The Conditions of Paradise: Our First Time

The Conditions of Paradise: Our First Time
Author: Akiko Morishima
Publisher: Seven Seas Entertainment
Total Pages: 156
Release: 2020-11-10
Genre: Comics & Graphic Novels
ISBN: 1645057119

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!

The Conditions of Paradise

The Conditions of Paradise
Author: Akiko Morishima
Publisher: Seven Seas Entertainment
Total Pages: 152
Release: 2020-03-24
Genre: Comics & Graphic Novels
ISBN: 1645057100

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?

Paradise Kiss

Paradise Kiss
Author: Ai Yazawa
Publisher: Vertical Inc
Total Pages: 860
Release: 2021-01-12
Genre: Comics & Graphic Novels
ISBN: 1647290546

Wildly-popular artist Ai Yazawa’s beloved fashion-centric manga, Paradise Kiss, is back in a glamorous omnibus edition to celebrate 20 years since the manga began serialization. Follow Yukari’s through-the-looking-glass journey as she is drawn into the world of fashion by a group of passionate, young aesthetes who are determined to make their couture label a success, with Yukari as their muse...

This Side of Paradise

This Side of Paradise
Author: F. Scott Fitzgerald
Publisher: The Floating Press
Total Pages: 503
Release: 2009-04-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1775414833

This Side of Paradise is a novel about post-World War I youth and their morality. Amory Blaine is a young Princeton University student with an attractive face and an interest in literature. His greed and desire for social status warp the theme of love weaving through the story.

Paradise

Paradise
Author: Toni Morrison
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 338
Release: 2014-03-11
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0804169888

The acclaimed Nobel Prize winner challenges our most fiercely held beliefs as she weaves folklore and history, memory and myth into an unforgettable meditation on race, religion, gender, and a far-off past that is ever present—in prose that soars with the rhythms, grandeur, and tragic arc of an epic poem. “They shoot the white girl first. With the rest they can take their time.” So begins Toni Morrison’s Paradise, which opens with a horrifying scene of mass violence and chronicles its genesis in an all-black small town in rural Oklahoma. Founded by the descendants of freed slaves and survivors in exodus from a hostile world, the patriarchal community of Ruby is built on righteousness, rigidly enforced moral law, and fear. But seventeen miles away, another group of exiles has gathered in a promised land of their own. And it is upon these women in flight from death and despair that nine male citizens of Ruby will lay their pain, their terror, and their murderous rage. “A fascinating story, wonderfully detailed. . . . The town is the stage for a profound and provocative debate.” —Los Angeles Times

To Paradise

To Paradise
Author: Hanya Yanagihara
Publisher: Anchor
Total Pages: 720
Release: 2022-01-11
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0385547943

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • From the award-winning, best-selling author of the classic A Little Life—a bold, brilliant novel spanning three centuries and three different versions of the American experiment, about lovers, family, loss and the elusive promise of utopia. A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: VOGUE • ESQUIRE • NPR • GOODREADS To Paradise is a fin de siècle novel of marvelous literary effect, but above all it is a work of emotional genius. The great power of this remarkable novel is driven by Yanagihara’s understanding of the aching desire to protect those we love—partners, lovers, children, friends, family, and even our fellow citizens—and the pain that ensues when we cannot. In an alternate version of 1893 America, New York is part of the Free States, where people may live and love whomever they please (or so it seems). The fragile young scion of a distinguished family resists betrothal to a worthy suitor, drawn to a charming music teacher of no means. In a 1993 Manhattan besieged by the AIDS epidemic, a young Hawaiian man lives with his much older, wealthier partner, hiding his troubled childhood and the fate of his father. And in 2093, in a world riven by plagues and governed by totalitarian rule, a powerful scientist’s damaged granddaughter tries to navigate life without him—and solve the mystery of her husband’s disappearances. These three sections comprise an ingenious symphony, as recurring notes and themes deepen and enrich one another: A townhouse in Washington Square Park in Greenwich Village; illness, and treatments that come at a terrible cost; wealth and squalor; the weak and the strong; race; the definition of family, and of nationhood; the dangerous righteousness of the powerful, and of revolutionaries; the longing to find a place in an earthly paradise, and the gradual realization that it can’t exist. What unites not just the characters, but these Americas, are their reckonings with the qualities that make us human: Fear. Love. Shame. Need. Loneliness.

