Letters Literature

It can't be wrong when it's not hurting anybody - and it feels so good. Now in delicious detail, happy addicts to the solitary vice reveal how, sexually speaking, they take matters into their own hands, whether as a steamy solo performance or a torrid team effort. Share the guilty pleasure with gals and guys, spies and showoffs, fetishists and toy lovers, mile-highers and auto-eroticists. See why in close encounters of the first kind, nobody does it better or hotter than Penthouse. And they're eager to show you how.

My love story all started with a letter. Only it wasn’t from the man I’d eventually fall in love with. It was from his daughter. A sweet little girl named Birdie Maxwell who’d written to the magazine that I worked for. You see, once a year my employer fulfilled a few wishes for readers. Only that column didn’t start up again for months. So I fulfilled some of her wishes myself. It was harmless…so I thought. Until one day I took things too far. While anonymously granting yet another of Birdie’s wishes, I got a look at her father.

The death of one’s spirit should come with a great deal of noise: weeping and wailing, if not thunder or the roar of a fire. Elizabeth could not have imagined a spirit forced into darkness by something so mundane as the scratch of pen on paper. Elizabeth Bennet has been certain of many things in her life: her place in society, the love of her family, her ability to choose her own future, and her ability to accurately judge the character of those she meets. Three days after the Netherfield Ball, a near tragedy shakes that foundation.

The Complete Jane Austen Collection includes all six novels, and Austen's shorter works; Lady Susan, The Watsons, Sandition, and her complete Juvenilia. Jane Austen is famous for her six novels, Sense and Sensibility, Pride and prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion. Her works of romantic fiction, set among the landed gentry, earned her a place as one of the most widely read writers in English literature. Her realism, biting irony and social commentary as well as her acclaimed plots have gained her historical importance among scholars and critics.

When Helene Hanff makes an innocent inquiry about the possibility of purchasing hard-to-find books through Marks and Co., Booksellers, she begins a 20-year love affair with Frank Doel, the proper English bookseller who answers her letter and sends along her first order in the fall of 1949. They are two very unlikely correspondents.

Nicholas Coughlan is twelve years old when his father, an Irish civil servant, announces that God has commanded him to become a painter. He abandons the family and a wife who is driven to despair. Years later, Nicholas’s own civil-service career is disrupted by tragic news: his father has burned down the house, with all his paintings and himself in it. Isabel Gore is the daughter of a poet. She’s a passionate girl, but her brother is the real prodigy, a musician. And yet this family, too, is struck by tragedy: a seizure leaves the boy mute and unable to play.

Kai Cheng Thom grew up a Chinese Canadian transgender girl in a hostile world. As an activist, counselor, conflict mediator, and spiritual healer, she's always pursued the same deeply personal mission: to embrace the revolutionary belief that every human being, no matter how hateful or horrible, is intrinsically sacred. But then Kai Cheng found herself in a crisis of faith, overwhelmed by the violence with which people treated one another, and barely clinging to the values and dreams she'd built her life around: justice, hope, love, and healing.

Juliet Young always writes letters to her mother, a world-traveling photojournalist. Even after her mother's death, she leaves letters at her grave. It's the only way Juliet can cope. Declan Murphy isn't the sort of guy you want to cross. In the midst of his court-ordered community service at the local cemetery, he's trying to escape the demons of his past. When Declan reads a haunting letter left beside a grave, he can't resist writing back. Soon, he's opening up to a perfect stranger, and their connection is immediate.

Burning up with hot love fever? This over-the-counter collection of erotica is the only prescription you need. If you fantasize about the very personal bedside manner of that sexy surgeon, the beautiful patient who's getting drilled in the dentist's chair, or the sweet taste of the nubile candy striper, these masters and mistresses of the healing arts have the Rxxx ready. They guarantee to raise your temperature, make sure that swelling never goes down, and keep the physical therapy so intense you'll be feeling it night after delirious night. Let the healing begin.

