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The written word will never die. Each week in July find two new suggestions for great summer reading.
Romance/Erotica:
 A delicious twist on erotic romance, and the debut collection from a hot new author.
Three novellas. Two interlocking stories. One sizzling read.
Nice
set up: one spirited woman in Kit Townsend, and two hot buddies, Ryder
and Mac, who take turns giving Kit what she needs. It's the perfect
no-strings triangle and while it doesn't exactly follow the rules,
neither does Kit. But when love unexpectedly throws these three friends
for a loop, can they still have a happy ending?
And then
there's Mia Malone, a sweet Dallas girl who had big dreams for the
future when she first met Texas Ranger Jack Kincaid. That fairy tale
was a lifetime ago. Today, framed for drug possession, she's forced to
work undercover at a strip joint where several working girls have
disappeared. Then in walks Jack—her protector, savior, and lover.
Pop Culture:
 The influx of Japanese art and fashion into the American cultural
mainstream gets an entertaining treatment from Kelts, an essayist and
lecturer at the University of Tokyo, who interviewed many of Japan's
leading culture gurus over the past three years. Kelts is clearly most
interested in the world of anime and manga (from Pokémon to Princess
Mononoke), as his readers will most likely be. A primary theme is that
of the Japanese paradox: how has such a strictly defined and rigid
society produced pop art that is, compared to its American counterparts
at least, wildly imaginative and boundary bursting? Kelts's belief is
that one directly created the other, that anime and manga's wild and
kinetic structures, hyperaddictive apocalyptic story lines and
surprisingly emotional content (not to mention sex and violence unheard
of in American pop culture) could never flourish in an openly
permissive and individualistic society that had not experienced nuclear
devastation. Although the book grasps too eagerly at its subject's
grander implications, it still effectively conveys the cross-Pacific
cultural dissonance. Kelts has a sharp grasp of his subject and is on
sure ground when discussing the history of the form, especially the
impact of Disney on postwar Japanese animators or the reverential awe
in which American animators hold such filmmakers as Hayao Miyazaki
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