No punches are pulled in Henry Miller's most famous work. Still pretty rough going for even our jaded sensibilities, but Tropic of Cancer is an unforgettable novel of self-confession. Maybe the most honest book ever written, this autobiographical fiction about Miller's life as an expatriate American in Paris was deemed obscene and banned from publication in this country for years. When you read this, you see immediately how much modern writers owe Miller.

Tropic of Cancer is a novel by Henry Miller which has been described as "notorious for its candid sexuality" and as responsible for the "free speech that we now take for granted in literature." It was first published in 1934 by the Obelisk Press in Paris, France, but this edition was banned in the United States. Its publication in 1961 in the U.S. by Grove Press led to obscenity trials that tested American laws on pornography in the early 1960s. In 1964, the U.S. Supreme Court declared the book non-obscene. It is widely regarded as an important masterpiece of 20th century literature.

Miller wrote the book between 1930 and 1934 during his "nomadic life" in Paris.Miller gave the following explanation of why the book's title was Tropic of Cancer: "It was because to me cancer symbolizes the disease of civilization, the endpoint of the wrong path, the necessity to change course radically, to start completely over from scratch.”

The book largely functions as an immersive meditation on the human condition. As a struggling writer, Miller describes his experience living among a community of bohemians in Paris, where he intermittently suffers from hunger, homelessness, squalor, loneliness and despair over his recent separation from his wife. Describing his perception of Paris during this time, Miller wrote:

One can live in Paris—I discovered that!—on just grief and anguish. A bitter nourishment—perhaps the best there is for certain people. At any rate, I had not yet come to the end of my rope. I was only flirting with disaster. ... I understood then why it is that Paris attracts the tortured, the hallucinated, the great maniacs of love. I understood why it is that here, at the very hub of the wheel, one can embrace the most fantastic, the most impossible theories, without finding them in the least strange; it is here that one reads again the books of his youth and the enigmas take on new meanings, one for every white hair. One walks the streets knowing that he is mad, possessed, because it is only too obvious that these cold, indifferent faces are the visages of one's keepers. Here all boundaries fade away and the world reveals itself for the mad slaughterhouse that it is. The treadmill stretches away to infinitude, the hatches are closed down tight, logic runs rampant, with bloody cleaver flashing.

There are many passages explicitly describing the narrator's sexual encounters. A 1978 paper found the sexual comedy in the book to be "undeniably low… a stronger visceral appeal than high comedy." The characters are caricatures, and the male characters "stumbl through the mazes of their conceptions of woman."

A 2002 analysis examined the theme of homophobia in the novel. It proposed that the novel contained a "deeply repressed homoerotic desire that periodically surfaces."

Music and dance are other recurrent themes in the book. Music is used "as a sign of the flagging vitality Miller everywhere rejects." References to dancing include a comparison of loving Mona to a "dance of death," and a call for the reader to join in "a last expiring dance" even though "we are doomed."

Tropic of Cancer is a novel by Henry Miller which has been described as "notorious for its candid sexuality" and as responsible for the "free speech that we now take for granted in literature." It was first published in 1934 by the Obelisk Press in Paris, France, but this edition was banned in the United States. Its publication in 1961 in the U.S. by Grove Press led to obscenity trials that tested American laws on pornography in the early 1960s. In 1964, the U.S. Supreme Court declared the book non-obscene. It is widely regarded as an important masterpiece of 20th century literature.

Miller wrote the book between 1930 and 1934 during his "nomadic life" in Paris.Miller gave the following explanation of why the book's title was Tropic of Cancer: "It was because to me cancer symbolizes the disease of civilization, the endpoint of the wrong path, the necessity to change course radically, to start completely over from scratch.”

The book largely functions as an immersive meditation on the human condition. As a struggling writer, Miller describes his experience living among a community of bohemians in Paris, where he intermittently suffers from hunger, homelessness, squalor, loneliness and despair over his recent separation from his wife. Describing his perception of Paris during this time, Miller wrote:

One can live in Paris—I discovered that!—on just grief and anguish. A bitter nourishment—perhaps the best there is for certain people. At any rate, I had not yet come to the end of my rope. I was only flirting with disaster. ... I understood then why it is that Paris attracts the tortured, the hallucinated, the great maniacs of love. I understood why it is that here, at the very hub of the wheel, one can embrace the most fantastic, the most impossible theories, without finding them in the least strange; it is here that one reads again the books of his youth and the enigmas take on new meanings, one for every white hair. One walks the streets knowing that he is mad, possessed, because it is only too obvious that these cold, indifferent faces are the visages of one's keepers. Here all boundaries fade away and the world reveals itself for the mad slaughterhouse that it is. The treadmill stretches away to infinitude, the hatches are closed down tight, logic runs rampant, with bloody cleaver flashing.

