Objects Of His Affection

To see our sins, wounds, idols, and failures apart from God's is simply too much. We will either minimize our condition, thus marginalizing our need of grace, or we will run away in hopeless despair to the arms of a lesser love or to the worship of lesser gods. But . . . God pursues us in our restlessness. receives us in our sinfulness. holds us in our brokenness, and frees us from our lovelessness. -- Scotty Smith excerpt from Objects of His Affection

Objects of affection recovers the emotional attraction of the medieval book through an engagement with a fifteenth-century literary collection known as Oxford, Bodleian Library Manuscript Ashmole 61. Exploring how the inhabitants of the book’s pages – human and nonhuman, tangible and intangible – collaborate with its readers then and now, this book addresses the manuscript’s material appeal in the ways it binds itself to different cultural, historical and material environments. In doing so it traces the affective literacy training that the manuscript provided its late-medieval English household, whose diverse inhabitants are incorporated into the ecology of the book itself as it fashions spiritually generous and socially mindful household members.

In the humorous, heartfelt new novel by the author of The Next Thing on My List, a personal organizer must somehow convince a reclusive artist to give up her hoarding ways and let go of the stuff she’s hung on to for decades. Lucy Bloom is broke, freshly dumped by her boyfriend, and forced to sell her house to send her nineteen-year-old son to drug rehab. Although she’s lost it all, she’s determined to start over. So when she’s offered a high-paying gig helping clear the clutter from the home of reclusive and eccentric painter Marva Meier Rios, Lucy grabs it. Armed with the organizing expertise she gained while writing her book, Things Are Not People, and fueled by a burning desire to get her life back on track, Lucy rolls up her sleeves to take on the mess that fills every room of Marva’s huge home. Lucy soon learns that the real challenge may be taking on Marva, who seems to love the objects in her home too much to let go of any of them. While trying to stay on course toward a strict deadline—and with an ex-boyfriend back in the picture, a new romance on the scene, and her son’s rehab not going as planned—Lucy discovers that Marva isn’t just hoarding, she is also hiding a big secret. The two form an unlikely bond, as each learns from the other that there are those things in life we keep, those we need to let go—but it’s not always easy to know the difference.

George and Nina seem like the perfect couple. They share a cozy, cluttered Brooklyn apartment, a taste for impromptu tuna casserole dinners, and a devotion to ballroom dancing lessons at Arthur Murray. They love each other. There's only one hitch: George is gay. And when Nina announces she's pregnant, things get especially complicated. Howard -- Nina's overbearing boyfriend and the baby's father -- wants marriage. Nina wants independence. George will do anything for a little unqualified affection, but is he ready to become an unwed surrogate dad? A touching and hilarious novel about love, friendship, and the many ways of making a family.

Literary Nonfiction. Ewa Hryniewicz-Yarbrough arrived in the United States from Poland in 1984, bringing memories of life under a totalitarian regime, where the personal was always political. In essay after essay in OBJECTS OF AFFECTION, her remarkable debut, Hryniewicz-Yarbrough shows the immigrant's double perspective, exploring a "bi-polar" world of displacement and rootlessness, geography and memory, individual and family history, always with an acute awareness of losses and gains that accompany adaptation to a new language and culture and the creation of a new identity.

Art thief Sophie steals paintings from the Philadelphia Museum of Art in order to keep her house out of foreclosure, but when the FBI begin sniffing around, Sophis is close to destroying the very life she's worked so hard to build.

Recounts how the author and her sisters inherited furniture and other artifacts collected over the course of centuries by ancestors including several who served in the military, describing the stories behind various pieces of interest and what they revealed about past family members.

“Love not the world, neither the things that are in the world. If any man loves the world, the love of the Father is not in him.” — 1 John 2:15 Those who struggle with habitual sin are keenly aware of the despair and fatigue that comes from trying harder and harder to control the desire to do what is wrong in the eyes of God. For this person, there be times of limited success in overcoming sin, but eventually he/she falls back again into unhealthy patterns. In "The Expulsive Power of a New Affection", Thomas Chalmers argues that no matter how hard we may try, we’ll never overcome habitual sin in our lives unless we switch our affections from the world to Jesus Christ. Thankfully Christ loved us first and is more than willing to set us free if we’d only realize the true Gospel power that we can all have in our lives today.

The Nobel Prize winner’s catalog of his Istanbul museum is like “wandering past the illuminated windows of an arcade. . . . This book spills over with pleasure”(The New York Times). The culmination of decades of omnivorous collecting, Orhan Pamuk’s Museum of Innocence in Istanbul uses his novel of lost love, The Museum of Innocence, as a departure point to explore the city of his youth. In The Innocence of Objects, Pamuk’s catalog of this remarkable museum, he writes about things that matter deeply to him: the psychology of the collector, the proper role of the museum, the photography of old Istanbul (illustrated with Pamuk’s superb collection of haunting photographs and movie stills), and of course the customs and traditions of his beloved city. The book’s imagery is equally evocative, ranging from the ephemera of everyday life to the superb photographs of Turkish photographer Ara Güler. Combining compelling visual images and writing, The Innocence of Objects is an original work of art and literature.

Prominent megachurch pastor offers 365 days of gospel-centered devotional prayers to help readers live out their Christian faith.