Once More With Feeling

Calling to mind smart, deadpan and unrepentant novels such as The New Me and My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Sophie McCreesh's distinctive and arresting debut novel is about a young woman veering towards self-destruction. Once More, With Feeling follows Jane, an artist navigating her closest relationships while fixating on her own perceived failures and self-imposed isolation. When Jane receives a student grant to attend a workshop in London, England, she sees the opportunity to leave her tedious life behind and start anew, bringing along her new friend Kitty, who Jane will not admit she has little in common with other than a shared appreciation for boxed wine and various other drugs. In London, Jane struggles to improve both her craft and her mindset while Kitty thrives, and a once exciting trip abroad transforms the already uneven dynamic of their friendship, leaving Jane feeling more withdrawn than ever. As her increasingly destructive behaviour gets in the way of her artistic ambitions, her most important relationships--those with Kitty, her absent lover Richard and a discredited therapist named Anna--begin to deteriorate as Jane starts to examine her growing dependence on substances. Darkly funny, piercing and tender, Once More, With Feeling is a portrait of a detached young woman trapped in the perils of self-loathing and addiction, who is searching for originality in an age of profound social disconnection and anxiety.

The script, behind the scenes notes, color photos, and sheet music for songs from the episode in the television series.

From award-winning author Méira Cook comes a novel exploring the intricacies and interconnected lives of one community in a small and colourful prairie city. After twenty years Max Binder is still in love with his fiery wife, Maggie, and is determined to get her the perfect fortieth birthday gift. But Max’s singular desire — to make his wife happy — leads to an unexpected event that changes the course of his family’s life and touches the people who make up their western prairie city. Set over the course of a single year, Once More With Feeling tells the story of this city through intersecting moments and interconnected lives. The colourful citizens who make up the community are marked by transformation, upheaval, and loss: the worker at a downtown soup kitchen who recognizes a kindred spirit amongst the homeless; the aging sisters who everywhere see the fleeting ghosts of two missing neighbourhood children; a communal voice of mothers anxious for the future of their children in the discomfiting world they inhabit. Award-winning author Méira Cook has crafted a novel that is at once funny, poignant, and yes, full of feeling.

Vicky and Charlie, twenty-somethings, one the son of a vicar, the other the daughter of a much loved Radio 4 and Times columnist, friends for years but never boyfriend/girlfriend, decide to make a hardcore porn movie. Vicky and Charlie are best friends who used to co-review hardcore porn movies. After a year of fat lechers, bored hookers and clunky dialogue, they said, "Hang on, we could make a better film than this ourselves." What was to stop them? Only their conservative families, stammering English reserve, and total lack of experience. They set off at once. This is the extraordinary and hilarious story of their journey from a sofa in North London, through the heart of the sex industry in California, to their own film set in Amsterdam. What happens when a 'nice girl' falls in love with a rent-boy, and a vicar's son attempts to film a gang-bang? Vicky and Charlie learned to see the world through new eyes, and the sex-workers learned how to play cribbage. And together they produced perhaps the most baffling skinflick in history.

Entertaining…utterly engaging…and real. An everyday lesbian world so credible you’ll think you’re eavesdropping. Where you will find the challenges as well as the joys of love and friendship. Where you will find yourself, and the women you know After eight years, Laura’s relationship with Mavis has collapsed, as much from its decreasing weight and passion as from Mavis’s casual infidelity. Taking temporary refuge with close friends Jolly and Wanda, Laura begins to put herself back together, her first step a brief but erotic interlude in Hawaii. But the most healing person she knows seems to be her own solitary self, and the most healing place, her own house. In the meantime, ex-partner Mavis is busy charming other women. But still she is a presence—an intrusion, feels Laura—in Laura’s life, bringing over her newest partners, prevailing upon Laura to widen her horizons, to continue their love as loyal friendship. Then Laura meets appealing, enigmatic Robin… and suddenly finds the possibility of a new relationship. A possibility that intrigues Laura. And completely flabbergasts Mavis…

#1 bestselling phenomenon Nora Roberts, “America’s favorite author” (The New Yorker), orchestrates a reunion between former lovers that hits all the right notes in Once More With Feeling. Celebrated musicians Raven Williams and Brandon Carstairs rose to the top of the charts—and to the front page of the gossip columns—before their relationship imploded. Heartbroken, Raven immersed herself into music, putting her career above life and love. Five years later, Brandon has been hired to score a potential blockbuster musical film—and wants Raven to co-write it with him. And as the melody and rhythm of their work flows, Raven and Brandon embrace the harmony of their hearts...

Hugely enjoyable, long awaited book by top world authority on "Buffy the Vampire Slayer". Buffy is still on screens and on DVD in home television libraries of a wide array of TV watchers and fans. This is also the student text for TV and cultural studies at colleges and universities where Buffy is widely taught. Rhonda Wilcox is a world authority on "Buffy the Vampire Slayer", who has been writing and lecturing about the show since its arrival on our screens. This book is the distillation of this remarkable body of work and thought, a celebration of the series that she proposes is an aesthetic test case for television. Buffy is enduring as art, she argues, by exploring its own possibilities for long-term construction as well as producing individual episodes that are powerful in their own right. She examines therefore the larger patterns that extend through many episodes: the hero myth, the imagery of light, naming symbolism, Spike, sex and redemption, Buffy Summers compared and contrasted with Harry Potter. She then moves in to focus on individual episodes, such as the "Buffy musical Once More, with Feeling", the largely silent Hush and the dream episode "Restless" (T.S. Eliot comes to television). She also examines Buffy's ways of making meaning - from literary narrative and symbolism to visual imagery and sound. Combining great intelligence and wit, written for the wide Buffy readership, this is the worthy companion to the show that has claimed and kept the minds and hearts of watchers worldwide.

"A wonderful voice, fresh and poignant and funny, stingingly real and magically readable." --Anne Rivers Siddons While planning her fifteenth wedding anniversary party, Laura Briggs turns on Donahue to discover her husband confessing his "secret life" to millions of TV viewers. By the first commercial break, Laura decides her marriage is over. Yet her life is just beginning, complete with Wednesday night divorce support groups and a growing anxiety that her son is spending too much time with imaginary superheroes. And when she stumbles upon her ex-husband shopping for sexy underwear (size small), she takes an impulsive trip to Alaska. (Could things get any colder?) The getaway gives her time to stop and smell the . . . moose--and open her eyes to a new man who may well be worth risking her heart for all over again. Cynthia Blair's fresh, witty, heartfelt perspective on the pitfalls and passions of modern womanhood shine in this irrepressible novel of a divorced mother who dares to love . . . once more with feeling.