The Man Who Wrote Dirty Books

An author of racy novels heads to picturesque Vermont to finish his manuscript—but finds his retreat less than peaceful—in this “bright, slapstick comedy” (The New York Times). Told through a sequence of exchanged letters, this comic novel introduces softcore pornographer “Guy LaDouche” as he heads to the wilderness in the hope of solitude and concentration to write his next book under a looming deadline. Instead of peace, he finds harassment and distraction—from his publisher, his old girlfriend, and an angry father convinced that LaDouche’s last novel, featuring a genuine nymphomaniac, was based on the man’s daughter. Soon, the author also finds his quiet getaway plan beset by a lawsuit and investigation by the FBI and local sheriff. Clever, satirical, and at times over-the-top absurd, The Man Who Wrote Dirty Books has been delighting readers since its first publication in 1964. “A very funny tale. . . . It would not be quite true to report that The Man Who Wrote Dirty Books contains no word capable of bringing the blush of shame to the cheek of modesty, but it is perfectly true that the thing is neither a dirty book nor about them.” —The Atlantic

In a recent sale catalog, one bookseller apologized for the condition of a sixteenth-century volume as "rather soiled by use." When the book was displayed the next year, the exhibition catalogue described it as "well and piously used [with] marginal notations in an Elizabethan hand [that] bring to life an early and earnest owner"; and the book's buyer, for his part, considered it to be "enlivened by the marginal notes and comments." For this collector, as for an increasing number of cultural historians and historians of the book, a marked-up copy was more interesting than one in pristine condition. William H. Sherman recovers a culture that took the phrase "mark my words" quite literally. Books from the first two centuries of printing are full of marginalia and other signs of engagement and use, such as customized bindings, traces of food and drink, penmanship exercises, and doodles. These marks offer a vast archive of information about the lives of books and their place in the lives of their readers. Based on a survey of thousands of early printed books, Used Books describes what readers wrote in and around their books and what we can learn from these marks by using the tools of archaeologists as well as historians and literary critics. The chapters address the place of book-marking in schools and churches, the use of the "manicule" (the ubiquitous hand-with-pointing-finger symbol), the role played by women in information management, the extraordinary commonplace book used for nearly sixty years by Renaissance England's greatest lawyer-statesman, and the attitudes toward annotated books among collectors and librarians from the Middle Ages to the present. This wide-ranging, learned, and often surprising book will make the marks of Renaissance readers more visible and legible to scholars, collectors, and bibliophiles.

I might be young, but I know what I want in life: to be a published author. I always said I'd do whatever it takes, but when my agent sets me up to ghostwrite for a well known "romance" author, I'm hesitant. Not just because he's way older than me. Not just because he's the biggest jerk I've ever met. Not just because he's crazy good looking (and he is.) But because I've read his books... all of them. When he finds out he asks me for my favorite scene. It's a dangerous road to go down, these kind of dirty talks, because we're about to spend a LOT of time together working alone in his penthouse. At the rate things are heating up, though, we might not get any work done at all.

In late 2008, as the world's economy crumbles and Barack Obama ascends to the White House, the remarkably unremarkable Milton Ontario - not to be confused with Milton, Ontario - leaves his parents' basement in Middle-of-Nowhere, Saskatchewan, and sets forth to find fame, fortune, and love in the Euro-lite electric sexuality of Montreal; to bask in the endless twenty-something Millennial adolescence of the Plateau; to escape the infinite flatness of Saskatchewan and find his messiah - Leonard Cohen. Hilariously ironic and irreverent, in Dirty Birds, Morgan Murray generates a quest novel for the twenty-first century-a coming-of-age, rom-com, crime-farce thriller-where a hero's greatest foe is his own crippling mediocrity as he seeks purpose in art, money, power, crime, and sleeping in all day.

Winner, Louise de Kiriline Lawrence Award for Nonfiction Lands of Lost Borders meets The Electric Woman in this vibrant coming-of-age memoir about a young woman's fierce, filthy, exhausting, and joyous experience working at a wilderness lodge. When Anna Maxymiw accepts a summer job as a housekeeper at a fishing lodge in Northern Ontario, she has little idea what to expect. At twenty-three, she has decided to step away from her master's degree and city life to board a floatplane bound for the remote boreal forest. For sixty-seven days, Anna will be working and living alongside twelve strangers. Together this group of young men and women will keep the lodge running. While the fishing guides head out on the water with the fishermen who are the lodge's guests, the women stay on land to clean and serve. Against the backdrop of a vast lake, wild storms, and hot days and eerily still nights, Anna encounters bears, bugs, and the lore surrounding the lake's legendary pike. As the summer progresses, complex (and sometimes fraught) bonds form between the men and women who work at the lodge, the ownership of the lodge changes hands, and tensions build. And Anna notices a shift in her outlook, too: she finds herself letting go of fears and insecurities and welcoming surprises and possibilities, both good and bad, with a willingness to be changed by them. Warm, funny, vulnerable, and wise, Dirty Work offers a singular perspective on the age-old impulse to leave familiar surroundings behind. This memoir is for anyone who has ever felt the urge to test themselves and wondered how they'd fare and who they'd be when they come out on the other side.

“Fascinating, profane . . . One of the most original and realistic depictions of the sex lives of young people to come around in a long time” (LA Times), from bestselling, award-winning Daniel Handler. Cole is a boy in high school. He runs cross country, he sketches, he jokes around with friends. But none of this quite matters next to the allure of sex. "Let me put it this way," he says. "Draw a number line, with zero is, you never think about sex and ten is, it's all you think about, and while you are drawing the line, I am thinking about sex." Cole fantasizes about whomever he's looking at. He consumes and shares pornography. And he sleeps with a lot of girls, which is beginning to earn him a not-quite-savory reputation around school. This leaves him adrift with only his best friend for company, and then something startling starts to happen between them that might be what he's been after all this time--and then he meets Grisaille. All the Dirty Parts is an unblinking take on teenage desire in a culture of unrelenting explicitness and shunted communication, where sex feels like love, but no one knows what love feels like. With short chapters in the style of Jenny Offill or Mary Robison, Daniel Handler gives us a tender, brutal, funny, intoxicating portrait of an age when the lens of sex tilts the world. "There are love stories galore," Cole tells us. "This isn't that. The story I'm typing is all the dirty parts."

Once upon a time, I was a princess in a tower. One night, and my entire life went up in flames. All because of him. Jafar. As my world burned down around me, he offered me a choice. Walk away with nothing but my freedom… Or rise to his challenge and win my fortune back. I bargained. I lost. Now Jafar owns me, body and soul. Even as my mind rails against his rules, my body loves the punishments he deals out when I break them. But a gilded cage is still a prison, I’ll do anything to obtain my freedom. Even betray the man I’m falling for. In DESPERATE MEASURES, you’ll find: -> Enemies to lovers -> Captive Heroine -> Kinky Roleplay -> Daddy/baby girl -> Alpha hero