Grass for His Pillow  is the second book in the  Tales of the Otori  series by Lian Hearn. Don't miss the related  series,  The Tale of Shikanoko. Praised for its epic scope and descriptive detail, Across the Nightingale Floor , the first book in the Tales of the Otori series, was an international bestseller and critical success, named by the London Times as "the most compelling novel to have been published this year." With Grass for His Pillow , Book Two, we return to the medieval Japan of Lian Hearn's creation—a land of harsh beauty and deceptive appearances. In a complex social hierarchy, amid dissembling clans and fractured allegiances, there is no place for passionate young love. The orphan Takeo has been condemned to work as an assassin—an enforced occupation that his father sacrificed his own life to escape. Meanwhile, Takeo’s beloved Shirakawa Kaede, heir to the Murayama and alone in the world, must find a way to unify the domain she has inherited, as she fights off the advances of would-be suitors and hopes against fading hope that Takeo will return to her...

Grass for His Pillow  is the second book in the  Tales of the Otori  series by Lian Hearn. Don't miss the related  series,  The Tale of Shikanoko. Praised for its epic scope and descriptive detail, Across the Nightingale Floor , the first book in the Tales of the Otori series, was an international bestseller and critical success, named by the London Times as "the most compelling novel to have been published this year." With Grass for His Pillow , Book Two, we return to the medieval Japan of Lian Hearn's creation—a land of harsh beauty and deceptive appearances. In a complex social hierarchy, amid dissembling clans and fractured allegiances, there is no place for passionate young love. The orphan Takeo has been condemned to work as an assassin—an enforced occupation that his father sacrificed his own life to escape. Meanwhile, Takeo’s beloved Shirakawa Kaede, heir to the Murayama and alone in the world, must find a way to unify the domain she has inherited, as she fights off the advances of would-be suitors and hopes against fading hope that Takeo will return to her...

OLD THOT NEXT DOOR is indeed a long-anticipated ratchet soap opera thriller by bestselling African-American Urban Fiction author QUAN MILLZ.Meet Vernita Ernestine Washington, a feisty 76-year-old woman who doesn’t care what you think about her ways, especially for a woman her age. Yeah, she might be a senior citizen but she’d be the first to tell you AGE AIN'T NOTHING BUT A NUMBER!She’s convinced the honeycomb between her legs doesn’t taste a day older than forty. "Don’t let the gray hairs fool you now!"A retired employee of the Illinois Department of Motor Vehicles, Mrs. Washington runs the mean, cold streets of Chi-town messing with all types of young thugs with multiple felonies. A widow for some time now, Vernita is determined to make up for her stale marriage. However, when a major health scare sets her back, she finds herself losing everything.Reality sets in that her time on Earth is about to come to a close. Now faced with a death sentence, Vernita seeks to live out her remaining days being the biggest old super freak. She gets her mojo back and begins living her life again. But a major, surprising twist will throw her life into more unpredictable chaos.Read more in OLD THOT NEXT DOOR!

OLD THOT NEXT DOOR is indeed a long-anticipated ratchet soap opera thriller by bestselling African-American Urban Fiction author QUAN MILLZ.Meet Vernita Ernestine Washington, a feisty 76-year-old woman who doesn’t care what you think about her ways, especially for a woman her age. Yeah, she might be a senior citizen but she’d be the first to tell you AGE AIN'T NOTHING BUT A NUMBER!She’s convinced the honeycomb between her legs doesn’t taste a day older than forty. "Don’t let the gray hairs fool you now!"A retired employee of the Illinois Department of Motor Vehicles, Mrs. Washington runs the mean, cold streets of Chi-town messing with all types of young thugs with multiple felonies. A widow for some time now, Vernita is determined to make up for her stale marriage. However, when a major health scare sets her back, she finds herself losing everything.Reality sets in that her time on Earth is about to come to a close. Now faced with a death sentence, Vernita seeks to live out her remaining days being the biggest old super freak. She gets her mojo back and begins living her life again. But a major, surprising twist will throw her life into more unpredictable chaos.Read more in OLD THOT NEXT DOOR!

