Wicked Empress

Empress Bithia indulges herself with as many men as it takes to satisfy her voracious passion. Now that it's time to continue the family line, though, her advisors expect her to submit to one man from a sexually primitive planet. Drahka disobeyed his tribe's strict sexual rules once. The shame still haunts him. He has one unbreakable rule: a man gives, a woman takes. His struggle to learn local customs is complicated by a mentor whose eyes hunger for the empress...and for him. Viltori has tried to teach Drakha that there are many ways to find pleasure, only to be met with resistance. Touching the handsome primitive sharpens his unbearable lust for Bithia, making him wonder if execution wouldn't be a blessing. When Bithia witnesses the results of Viltori's training, she realizes these two men can fill her empty heart, inspiring her to take command of the throne at last. Except those who've held the reins thus far have a sinister reason for keeping Bithia--and her new consorts--in their place.

A biography of Empress Dowager Cixi who ruled over China from 1861 through 1908 that discusses how she rose to power and the challenges she faced as a leader.

Biography of Catherine the Great of Russia.

In Fragments and Assemblages, Arthur Bahr expands the ways in which we interpret medieval manuscripts, examining the formal characteristics of both physical manuscripts and literary works. Specifically, Bahr argues that manuscript compilations from fourteenth-century London reward interpretation as both assemblages and fragments: as meaningfully constructed objects whose forms and textual contents shed light on the city’s literary, social, and political cultures, but also as artifacts whose physical fragmentation invites forms of literary criticism that were unintended by their medieval makers. Such compilations are not simply repositories of data to be used for the reconstruction of the distant past; their physical forms reward literary and aesthetic analysis in their own right. The compilations analyzed reflect the full vibrancy of fourteenth-century London’s literary cultures: the multilingual codices of Edwardian civil servant Andrew Horn and Ricardian poet John Gower, the famous Auchinleck manuscript of texts in Middle English, and Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. By reading these compilations as both formal shapes and historical occurrences, Bahr uncovers neglected literary histories specific to the time and place of their production. The book offers a less empiricist way of interpreting the relationship between textual and physical form that will be of interest to a wide range of literary critics and manuscript scholars.