Meet Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter, in the first novel in the #1 New York Times bestselling series that “blends the genres of romance, horror and adventure with stunning panache”(Diana Gabaldon). Laurell K. Hamilton’s bestselling series has captured readers’ wildest imaginations and addicted them to a seductive world where supernatural hungers collide with the desires of the human heart, starring a heroine like no other... Anita Blake is small, dark, and dangerous. Her turf is the city of St. Louis. Her job: re-animating the dead and killing the undead who take things too far. But when the city’s most powerful vampire asks her to solve a series of vicious slayings, Anita must confront her greatest fear—her undeniable attraction to master vampire Jean-Claude, one of the creatures she is sworn to destroy... “What The Da Vinci Code did for the religious thriller, the Anita Blake series has done for the vampire novel.”—USA Today

"Avidly Reads Guilty Pleasures reclaims the femme fictions dismissed as "trash" to celebrate the surprisingly cathartic pleasures of domination, privilege, and the material trappings of patriarchal culture"--

Guilty pleasures in one’s reading habits are nothing new. Late-nineteenth-century American literary culture even championed the idea that popular novels need not be great. Best-selling novels arrived in the public sphere as at once beloved and contested objects, an ambivalence that reflected and informed America’s cultural insecurity. This became a matter of nationhood as well as aesthetics: the amateurism of popular narratives resonated with the discourse of new nationhood. In Guilty Pleasures, Hugh McIntosh examines reactions to best-selling fiction in the United States from 1850 to 1920, including reader response to such best-sellers as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Ben Hur, and Trilby as well as fictional representations—from Trollope to Baldwin—of American culture’s lack of artistic greatness. Drawing on a transatlantic archive of contemporary criticism, urban display, parody, and advertising, Guilty Pleasures thoroughly documents how the conflicted attitude toward popular novels shaped these ephemeral modes of response. Paying close attention to this material history of novel reading, McIntosh reveals how popular fiction’s unique status as socially saturating and aesthetically questionable inspired public reflection on what it meant to belong to a flawed national community.

Using detailed studies of stars such as Mae West, Joan Crawford and Madonna, Guilty Pleasures examines the tradition of feminist camp - a female form of aestheticism related to masquerade and rooted in burlesque, parallel but different to gay male camp.

Sofia always thought she got lucky in love. After marrying her college sweetheart and having three children, life was good. But when her husband of fifteen years came home and announced he'd fallen in love with a 25-year-old fitness model, her world shattered around her. To add insult to injury, she only had thirty days to move out.Broke and disheartened, Sofia scrambled to find an affordable home for her and her children. Just as she was about to give up hope, a rude stranger in a coffee shop gave her a tip that saved her from moving in with her parents. Overwhelmed with gratitude, she kissed the rude but thoughtful man before rushing out of the coffee shop. Santiago had always been the hottest guy in the room, and he had the ego to go with it. But that was before¿ Now he had a hideous scar that ran down his face and no filter over what came out of his mouth. He spent his days hiding from the world. It wasn't until that fateful day at the coffee shop that things changed. The sadness in her eyes called to his damaged heart. He never expected a simple cup of coffee would change everything. That a kiss from a sad stranger would turn his world upside down. He quickly realized one kiss wasn't enough, and he became determined to find this woman with the sad eyes and broken heart. When Sofia and Santiago run into each other again, would their last impressions hold a candle to the chemistry they now felt for each other? Would they be able to get past their own issues and meddling ex's to be together? Would it be possible for two broken people to love again?

Few people associate law books with humor. Yet the legal world--in particular the American legal system--is itself frequently funny. Indeed, jokes about the profession are staples of American comedy. And there is actually humor within the world of law too: both lawyers and judges occasionally strive to be funny to deal with the drudgery of their duties. Just as importantly, though, our legal system is a strong regulator of humor. It encourages some types of humor while muzzling or punishing others. In a sense, law and humor engage a two-way feedback loop: humor provides the raw material for legal regulation and legal regulation inspires humor. In Guilty Pleasures, legal scholar Laura Little provides a multi-faceted account of American law and humor, looking at constraints on humor (and humor's effect on law), humor about law, and humor in law. In addition to interspersing amusing episodes from the legal world throughout the book, the book contains 75 New Yorker cartoons about lawyers and a preface by Bob Mankoff, the cartoon editor for the New Yorker.

For scholars invested in supporting or challenging dominant ideologies, the beauty of literature seemed frivolous, even complicit with social iniquities. Suspicion of aesthetics became a way to establish the rigor of one’s thought and the purity of one’s politics. Yet aesthetic pleasure never disappeared, Timothy Aubrey writes. It went underground.