The Conditions Of Paradise

From first love to mature romance, a heart-tugging collection of yuri stories by the superstar manga artist behind Yuri Bear Storm and Hanjuku Joshi! (And don't miss the two follow-up volumes!) Sarina and her best friend Sumi are super close. Sumi often crashes at Sarina’s place, and sometimes the two even make out a little bit. But Sarina figures a romantic relationship could never work between them. Sarina is an organized office worker, while Sumi is a nomadic freelance writer. Can the two find a way to make their very different lifestyles mesh?

Sumi has long carried a torch for her best friend Sarina, but she's made peace with the fact that Sarina will never love her back. But as the two women start to blur the lines and kiss, will they go from being friends to lovers? Read their tale and many more sweet yuri love stories in The Conditions of Paradise: Our First Time!

In this story of romance and sisterhood, Sophie learns that the inheritance of a lifetime sometimes comes with a catch. When Sophie’s uncle leaves her a castle on the Italian Riviera in his will, she can’t believe her luck. The catch? She and her estranged sister, Rachel, must live there together for three months in order to inherit it. A cheating Italian ex soon learns of Sophie’s return and wants to rekindle their spark, but Sophie realizes that distance does make the heart grow fonder—for her friend back home, Chris, who becomes more to her than just a friend. But does he feel the same? This beautiful story is perfect for fans of Alex Brown and Lucy Coleman.

He collected beautiful things. Rare things. Ripped them out of their natural environment and preserved them in all of their dead splendor. The problem was I wasn't beautiful. I was all of the hideous and ugly realities of the world packaged into one broken human being. He came to kill me. That was his business. Death. He ripped me out of my natural environment, the prison I'd created, and locked me away with all of his beautiful dead things. I hated him. I still hate him. But if I was given the choice and the ability to leave this cage, come back to life, I'd stay dead. In all of my hideous splendor. Because my murderer can only possess dead things. And I can only be possessed by someone more broken and ugly than me.

“Electrifying…sparkles with Manger’s song and poetry, and is brilliantly layered with literary and folkloric references.” — Tablet “There is something joyous about Manger’s playful language.” — The Jewish Chronicle The raucously witty Yiddish classic about a Jewish Paradise afflicted by very human temptations and pains — a delightful new translation perfect for fans of Michael Chabon Witty, playful and slyly profound, this story of a young angel expelled from Paradise is the only novel by one of the great Yiddish writers, which was written just before the outbreak of World War II. As a result of a crafty trick, the expelled angel retains the memory of his previous life when he’s born as a Yiddish-fluent baby mortal on Earth. The humans around him plead for details of that other realm, but the Paradise of his mischievous stories is far from their expectations: a world of drunken angels, lewd patriarchs and the very same divisions and temptations that shape the human world. Published here in a lively new translation by Robert Adler Peckerar, The Book of Paradise is a comic masterpiece from poet-satirist Itzik Manger that irreverently blurs the boundaries between ancient and modern and sacred and profane, where the shtetl is heaven, and heaven is the shtetl.

Chronicles the author's quest to find out about her ancestry through DNA testing, sharing findings, stories, and the controveries around Latino identity.

This book concerns the use of the drug qat in North Yemen (Yemen Arab Republic), a country lying on the southwestern corner of the Arabian Peninsula. However, because this substance is so interwoven into the fabric of society and culture, it is also necessarily about Yemen itself. The history and culture of South Arabia are still relatively unknown to the rest of the world, and the drug qat, so widely used there, is equally unknown. Thus, the material we present here should be of interest to all of those concerned with drug use, those who wish to understand more about Yemen and the Middle East, and to the Yemenis themselves. Another purpose is to develop some general understandings about sub stance uses and their effects which are less clouded by the mass hysteria and political considerations which often obscure drug issues in our own society. Examination of drug-use patterns in a country where millions of people are users on a regular basis, and where there has been familiarity with the drug for several hundred years, offers an opportunity to achieve perspectives not possible in countries with different attitudes and without such histories. I am not sanguine about the prospects of our abilities to learn from others or from the past, but I do not think we should abandon hope of doing so.

Read the book that Ali Standish (author of The Ethan I Was Before) calls "a heartwarming story" and Melissa Roske (author of Kat Greene Comes Clean) calls "a joyful, heartfelt debut!" Thirteen-year-old Jamie Bunn made a mistake at the end of the school year. A big one. And every kid in her middle school knows all about it. Now she has to spend her summer vacation volunteering at the local library—as punishment. What a waste of a summer! Or so she thinks. A Kind of Paradise is an unforgettable story about the power of community, the power of the library, and the power of forgiveness.