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262 books match the query 'Love' and 13 start with i

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I Hear Voices

Jean Feraca

University of Wisconsin Press, 2007

Jean Feraca’s road to self-fulfillment has been as quirky and demanding as the characters in her incredible memoir. A veteran of several decades of public radio broadcasting, Feraca is also a writer and a poet. She is a talk show host beloved for her unique mixture of the humanities, poetry, and journalism, and is the creator of the pioneering international cultural affairs radio program Here on Earth: Radio without Borders.
In this searing memoir, Feraca traces her own emergence. She pulls back the curtain on her private life, revealing unforgettable portraits of the characters in her brawling Italian-American family: Jenny, the grandmother, the devil woman who threw Casey Stengel down an excavation pit; Dolly, the mother, a cross between Long John Silver and the Wife of Bath, who in battling mental illness becomes the scourge of a Lutheran nursing home; and Stephen, the brilliant but troubled older brother, an anthropologist adopted by a Sioux tribe. In a new chapter that reinforces and ties together the book’s exploration of the multiple forms of love, Jean introduces us to Roger, a Wildman and her husband’s best friend with whom she, too, develops an extraordinary intimacy. A selection of fifteen of Feraca’s poems add counterpoint to her engaging prose.

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In Love with Jerzy Kosinski

A Novel

Agate Nesaule

University of Wisconsin Press, 2009

From Agate Nesaule, acclaimed by writers across the globe from Doris Lessing to Tim O’Brien, comes a long-awaited novel. In Love with Jerzy Kosinski is a story of courage and persistence, exploring in fiction the themes that gripped readers of Nesaule’s award-winning memoir, A Woman in Amber.

After fleeing Latvia as a child, Anna Duja escapes Russian confinement in displaced persons camps and eventually arrives in America. Years later, she finds herself in a different kind of captivity on isolated Cloudy Lake, Wisconsin, living with her disarming but manipulative husband, Stanley.

Inspired by the transformation of Polish-Jewish émigré Jerzy Kosinski from persecuted wartime escapee to celebrity author in America, Anna slips away from Stanley and Cloudy Lake in small steps: learning to drive, making friends, moving to Madison, falling in love, and learning to forgive. Readers will applaud the book’s power, the beauty of its prose, and its strong evocation of a woman gradually finding her way in the wake of trauma.

Winner, the Chancellor’s Regional Literary Award, University of Wisconsin-Whitewater

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In a Desert Garden

Love and Death among the Insects

John Alcock

University of Arizona Press, 1999

When John Alcock replaced the Bermuda grass in his suburban Arizona lawn with gravel, cacti, and fairy dusters, he was doing more than creating desert landscaping. He seeded his property with flowers to entice certain insects and even added a few cowpies to attract termites, creating a personal laboratory for ecological studies. His observations of life in his own front yard provided him with the fieldnotes for this unusual book. In a Desert Garden draws readers into the strange and fascinating world of plants and animals native to Arizona's Sonoran Desert.

As Alcock studies the plants in his yard, he shares thoughts on planting, weeding, and pruning that any gardener will appreciate. And when commenting on the mating rituals of spiders and beetles or marveling at the camouflage of grasshoppers and caterpillars, he uses humor and insight to detail the lives of the insects that live in his patch of desert. Celebrating the virtues of even aphids and mosquitoes, Alcock draws the reader into the intricacies of desert life to reveal the complex interactions found in this unique ecosystem. In a Desert Garden combines meticulous science with contemplations of nature and reminds us that a world of wonder lies just outside our own doors.

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In the Company of Demons

Unnatural Beings, Love, and Identity in the Italian Renaissance

Armando Maggi

University of Chicago Press, 2006

Who are the familiar spirits of classical culture and what is their relationship to Christian demons? In its interpretation of Latin and Greek culture, Christianity contends that Satan is behind all classical deities, semi-gods, and spiritual creatures, including the gods of the household, the lares and penates.But with In the Company of Demons, the world’s leading demonologist Armando Maggi argues that the great thinkers of the Italian Renaissance had a more nuanced and perhaps less sinister interpretation of these creatures or spiritual bodies.

Maggi leads us straight to the heart of what Italian Renaissance culture thought familiar spirits were. Through close readings of Giovan Francesco Pico della Mirandola, Strozzi Cigogna, Pompeo della Barba, Ludovico Sinistrari, and others, we find that these spirits or demons speak through their sudden and striking appearances—their very bodies seen as metaphors to be interpreted. The form of the body, Maggi explains, relies on the spirits’ knowledge of their human interlocutors’ pasts. But their core trait is compassion, and sometimes their odd, eerie arrivals are seen as harbingers or warnings to protect us. It comes as no surprise then that when spiritual beings distort the natural world to communicate, it is vital that we begin to listen.