Gates of Paradise

Gates of Paradise
Author: V.C. Andrews
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 454
Release: 2009-11-24
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1439187762

Now a major Lifetime movie event, from New York Times bestselling author and literary phenomenon V.C. Andrews (Flowers in the Attic, My Sweet Audrina) comes the fourth installment in the classic story of the Casteel family saga. Stunned by tragedy, a young woman finds herself desperate and alone, and clinging to the frailest of dreams. Can Heaven’s daughter find the inner strength to survive? The car crash that killed Heaven and Logan left Annie Casteel Stonewall orphaned and crippled. Whisked off to Farthinggale Manor by the possessive Tony Tatterton, Annie pines for her lost family, but especially for Luke, her half-brother. Friend of her childhood, her fantasy prince, her loving confidante…without the warm glow of Luke’s love, she is lost in the shadows of despair. When Annie discovers Troy’s cottage hidden in Farthinggale’s woods, the mystery of her past deepens. And even as she yearns to see Luke again, her hopes and dreams are darkened by the sinister Casteel spell…treacherous, powerful, and evil.

28 Paradises

28 Paradises
Author: Patrick Modiano
Publisher: David Zwirner Books
Total Pages: 81
Release: 2019-05-21
Genre: Poetry
ISBN: 164423002X

Published in English for the first time, 28 Paradises is the marriage of prose and painting by Nobel-prize winning author Patrick Modiano and his partner, the illustrator Dominique Zehrfuss. 28 Paradises is a rare book: it reveals not only the individual talents of the authors, Modiano and Zehrfuss, but also the depth of the couple’s creative union. Sensitively translated into English for the first time by Damion Searls, 28 Paradises captures the exquisite sadness of waking from a beautiful dream. There are twenty-eight dreams in this book, or perhaps one dream in twenty-eight parts—visions of paradise imagined by Zehrfuss during a time of deep sadness. Captured first in Zehrfuss’s brightly colored gouaches, each paradise was then refashioned as a poem by Modiano. Zehrfuss’s paintings are Edens in miniature, and rather than describe them outright, Modiano dreams himself into these reveries in quiet, understated verse. The reader enters this shared realm in an experience less like paging through a book and more like slipping into a shared world. These paradises are wishes for moments when a painting, or a poem, or a lover—perhaps they are not so different—relieves the loneliness of being human. As Modiano writes with a touch of wistfulness, “The Lilliputian painted her paradises / And I / Next to her / Wrote a poem.” A pure example of ekphrastic writing—poetry inspired by paintings—this book shows how writing and visual art can together create a unique emotional experience. First published by Editions de l’Olivier/ Le Seuil in 2005

What Strange Paradise

What Strange Paradise
Author: Omar El Akkad
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 256
Release: 2021-07-20
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0525657916

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR • From the widely acclaimed, bestselling author of American War—a beautifully written, unrelentingly dramatic, and profoundly moving novel that looks at the global refugee crisis through the eyes of a child. "Told from the point of view of two children, on the ground and at sea, the story so astutely unpacks the us-versus-them dynamics of our divided world that it deserves to be an instant classic." —The New York Times Book Review More bodies have washed up on the shores of a small island. Another overfilled, ill-equipped, dilapidated ship has sunk under the weight of its too many passengers: Syrians, Ethiopians, Egyptians, Lebanese, Palestinians, all of them desperate to escape untenable lives back in their homelands. But miraculously, someone has survived the passage: nine-year-old Amir, a Syrian boy who is soon rescued by Vänna. Vänna is a teenage girl, who, despite being native to the island, experiences her own sense of homelessness in a place and among people she has come to disdain. And though Vänna and Amir are complete strangers, though they don’t speak a common language, Vänna is determined to do whatever it takes to save the boy. In alternating chapters, we learn about Amir’s life and how he came to be on the boat, and we follow him and the girl as they make their way toward safety. What Strange Paradise is the story of two children finding their way through a hostile world. But it is also a story of empathy and indifference, of hope and despair—and about the way each of those things can blind us to reality.