kimberly dishes out every hairy detail about her baldness, breakdowns, and breakthroughs - and shows that a little tumor humor is just what the doctor ordered.

The groundbreaking novel from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Pastoral that originally propelled its author to literary stardom: told in a continuous monologue from patient to psychoanalyst, this masterpiece draws us into the turbulent mind of one lust-ridden young Jewish bachelor named Alexander Portnoy. "Deliciously funny...absurd and exuberant, wild and uproarious...a brilliantly vivid reading experience." —The New York Times Book Review "Touching as well as hilariously lewd.... Roth is vibrantly talented." —New York Review of Books Portnoy's Complaint n. [after Alexander Portnoy (1933- )] A disorder in which strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature. Spielvogel says: 'Acts of exhibitionism, voyeurism, fetishism, auto-eroticism and oral coitus are plentiful; as a consequence of the patient's "morality," however, neither fantasy nor act issues in genuine sexual gratification, but rather in overriding feelings of shame and the dread of retribution, particularly in the form of castration.' (Spielvogel, O. "The Puzzled Penis," Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, Vol. XXIV, p. 909.) It is believed by Spielvogel that many of the symptoms can be traced to the bonds obtaining in the mother-child relationship.

First published in Germany in 1929, The End and the Beginning is a lively personal memoir of a vanished world and of a rebellious, high-spirited young woman's struggle to achieve independence. Born in 1883 into a distinguished and wealthy aristocratic family of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, Hermynia Zur Muhlen spent much of her childhood travelling in Europe and North Africa with her diplomat father. After five years on her German husband's estate in czarist Russia she broke with both her family and her husband and set out on a precarious career as a professional writer committed to socialism. Besides translating many leading contemporary authors, notably Upton Sinclair, into German, she herself published an impressive number of politically engaged novels, detective stories, short stories, and children's fairy tales. Because of her outspoken opposition to National Socialism, she had to flee her native Austria in 1938 and seek refuge in England, where she died, virtually penniless, in 1951. This revised and corrected translation of Zur Muhlen's memoir - with extensive notes and an essay on the author by Lionel Gossman - will appeal especially to readers interested in women's history, the Central European aristocratic world that came to an end with the First World War, and the culture and politics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Updated, with new research and over 100 revisions Ten years later, they're still talking about the weather! Kate Fox, the social anthropologist who put the quirks and hidden conditions of the English under a microscope, is back with more biting insights about the nature of Englishness. This updated and revised edition of Watching the English - which over the last decade has become the unofficial guidebook to the English national character - features new and fresh insights on the unwritten rules and foibles of "squaddies," bikers, horse-riders, and more. Fox revisits a strange and fascinating culture, governed by complex sets of unspoken rules and bizarre codes of behavior. She demystifies the peculiar cultural rules that baffle us: the rules of weather-speak. The ironic-gnome rule. The reflex apology rule. The paranoid pantomime rule. Class anxiety tests. The roots of English self-mockery and many more. An international bestseller, Watching the English is a biting, affectionate, insightful and often hilarious look at the English and their society.

MACHINE OF DEATH tells thirty-four different stories about people who know how they will die. Prepare to have your tears jerked, your spine tingled, your funny bone tickled, your mind blown, your pulse quickened, or your heart warmed. Or better yet, simply prepare to be surprised. Because even when people do have perfect knowledge of the future, there's no telling exactly how things will turn out.

Finding balance in life is a goal many of us strive to achieve. Whether it's through a healthy diet, exercise regimen, state of mind, relationship, or other activity (or all of the above), we spend our days trying to be, and become, our best selves. But what happens when all that focus starts to dominate our lives? When our desire for "perfect health" trumps everything else, perhaps without us even realizing it? What happens when our solution starts becoming the problem? These are questions that author and popular blogger Jordan Younger faced when she decided that her extreme, plant-based lifestyle just wasn't working in favor of her health anymore--and questions that you may be facing too. In Breaking Vegan, Jordan reveals how obsessive "healthy" dieting eventually led her to a diagnosis of orthorexia, or a focus on healthy food that involves other emotional factors and ultimately becomes dysfunctional, even dangerous. In candid detail, Jordan shares what it was like to leave veganism, the downfall of her desire to achieve nutritional perfection, and how she ultimately found her way to recovery. In addition to this, Jordan outlines an "anti-diet," whole-foods-based eating plan featuring more than 25 recipes to help inspire others to find similar balance in their own lives. Breaking Vegan is about tolerance and forgiveness. And ultimately, forging one's own path toward happiness.

