When you love someone, you don't want to hurt them, even if they deserve to be hurt. When you love someone, you want to hurt them, even when they don't deserve to be hurt.

BEAUTIFUL is stark, disquieting and, quite simply, riveting. Amy Reed is an author to keep on your radar.

Me? Beautiful? I'm plain as cardboard. That may be how you see yourself, but the rest of the world would be hard to agree. You shine brighter than the Milky Way. Now there are those who might try to take that from you, but you don't have to give it away. Keep on shining Pattyn. And when the right young man comes along, he'll love you all the more for giftin' this sad planet with your light.

Believe it or not, I sold my first novel, Crank, with only seventy-five pages complete. It was in verse then, and it was hard-hitting then.

Light That's how I feel- like the winter-fringed breeze might scoop me up into its wings, fly away with me trapped in its feathered embrace. I am a snowflake. A wisp of eiderdown, liberated from gravity. My body is light. Ephemeral. My head is light. I want to sway beneath the weight of air, dizzy with thought. Light filters through my closed eyelids. The sun, chasing shadows, tells me I'm not afloat in dreams.

Then I said it. He said it too. I love you. And everything that went before meant nothing.

Paradise A concept embraced by almost every culture. A land of peace and harmony. Some say it doesn't belong to the earth, that there is no Shangri-la, no utopian wilderness for the living.