“A big, rich, satisfying, old-fashioned hunk of a book . . . part comedy, part tragedy, and thoroughly satisfying.” —Chicago Tribune Book World A Texas family as big and brash as their home state, the Renshaws are united by their fierce loyalty to one another and their ruthlessness in destroying anyone who threatens their interests. When the Renshaw matriarch, Edwina, takes to her deathbed, her ten children are summoned home to stand vigil. Past humiliations and long-simmering resentments soon boil to the surface—a son’s forbidden love affair destroyed by his imperious mother, a daughter’s dutiful attentions greeted with nothing but disdain. But the most painful wound of all is the absence of Kyle, Edwina’s favorite son and the only member of the family to leave Texas. What drove him away, and can his siblings get him home in time to see his mother before she dies? As the ties that bind the indomitable Renshaws stretch and fray, Proud Flesh builds to a stunning climax of passion and violence. It is an unforgettable story, and one of William Humphrey’s finest. This ebook features an illustrated biography of William Humphrey including rare photos form the author’s estate.

Mann's photographs of her husband, Larry, who has late-onset muscular dystrophy.

Hidden jealousies erupt, old secrets emerge, old wounds reopen. Passion, violence, and devastating love explode as a proud family gather to await the death of the family's matriarch.

Providing an alphabetical listing of sexual language and locution in 16th and 17th-century English, this book draws especially on the more immediate literary modes: the theatre, broadside ballads, newsbooks and pamphlets. The aim is to assist the reader of Shakespearean and Stuart literature to identify metaphors and elucidate meanings; and more broadly, to chart, through illustrative quotation, shifting and recurrent linguistic patterns. Linguistic habit is closely bound up with the ideas and assumptions of a period, and the figurative language of sexuality across this period is highly illuminating of socio-cultural change as well as linguistic development. Thus the entries offer as much to those concerned with social history and the history of ideas as to the reader of Shakespeare or Dryden.