A surprisingly open memoir co-authored by the married duo of a world class oncologist and a cancer survivor about love, pain, hope, strength and resilience while navigating the overwhelming breast cancer advocacy movement. Off Our Chests recounts the story of Liza and John's experience with her diagnosis and treatment. Written in alternating voices, Liza details her treatment, the complex decisions she had to make throughout her course of chemotherapy and radiation, including clinical trial participation and an elective double mastectomy, the added complexity of being treated at the cancer center of which John was the chief of hematology and oncology, and the emotional impact of knowing she may die as a young woman with young children. John, who lost his own mother to cancer at the age of 13, provides an inside look into the world of cancer care and research, but also the perspective of someone who understands the medicine but who was unprepared for assuming the role of caregiver and worried husband. John adds insights into his world of running the clinical operations of the cancer center where Liza would receive her care, commentary on the breast cancer machine, the need for clinical research, the high cost of cancer care, and an easy to understand explanation of the clinical and scientific background of oncology. While they both felt that they were already expert commentators on their own "Cancer Channel" during the course of Liza's illness, they both came to realize how little understanding they truly had of what a cancer diagnosis does to the patient, caregivers, children, family members, and friends. Liza and John share their most intimate thoughts, including many that were previously unsaid--even between the two of them. Both gain an understanding of the other's life, a deeper appreciation of what it means to be a cancer patient, and of the emotional strains of being an oncologist where so many of the patients die on their watch.

By the New York Times bestselling author of The Bone Clocks and Cloud Atlas | Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize Selected by Time as One of the Ten Best Books of the Year | A New York Times Notable Book | Named One of the Best Books of the Year by The Washington Post Book World, The Christian Science Monitor, Rocky Mountain News, and Kirkus Reviews | A Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist | Winner of the ALA Alex Award | Finalist for the Costa Novel Award From award-winning writer David Mitchell comes a sinewy, meditative novel of boyhood on the cusp of adulthood and the old on the cusp of the new. Black Swan Green tracks a single year in what is, for thirteen-year-old Jason Taylor, the sleepiest village in muddiest Worcestershire in a dying Cold War England, 1982. But the thirteen chapters, each a short story in its own right, create an exquisitely observed world that is anything but sleepy. A world of Kissingeresque realpolitik enacted in boys’ games on a frozen lake; of “nightcreeping” through the summer backyards of strangers; of the tabloid-fueled thrills of the Falklands War and its human toll; of the cruel, luscious Dawn Madden and her power-hungry boyfriend, Ross Wilcox; of a certain Madame Eva van Outryve de Crommelynck, an elderly bohemian emigré who is both more and less than she appears; of Jason’s search to replace his dead grandfather’s irreplaceable smashed watch before the crime is discovered; of first cigarettes, first kisses, first Duran Duran LPs, and first deaths; of Margaret Thatcher’s recession; of Gypsies camping in the woods and the hysteria they inspire; and, even closer to home, of a slow-motion divorce in four seasons. Pointed, funny, profound, left-field, elegiac, and painted with the stuff of life, Black Swan Green is David Mitchell’s subtlest and most effective achievement to date. Praise for Black Swan Green “[David Mitchell has created] one of the most endearing, smart, and funny young narrators ever to rise up from the pages of a novel. . . . The always fresh and brilliant writing will carry readers back to their own childhoods. . . . This enchanting novel makes us remember exactly what it was like.”—The Boston Globe “[David Mitchell is a] prodigiously daring and imaginative young writer. . . . As in the works of Thomas Pynchon and Herman Melville, one feels the roof of the narrative lifted off and oneself in thrall.”—Time