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Inequalities of Love

College-Educated Black Women and the Barriers to Romance and Family

Averil Y. Clarke

Duke University Press, 2011

Inequalities of Love uses the personal narratives of college-educated black women to describe the difficulties they face when trying to date, marry, and have children. While conventional wisdom suggests that all women, regardless of race, must sacrifice romance and family for advanced educations and professional careers, Averil Y. Clarke’s research reveals that educated black women’s disadvantages in romance and starting a family are consequences of a system of racial inequality and discrimination. The author analyzes the accounts of black women who repeatedly return to incompatible partners as they lose hope of finding “Mr. Right” and reject unwed parenting because it seems to affirm a negative stereotype of black women’s sexuality that is inconsistent with their personal and professional identities. She uses national survey data to compare college-educated black women’s experiences of romance, reproduction, and family to those of less-educated black women and those of white and Hispanic women with degrees. She reports that degreed black women’s lives include less marriage and sex, and more unwanted pregnancy, abortion, and unwed childbearing than college-educated white and Hispanic women. Black women’s romantic limitations matter because they constitute deprivation and constraint in romance and because they illuminate important links between race, class, and gender inequality in the United States. Clarke’s discussion of the inequities that black women experience in romance highlights the connections between individuals’ sexual and reproductive decisions, their performance of professional or elite class identities, and the avoidance of racial stigma.

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Inheritance

Love, Loss, and the Legacy of the Holocaust

Charlie Scheidt

Rutgers University Press, 2026

2026 International Book Award (IBA) for Nonfiction: Narrative.

2026 Independent Publisher Book Awards (IPPY) Silver Medal in the Autobiography/Memoir II (Coming of Age/Family Legacy) category.

After his mother’s death, Charlie Scheidt discovered a trove of historic documents that set him on a decade-long journey to uncover his family’s hidden past during the Holocaust. Joined by Kat Rohrer, the granddaughter of a Nazi officer, Scheidt embarked on a quest to trace his family’s harrowing efforts to escape from Nazi-occupied Europe. As they investigated, they uncovered stories of survival and loss. Their journey takes them across generations and continents, revealing a legacy of love, loss, and resilience. Grappling with questions about the long-lasting effects of inherited trauma, the book asks whether it is possible to break free of a familial cycle. This memoir, rooted in his family’s escape and the lasting trauma that followed, is a powerful reflection on history’s enduring scars, the importance of remembrance, and healing across generations.

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Intimate Connections

Love and Marriage in Pakistan’s High Mountains

Anna-Maria Walter

Rutgers University Press, 2022

Intimate Connections dissects ideas, feelings, and practices around love, marriage, and respectability in the remote high mountains of Gilgit-Baltistan in northern Pakistan. It offers insightful perspectives from the emotional lives of Shia women and their active engagement with their husbands. These gender relations are shaped by countless factors, including embodied values of modesty and honor, vernacular fairy tales and Bollywood movies, Islamic revivalism and development initiatives. In particular, the advent of media and communication technologies has left a mark on (pre)marital relations in both South Asia and the wider Muslim world. Juxtaposing different understandings of ‘love’ reveals rich and manifold worlds of courtship, elopements, family dynamics, and more or less affectionate matches that are nowadays often initiated through SMS. Deep ethnographic accounts trace the relationships between young couples to show how Muslim women in a globalized world dynamically frame and negotiate circumstances in their lives.

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Intimate Creativity

Partners In Love And Art

Irving Sarnoff

University of Wisconsin Press, 2002

     Integrating the psychology of love and creativity, this pioneering book explores both how a couple’s involvement as lovers influences their creative collaboration and how working together affects their relationship. Representing a variety of genres—painting, sculpture, photography, and installation art—the celebrated couples profiled here include, among others, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Elizabeth Diller and Ricardo Scofidio, and Kristin Jones and Andrew Ginzel.
     Intrigued by this process of "intimate creativity," psychologists Irving and Suzanne Sarnoff (themselves partners in love and work) decided to conduct in-depth interviews with partners in visual art because they defy the supremely individualistic tradition of their field. Whatever their age or sexual orientation, these artist-couples combine their talents to form a collective identity as a professional team. Passionately intense about their shared commitment, they communicate endlessly to resolve conflicts and reach consensus. Providing mutual validation and support, they increase their productivity and the quality of their work; they minimize their fear and frustration and enhance their pleasure in being together.
     The authors also draw on historical and contemporary literature about similar couples, ranging from Jean Arp and Sophie Taeuber to Gilbert and George to Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen. Stimulating and engaging, this book highlights the features of a unique collaborative process, considers the connection between creativity and sexuality, and suggests possibilities for any couple to expand their intimacy.