A deeply personal memoir-in-essays, reckoning with being an object of Asian fetish and how media, pop culture, and colonialism contributed to the oversexualization of Asian women—from Kaila Yu, former pinup model and lead singer of Nylon Pink. No one fetishized Kaila Yu more than she fetishized herself. As a young girl, she dreamt of beauty. But none of the beautiful women on television looked like her. Growing up as a teenager in the late '90s and early 2000s, Asian representation was scarce, and where it existed, the women were often reduced to overtly sexual and submissive caricatures—the geishas of the book-turned-film Memoirs of a Geisha; the lewd twins, Fook Mi and Fook Yu, in Austin Powers films; Papillon Soo Soo’s sex worker character in the cult Vietnam War movie Full Metal Jacket; and pin-up goddess Sung-Hi Lee. Meanwhile, the "girls next door" were always white. Within that narrow framework, Kaila internalized a painful conclusion: The only way someone who looked like her could have value or be considered beautiful and desirable was to sexualize herself. Blending vulnerable stories from Yu’s life with incisive cultural critique and history, Fetishized is a memoir-in-essays exploring feminism, beauty, yellow fever, and the roles pop culture and colonialism played in shaping pervasive and destructive stereotypes about Asian women and their bodies. Yu revisits the formative moments that shaped her identity. She reflects on the women in media who influenced her, the legacy of U.S. occupation in shaping Western perceptions of Asian women, her own experiences in the pinup and import modeling industry, auditioning for TV and film roles that perpetuated dehumanizing stereotypes, and touring the world with her band in revealing outfits. She recounts altering her body to conform to Western beauty standards, allowing men to treat her like a sex object, and the emotional toll and trauma of losing her sense of self in the pursuit of the image she thought the world wanted. Raw and intimate, Fetishized is a personal journey of self-love and healing. It’s both a searing indictment of the violence of objectification and a tender exploration of the broken relationship so many of us have with beauty, desire, and our own bodies.

A deeply personal memoir-in-essays, reckoning with being an object of Asian fetish and how media, pop culture, and colonialism contributed to the oversexualization of Asian women—from Kaila Yu, former pinup model and lead singer of Nylon Pink. No one fetishized Kaila Yu more than she fetishized herself. As a young girl, she dreamt of beauty. But none of the beautiful women on television looked like her. Growing up as a teenager in the late '90s and early 2000s, Asian representation was scarce, and where it existed, the women were often reduced to overtly sexual and submissive caricatures—the geishas of the book-turned-film Memoirs of a Geisha; the lewd twins, Fook Mi and Fook Yu, in Austin Powers films; Papillon Soo Soo’s sex worker character in the cult Vietnam War movie Full Metal Jacket; and pin-up goddess Sung-Hi Lee. Meanwhile, the "girls next door" were always white. Within that narrow framework, Kaila internalized a painful conclusion: The only way someone who looked like her could have value or be considered beautiful and desirable was to sexualize herself. Blending vulnerable stories from Yu’s life with incisive cultural critique and history, Fetishized is a memoir-in-essays exploring feminism, beauty, yellow fever, and the roles pop culture and colonialism played in shaping pervasive and destructive stereotypes about Asian women and their bodies. Yu revisits the formative moments that shaped her identity. She reflects on the women in media who influenced her, the legacy of U.S. occupation in shaping Western perceptions of Asian women, her own experiences in the pinup and import modeling industry, auditioning for TV and film roles that perpetuated dehumanizing stereotypes, and touring the world with her band in revealing outfits. She recounts altering her body to conform to Western beauty standards, allowing men to treat her like a sex object, and the emotional toll and trauma of losing her sense of self in the pursuit of the image she thought the world wanted. Raw and intimate, Fetishized is a personal journey of self-love and healing. It’s both a searing indictment of the violence of objectification and a tender exploration of the broken relationship so many of us have with beauty, desire, and our own bodies.

Every year, a small group of acquaintances pay a visit to the remote, castle-like Mill House, home to the reclusive Fujinuma Kiichi, son of a famous artist, who has lived his life behind a rubber mask ever since a disfiguring car accident. This year, however, the visit is disrupted by an impossible disappearance, the theft of a painting and a series of baffling murders. The brilliant Kiyoshi Shimada arrives to investigate. But will he uncover the truth, and will you be able to solve the mystery of the Mill House Murders before he does?