There are many passages explicitly describing the narrator's sexual encounters. A 1978 paper found the sexual comedy in the book to be "undeniably low… a stronger visceral appeal than high comedy." The characters are caricatures, and the male characters "stumbl through the mazes of their conceptions of woman."

A 2002 analysis examined the theme of homophobia in the novel. It proposed that the novel contained a "deeply repressed homoerotic desire that periodically surfaces."

Music and dance are other recurrent themes in the book. Music is used "as a sign of the flagging vitality Miller everywhere rejects." References to dancing include a comparison of loving Mona to a "dance of death," and a call for the reader to join in "a last expiring dance" even though "we are doomed."

Tina is a writer who spends too much time writing about hot, erotic encounters, and not enough time experiencing them!

Taking a vacation, she explores her wild side, in the tropical climate of Maui. Sandy beaches and hot sex await!

Contains explicit content. Adults only.

Tina is a writer who spends too much time writing about hot, erotic encounters, and not enough time experiencing them!

Taking a vacation, she explores her wild side, in the tropical climate of Maui. Sandy beaches and hot sex await!

Contains explicit content. Adults only.

Since the end of World War II, economists have tried to figure out how poor countries in the tropics could attain standards of living approaching those of countries in Europe and North America. Attempted remedies have included providing foreign aid, investing in machines, fostering education, controlling population growth, and making aid loans as well as forgiving those loans on condition of reforms. None of these solutions has delivered as promised. The problem is not the failure of economics, William Easterly argues, but the failure to apply economic principles to practical policy work.In this book Easterly shows how these solutions all violate the basic principle of economics, that people--private individuals and businesses, government officials, even aid donors--respond to incentives. Easterly first discusses the importance of growth. He then analyzes the development solutions that have failed. Finally, he suggests alternative approaches to the problem. Written in an accessible, at times irreverent, style, Easterly's book combines modern growth theory with anecdotes from his fieldwork for the World Bank.

Jane Doe lives in the shadows under an assumed name. A once-promising anthropologist and an expert on shamanism, everyone thinks she's dead. Or so she hopes.

Jimmy Paz is a Cuban-American police detective. Straddling two cultures, he understands things others cannot.

When the killings start -- a series of ritualistic murders -- all of Miami is terrified. Especially Jane. She knows the dark truth that Jimmy must desperately search to uncover. As their lives slowly interconnect, Jane and Paz are soon caught in a cataclysmic battle between good and an evil as unimaginable as it is terrifying . . .

This debut thriller should come with a warning--do not pick up if you have anything else planned for as long as it takes to read it! Tropic of Night is a dramatic, stylish, smart, and very strongly plotted novel, mixing anthropology, ethnography, sorcery, mayhem, and murder in an intriguing and wholly captivating story that ranges from Mali to Siberia, Nigeria to Miami, and never lets up. Jane Doe is a smart but listless graduate student when she encounters Marcel Vierchau, a French scholar whose lover she quickly becomes, following him to the strange world of the Chenka, a mysterious sect of Siberian shamans in whose society she quickly loses her scholarly objectivity--and nearly her life. Returning without Vierchau to the comfortable world of her wealthy family, she meets and marries DeWitt Moore, a black poet who accompanies her to Africa on a field trip that turns him into a powerful shaman, awakens her own abilities to commune with the spirits of the Yoruba sorcerers, and again comes close to destroying her. Wary of Moore's new strength, she stages her own death and becomes a faceless member of Miami's underclass, but just when she believes she's safe from his reach, a series of bloody ritual murders of pregnant Miami women convince her that she is once again his target--and that anyone who comes between them, including her adopted daughter, will also meet a terrifying end. Michael Gruber delivers a fabulous, wholly original read that will linger in the reader's mind long after the last page is turned! --Jane Adams

Starring Jimmy Smits, this poetic Pulitzer Prize winning play captures 1929 Florida at a time when cigars are still rolled by hand and lectors are employed to educate and entertain the workers. The arrival of a new lector is a cause for celebration. But when he reads aloud from Anna Karenina, he unwittingly becomes a catalyst in the lives of his avid listeners, for whom Tolstoy, the tropics, and The American Dream prove a volatile combination.

A L.A. Theatre Works full-cast performance featuring: Alma Martinez, Jonathan Nichols, Winston Rocha, Onahoua Rodriguez, Adriana Sevan, Herbert Siguenza and Jimmy Smits.

