The Objects Of Affection

Objects of affection recovers the emotional attraction of the medieval book through an engagement with a fifteenth-century literary collection known as Oxford, Bodleian Library Manuscript Ashmole 61. Exploring how the inhabitants of the book's pages - human and nonhuman, tangible and intangible - collaborate with its readers then and now, this book addresses the manuscript's material appeal in the ways it binds itself to different cultural, historical and material environments. In doing so it traces the affective literacy training that the manuscript provided its late-medieval English household, whose diverse inhabitants are incorporated into the ecology of the book itself as it fashions spiritually generous and socially mindful household members.

Literary Nonfiction. Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough arrived in the United States from Poland in 1984, bringing memories of life under a totalitarian regime, where the personal was always political. In essay after essay in OBJECTS OF AFFECTION, her remarkable debut, Hryniewicz-Yarbrough shows the immigrant's double perspective, exploring a "bi-polar" world of displacement and rootlessness, geography and memory, individual and family history, always with an acute awareness of losses and gains that accompany adaptation to a new language and culture and the creation of a new identity.

In this book, pre-eminent semiotician Arthur Asa Berger decodes the meanings of common objects of consumption and their perceived 'sacredness' in consumerist cultures. Using semiotic theory, consumer culture is dissected in new and fascinating ways.

Struggling to start over after a failed relationship and her son's entry into drug rehab, a struggling Lucy Bloom tackles an unexpectedly challenging job clearing the cluttered home of a reclusive artist and hoarder who hides an astonishing secret.

George and Nina seem like the perfect couple. They share a cozy, cluttered Brooklyn apartment, a taste for impromptu tuna casserole dinners, and a devotion to ballroom dancing lessons at Arthur Murray. They love each other. There's only one hitch: George is gay. And when Nina announces she's pregnant, things get especially complicated. Howard -- Nina's overbearing boyfriend and the baby's father -- wants marriage. Nina wants independence. George will do anything for a little unqualified affection, but is he ready to become an unwed surrogate dad? A touching and hilarious novel about love, friendship, and the many ways of making a family.

Recounts how the author and her sisters inherited furniture and other artifacts collected over the course of centuries by ancestors including several who served in the military, describing the stories behind various pieces of interest and what they revealed about past family members.

"This thrilling, emotional, and tautly paced novel will appeal to fans of The Book Thief (2006)."—Booklist, STARRED Review Her family is priceless. So is the art she's stealing to support them. Sophie Porter is the last person in the world you'd expect to be stealing Renaissance masterpieces—and that's exactly why she's so good at it. Slipping objects out of her husband's office at the Philadelphia Museum of Art satisfies something deep inside, during a time in her life when satisfactions are few and far between. Selling the treasures also happens to keep their house out of foreclosure — a house that means everything to Sophie. But the FBI is sniffing around, and Sophie is close to destroying the very life she's working so hard to build. She knows she should give up her thieving ways. But she may no longer be in control. The Objects of Her Affection is a riveting story about the realities of motherhood, the perils of secrecy, and the art of appraising the real treasures in our lives. "Sonya Cobb combines the rarified atmosphere of museum scholarship, illegal art trafficking, and the sticky desperation of young motherhood to craft a superbly written thriller."—Karen Engelmann, author of The Stockholm Octavo