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Intimate Geopolitics

Love, Territory, and the Future on India’s Northern Threshold

Sara Smith

Rutgers University Press, 2020

Winner of the 2021 Julian Minghi Distinguished Book Award from the American Association of Geographers
2021 Foreword Indies Finalist - Politics and Social Sciences

Intimate Geopolitics begins with a love story set in the Himalayan region of Ladakh, in India’s Jammu and Kashmir State, but this is also a story about territory, and the ways that love, marriage, and young people are caught up in contemporary global processes. In Ladakh, children grow up to adopt a religious identity in part to be counted in the census, and to vote in elections. Religion, population, and voting blocs are implicitly tied to territorial sovereignty and marriage across religious boundaries becomes a geopolitical problem in an area that seeks to define insiders and outsiders in relation to borders and national identity. This book populates territory, a conventionally abstract rendering of space, with the stories of those who live through territorial struggle at marriage and birth ceremonies, in the kitchen and in the bazaar, in heartbreak and in joy. Intimate Geopolitics argues for the incorporation of the role of time–temporality–into our understanding of territory.

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Intimate Positions

Love, Belonging, and Sino-Italian Writing

Valentina Pedone

University of Westminster Press, 2027

Intimate Positions offers the first sustained study of Sino-Italian writing, foregrounding the ways in which cultural belonging is imagined through love. Beginning from the premise that intimacy is never merely private, the book examines literary works written in both Chinese and Italian by authors of Chinese origin living in Italy, showing how romantic and familial attachments become charged sites where wider social and political questions take shape. In dialogue with affect theory, Intimate Positions approaches intimacy as both a literary theme and a force that binds individuals to families, communities, nations, and inherited ideas of identity.

Across five chapters, Intimate Positions traces a movement from normative attachments towards increasingly unstable and transformative forms of belonging. Chapters examine works in which romantic intimacy reinforces collective and patriotic visions of Chineseness; working-class narratives in which precarious lives and fragile solidarities fracture the image of a unified Chinese community in Italy; family and marriage in writing by first- and second-generation authors; interracial relationships as unsettled spaces shaped by gendered power, desire, and inequality; and queer forms of self-representation, in which Chineseness and Italianness emerge as fluid positions that can be performed and remade.

At once an interdisciplinary contribution to Sinophone studies, Italian studies, cultural studies, and mobility studies, Intimate Positions combines close textual analysis with interviews with writers, artists, activists, and cultural mediators. It illuminates a field underexplored by scholarship, and offers a relational understanding of belonging as an ongoing process of affective positioning, continually made and remade through intimacy.

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Invitations to Love

Literacy, Love Letters, and Social Change in Nepal

Laura M. Ahearn

University of Michigan Press, 2001

Invitations to Love provides a close examination of the dramatic shift away from arranged marriage and capture marriage toward elopement in the village of Junigau, Nepal. Laura M. Ahearn shows that young Nepalese people are applying their newly acquired literacy skills to love-letter writing, fostering a transition that involves not only a shift in marriage rituals, but also a change in how villagers conceive of their own ability to act and attribute responsibility for events. These developments have potential ramifications that extend far beyond the realm of marriage and well past the Himalayas.

The love-letter correspondences examined by Ahearn also provide a deeper understanding of the social effects of literacy. While the acquisition of literary skills may open up new opportunities for some individuals, such skills can also impose new constraints, expectations, and disappointments. The increase in female literacy rates in Junigau in the 1990s made possible the emergence of new courtship practices and facilitated self-initiated marriages, but it also reinforced certain gender ideologies and undercut some avenues to social power, especially for women.

Scholars, and students in such fields as anthropology, women's studies, linguistics, development studies, and South Asian studies will find this book ethnographically rich and theoretically insightful.

Laura M. Ahearn is Assistant Professor of Anthropology, Rutgers University.

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Is Ultimate Reality Unlimited Love?

Stephen G. Post

Templeton Press, 2014

This book draws from previously unpublished letters and interviews with physicists, theologians, and Sir John’s close associates and family to present Sir John’s ideas on pure unlimited love. Post, who was in dialogue with Sir John for fifteen years on this topic and who had founded the Institute for Research on Unlimited Love (www.unlimitedloveinstitute.com), addresses how John Templeton arrived at his philosophy as a youth growing up in Tennessee. Post also shares how classical Presbyterian ideas came to synergize in his mind with the more Eastern influences of American transcendentalism and the Unity School of Christianity and ponders if Sir John truly believed that science and spirituality might fully converge on the same view of Ultimate Reality with their very different ways of knowing. Is Ultimate Reality Unlimited Love? presents Sir John’s hope for spiritual progress with the eventual convergence of ultimate reality and unlimited love.