Warning: This work is fiction containing explicit sex scenes suitable for adult readers only.

"TROPIC FEVER" - a voyage into the darkness of the soul, from which for some there will be no return.

After three months working with her botanist husband in the Amazon rain forest, Sharon Conway, a 25-year old photo-journalist and graduate of Yale, begins to lose her mind.
And starts imagining a mysterious young Indian guy she calls 'Keke' is watching them making love.
The problem is, she discovers he is real. And other women see him too.
From there on it's all downhill...

"It got so bad after the first three months living in the jungle I began I imagining things." She told her captivated audience. "The only cure was drink, drugs and sex. ...Or maybe that was my problem. Too much drink, ganja and sex.
The heat turned us into sex maniacs. Like the clock was turned back from twenty five to eighteen. We were all over each other when I had writer's block: which was most of the time. And whenever Paul took a break from his microscope and botanical research.
That's the first thing I discovered about the Amazon: it's hot and wet. And rains most of the time. And all you want to do is fuck.
The second thing was, you start seeing things.
I imagined this mysterious native kid with a basin-cut hair style (I called him Keke) was watching us, in the house while we were fucking. Even if he was only there in my mind, it made sex seem somehow deliciously perverse. Maybe he was sixteen? Fourteen or eighteen! Who knows? I didn't care. It was wicked. And seriously crazy. And because I started imagining I was performing for him with my husband, all the more exciting.

"Next day one of the company's senior research executives arrived on short notice....It proved to be a turning point in all our lives.
At first I didn't quite know what to make of Raquel, she was so relaxed and easy going. Definitely an old hand in the jungle. As a specialist in tropical medicine and pharmacology she had been there many times before.
She wore a wedding ring. Which meant nothing: she was a cougar. Forty, intelligent, beautiful, assertive, self-assured. Desirable. And sexual without scruples.
Someone who could seriously fuck up a young married couple's relationship if she was on the prowl. Or put them in a sex 7th Heaven 'ménage à trois' if they had the courage to go for what was on offer.
Anyway, for the sake of his career Paul wanted to make a good impression on her. With me just hanging in there, coming along for the ride. So next day when they started work I tried to look like I was doing something intelligent for a change, like writing my book, instead of destroying my liver with hard liquor...and jerking off with the dildo I kept in the bottom drawer of my desk."

Warning: This work is fiction containing explicit sex scenes suitable for adult readers only.

"TROPIC FEVER" - a voyage into the darkness of the soul, from which for some there will be no return.

After three months working with her botanist husband in the Amazon rain forest, Sharon Conway, a 25-year old photo-journalist and graduate of Yale, begins to lose her mind.
And starts imagining a mysterious young Indian guy she calls 'Keke' is watching them making love.
The problem is, she discovers he is real. And other women see him too.
From there on it's all downhill...

"It got so bad after the first three months living in the jungle I began I imagining things." She told her captivated audience. "The only cure was drink, drugs and sex. ...Or maybe that was my problem. Too much drink, ganja and sex.
The heat turned us into sex maniacs. Like the clock was turned back from twenty five to eighteen. We were all over each other when I had writer's block: which was most of the time. And whenever Paul took a break from his microscope and botanical research.
That's the first thing I discovered about the Amazon: it's hot and wet. And rains most of the time. And all you want to do is fuck.
The second thing was, you start seeing things.
I imagined this mysterious native kid with a basin-cut hair style (I called him Keke) was watching us, in the house while we were fucking. Even if he was only there in my mind, it made sex seem somehow deliciously perverse. Maybe he was sixteen? Fourteen or eighteen! Who knows? I didn't care. It was wicked. And seriously crazy. And because I started imagining I was performing for him with my husband, all the more exciting.

"Next day one of the company's senior research executives arrived on short notice....It proved to be a turning point in all our lives.
At first I didn't quite know what to make of Raquel, she was so relaxed and easy going. Definitely an old hand in the jungle. As a specialist in tropical medicine and pharmacology she had been there many times before.
She wore a wedding ring. Which meant nothing: she was a cougar. Forty, intelligent, beautiful, assertive, self-assured. Desirable. And sexual without scruples.
Someone who could seriously fuck up a young married couple's relationship if she was on the prowl. Or put them in a sex 7th Heaven 'ménage à trois' if they had the courage to go for what was on offer.
Anyway, for the sake of his career Paul wanted to make a good impression on her. With me just hanging in there, coming along for the ride. So next day when they started work I tried to look like I was doing something intelligent for a change, like writing my book, instead of destroying my liver with hard liquor...and jerking off with the dildo I kept in the bottom drawer of my desk."