American Family Resource Center

Crossing the Boundary: Black Women Survive Incest

List Price: $12.95

This powerful and important book is the culmination of Melba Wilson's long-held desire to write about an experience that affected her and countless other women and children. Looking at the experience of black women incest survivors, she examines the cost of this survival and the strengths that make it possible. Wilson focuses on the dynamics of sex and sexual oppression as they intersect with gender, class and race. She includes the voices of other survivors, a discussion of the role of professionals, and an exploration of incest in the autobiographical and fictional work of Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, Buchi Emecheta and other black writers. Read more...

Literotica 2: The Very Best of Literotica.com

List Price: $16.00

LITEROTICA 2 is provocative erotic fiction as selected by readers and the editors of the popular website Literotica.com. Ranging in tone from humorous to heartbreaking, the stories in this collection are highly literate tales of erotic adventure.

LITEROTICA 2 is culled from thousands of stories, even whole novels, posted at Literotica.com. Well-developed characters and believable plot lines distinguish the stories in the LITEROTICA book series. (LITEROTICA 1 is now in its fourth printing and was a featured selection of Doubleday's erotic book club.)

"This book is filled with new voices, telling a wide variety of engaging, explicit stories," states well-known erotica author Marilyn Jaye Lewis in the book's introduction. "Some are upbeat and racy, while others are rich with emotional depth, healing, and a certain sense of closure. If there were any one theme unifying these stories, it would most likely be imaginative erotica; there isn't a predictable plotline lurking in any of the stories in this collection. Now, how refreshing is that?"

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No Secrets, No Lies: How Black Families Can Heal from Sexual Abuse

List Price: $23.95

With a foreword by Joycelyn Elders, M.D., No Secrets, No Lies is a powerful and daringly honest resource guide for families seeking to understand, prevent, and overcome childhood sexual abuse and its devastating impact on adult survivors.

An estimated one in four women and one in six men is abused by age eighteen, most often by someone they know. Most of these sexual assaults are never disclosed, much less reported to the police.

No Secrets, No Lies demystifies the cultural taboos and social dynamics that keep Black families silent and enable abuse to continue for generations. Among them:

• Fear of betraying family by turning offenders in to "the system"
• Distrust of institutions and authority figures, such as police officers
• Reluctance to seek counseling or therapy
• A legacy of enslavement and stereotypes about black sexuality

Through compelling personal accounts from everyday people, Robin D. Stone, a sexual abuse survivor herself, illuminates the emotional, psychological and hidden consequences of remaining silent, and provides holistic, practical steps to move toward healing.

No Secrets, No Lies candidly speaks to: survivors, telling them they are not at fault, not alone and how they can seek help; parents, guardians and caretakers, explaining how they can keep children safe and help survivors recover; and family, friends and other loved ones, showing ways to lend support. Read more...

Constructing Incest Stories : Black Women's Voices in Fact and Fiction

List Price: $24.95 Price: $24.95

Constructing Incest Stories: Black Women s Voices in Fact and Fiction provides a highly original perspective on incest by an illuminating fusion of social science research and literary analysis. It provides a variety of truths about incest, as narrated both from the inside (by survivors) and the outside (by writers of fiction). The book also analyzes the mechanics and significance of narrative construction with specific reference to incest as well the taboo associated with it, which specifically militates against narrative disclosure. The first part presents four accounts of incest, developed from interviews with Black women, which have been constructed into first-person narratives of the real-life experiences of incest survivors. The analysis of the process of the construction of these factual stories serves as a springboard for examining the problematics of narrative construction in five fictional works whose plots are built around incest: Karen E. Quinones Miller s I m Telling, Donna Hill s In My Bedroom, Sapphire/ Ramona Lofton s Push, Alice Walker s The Color Purple, and Toni Morrison s The Bluest Eye. The textual analysis poses a fundamental question: How (by what specific techniques) does one tell a story that cannot be told, particularly if you are a Black woman? This text provides an answer to this question and reflects on the therapeutic, social, and psychological function of narrative construction in this context. Read more...