Meet Maggie, Eva, and Lisa, founders of The Scarlet Letter Society. Named as such due to their various infidelities, both physical and emotional, the SLS is their refusal to be shamed like Hester Prynne in Nathaniel Hawthorne's classic tale of forbidden longing. Maggie is twice divorced and juggling three lovers - one of whom is her first ex-husband. Eva is trapped in a loveless marriage and has turned to her young intern and a seductive French chef for satisfaction.

A beautiful discovery outside the window of her underwater home prompts the reclusive E. to begin a correspondence with renowned scholar Henerey Clel. The letters they share are filled with passion, at first for their mutual interests, and then, inevitably, for each other. Together, they uncover a mystery from the unknown depths, destined to transform the underwater world they both equally fear and love. But by no mere coincidence, a seaquake destroys E.'s home, and she and Henerey vanish.

Vernell LaQuan Banks and Justyce McAllister grew up a block apart in the Southwest Atlanta neighborhood of Wynwood Heights. Years later, though, Justyce walks the illustrious halls of Yale University...and Quan sits behind bars at the Fulton Regional Youth Detention Center. Through a series of flashbacks, vignettes, and letters to Justyce - the protagonist of Dear Martin - Quan's story takes form.

Letters of Note, the book based on the beloved website of the same name, became an instant classic on publication in 2013, selling hundreds of thousands of copies. This new edition sees the collection of the world's most entertaining, inspiring and unusual letters updated with 14 riveting new missives and a new introduction from curator Shaun Usher.

To eager students of human sexuality in all its wild and amazing forms: Welcome to Penthouse University, the premier center of higher learning in carnal knowledge. It's a place to explore - from making love in the library to steamy oral exams behind closed classroom doors. A place to experiment - with bi-curious coeds in the dorm and nubile sorority sisters at sex toy parties. A place to graduate - to shower room liaisons with the curvy phys ed teacher and thrilling threesomes with the seductive housesitter.

To you, perceptive reader, I bequeath my history....Late one night, exploring her father's library, a young woman finds an ancient book and a cache of yellowing letters. The letters are all addressed to "My dear and unfortunate successor," and they plunge her into a world she never dreamed of-a labyrinth where the secrets of her father's past and her mother's mysterious fate connect to an inconceivable evil hidden in the depths of history.

After disappearing amidst a spray of bullets, antiques dealer Sarah Lester leaves behind no body, only questions. Sarah’s friends are left dealing with the aftermath of her disappearance, including an investigation into the provenance of her antiques, which threatens to crush The Old Curiosity Shop. As Sarah struggles to reunite with her father, she continues the search for her mother, unaware the violent colonial past has followed her home, putting herself, and those she loves in danger.

An inquisitive observer, thoughtful commentator, and assiduous craftsman, Neil Gaiman has long been celebrated for the sharp intellect and startling imagination that informs his fiction. Now The View from the Cheap Seats brings together, for the first time ever, more than 60 works of his outstanding nonfiction on topics and people close to his heart.

Priscilla, Devon, and Bailey haven’t been close in years, but when the sisters are forced to come together to settle their mother’s estate, they discover a secret. In an old trunk, they happen upon ownership papers for a house on the Amalfi Coast, along with a love letter to their mother from an anonymous man, promising to meet her in Italy during the summer of her 65th birthday. Now they’re questioning everything they knew about her history. In order to get answers about the woman they thought they knew, they’ll have to go back to where it all started.

Someone is sending spiteful letters to the people of Peterswood - but who? Fatty, Larry, Pip, Daisy, Bets and Buster the Dog have to find the culprit who is making the villagers so unhappy. But Mr Goon is right on their heels to solve the mystery first!

Correspondence has fallen into our hands that we were not intended to see. Foulgrin, a high-ranking demon, instructs his subordinate how to deceive and destroy Jordan Fletcher and his family. It's like placing a bugging device in hell's war room, where we overhear our enemies assessing our weaknesses and strategizing attack. To win the battle, we must know our God, know ourselves, and know our enemy. Lord Foulgrin's Letters is written to help us become better acquainted with each.