Smart Bitches Trashy Books | All of the romance, none of the bullshit.

Deep in the back file cabinet, in the recesses of the Harlequin office, there exists a file folder. It hides behind the “Confidential: Grave Location, Jimmy Hoffa” folder, and the sealed file marked “Truth about Turin, Shroud of.” It’s even nestled in the shadow of the “Dion, Celine: Home Planet Location” folder.

It’s the “Forbidden Titles” file. A list of titles so bad, even the folks down in the Harlequin Presents office aren’t allowed to look at them, for fear they wrest control of the empire away from the publishers and wreak havoc on our understanding of romance as we know it.

Your intrepid Smart Bitches, though, they know how to jimmy the lock on an old metal file cabinet, while holding cosmopolitans in one hand and a stack of Bombshells in the other. Behold: the titles you will never see in a Harlequin Presents novel.

The Painfully Shy Computer Geek’s Russian Bride

The Italian Tycoon’s Restraining Order

The Basement-Dwelling Mama’s Boy’s Virginity

The Stupid White Man’s Dark-skinned Secret Baby

The Heiress’ Purple Cheekbone Bruises

The Crack Whore’s Secret Babies, All Three of Them, Plus a Couple of Toddlers, Too (Hey Man, Who can Keep Track Of All Those Moving Things When You’re High?)

The Boardroom Mistress’s Sexual Harrassment Lawsuit

The Porn Star Thinks Positive

The Morbidly Obese Lady’s Secret Pregnancy

The Heir’s DID Mistress’s Other Personality’s Mail-Order Bride”

The Hungarian Tycoon’s Yugo

Love in the El Camino

The Billionaire’s Incontinent Wife

The Spaniard’s Mostly Virginal Bride, Because Anal Totally Doesn’t Count

The Greek’s Underage Cambodian Whore

A Scandalous Accounting Discrepancy

Pregnancy by Turkey Baster

The Billionaire’s Bulimic Supermodel Mistress

His Secret Weeping Sores

Bound by A Really Fat Dominatrix

The Disobedient Bottom

Herpes Infection of Revenge

Expecting the Playboy’s HIV Test To Come Back Negative

Fellating the Father of the Groom

The Secret of Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch

The Mediterranean Mogul’s Secret One-Testicled Lovechild

The Sheikh’s Obnoxious Halitosis

Via Sara Donati’s blog, I found this Slate article on Diana Gabaldon, the Outlander phenomenon and A Breath of Snow and Ashes.

Have I mentioned how very, very much I love being condescended to? Check out some of the steaming nuggets of wit and wisdom offered up in this article:

Bookseller Chick has a most excellent entry up about the salubrious effects of reading Harlequin Presents while enduring the vigors of organic chemistry class. But my favorite part is right at the end, wherein she explains how to play the Harlequin Presents game:

I’ve always believe that Harlequin Presents covers can be used either to a.) make one weird blackmail note, or b.) summarize a whole new plot for the upcoming month. To do this one must first collect six Harlequin Presents. For our example we’ll use the six that came out for the month of November:

Pregnancy of Revenge by Jacqueline Baird
The Italian Doctor’s Mistress by Catherine Spencer
Bound by Blackmail by Kate Walker
Disobedient Virgin by Sandra Marton
Sale or Return Bride by Sarah Morgan
The Greek’s Bought Wife by Helen Bianchin

Do not try to make sense out of the titles. I don’t know what the Sale or Return Bride means either; it doesn’t matter. You are now going to rearrange these titles so they make a sentence (or a couple of sentences). Feel free to add in important linking words like (if, then, and, or longer phrases). Your result may look like so:

Although Bound by Blackmail, the Disobedient Virgin refused to be the Italian Doctor’s Mistress and instead chose to be The Greek’s Bought Wife. Even though he considered her to be his Sale or Return Bride, she would carry his Pregnancy of Revenge with love.

I want to play! I want to play! I’m going to use October’s titles:

Expecting the Playboy’s Heir by Penny Jordan
His One-Night Mistress by Sandra Field
The Brazilian’s Blackmailed Bride by Michelle Reid
A Scandalous Marriage by Miranda Lee
The Greek’s Ultimate Revenge by Julia James
The Spaniard’s Inconvenient Wife by Kate Walker (hehe, I initially read this as “incontinent")

Et voila:
After being His One-Night Mistress, Calliope Kourios found herself Expecting the Playboy’s Heir...and being forced into A Scandalous Marriage! But she couldn’t be The Brazilian’s Blackmailed Bride, because Calliope had a secret...She was already The Spaniard’s Inconvenient Wife. Can she find a way out of this quandary, or will she have to use The Greek’s Ultimate Revenge?

I bet you can play this game with traditional Regency titles, too. Have a whack at it, kids! It’s good, clean fun!

Angie scored an interview with JR Ward, author of the Black Dagger brotherhood series. You know, the series featuring the hardcore vampires who love Ludacris.

OK, I’m done snarking. For now. Hie thee to Angie’s blog and read it, because it’s an interesting interview, especially the explanation for why the brothers have the name they do. And apparently one of them, Phury, is a virgin. Mmmm, virgin heroes.... I might have to pick THAT one up if nothing else, because I’d love to see if Phury’s phirst phuck is phabulous.

Sarah: Is she conscious? Dead? Wearing an ill-fitting prom dress? Is he preparing to drain her into that prominently placed urn?

But wow, that may be a Latino vampire. There is a shortage of minority vampire heroes out there. But this one? He looks so confused I’m not sure he knows what he’s doing. He’s got the costume, and the teeth, and the cape - can’t forget the cape. But his expression - check out the close up of the art - he looks befuddled, like someone gave him the costume but didn’t tell him what to do.

Candy: Homeboy doesn’t look like he’s ready to take a bite out of that neck so much as drool on it. Seriously. This is one vampire whose dentist overdid it with the novocaine at his last root canal.

(C’mon. All those centuries of drinking nothing but blood. Those teeth have to be ghastly.)

Sarah: Here’s my Night Game: sneak up behind this guy and topple him over with one well-placed push to the shoulder blade. Because he is WAY too top-heavy to be real! Seriously, his chest is almost twice as wide as his waistline.

Candy: Because of the way the cover is framed, I TOTALLY thought the chick’s arm was the guy’s at first, and I thought “EEK! GIMP ARM!”

But now I think “EEK! HEADLESS WOMAN!” Because seriously, look at the angle of the arm, and project the height of her shoulder, neck and head. We should see SOME part of her peeping up ‘twixt the shoulders of Gorilla-Boy there, even if it’s just the winsome wisps of feathered bangs. But we don’t. Maybe she’s severely hunchbacked? Or some ninja had sneaked up behind her and TOTALLY BEHEADED HER right before the camera shutter clicked?

Either way, what bliss.

Sarah: The damned. Oh, they sure are. Dude on the right has a very animal-esque snout going on thee. And Nia Peebles? Is that what happened to her?

But really, I fell bad for the dude up front with the man breasts held in place by a Victoria’s Secret underwire camisole. Snout-dude has been mocking him for hours by now.

Candy: Wait: blow-up dolls can be damned?

And my mind wonders: What are they damned to? An eternity of looking like slightly constipated SIMs? Is that, like, the Blow-Up Doll Hellish Fate the Blow-Up Doll preachers use to scare the horny deviants into behaving?

Sarah: This is, obviously, a DVD cover, but it had to be included, for both the poor-fitting vampire teeth and the absolutely bizarre expression.

“Excuse me! I must bite you! With my plastic teeth! I hope they do not fall out!”

Candy: See, what did I say about vampires needing dentists? I love the inset even more than the main picture. The dude has the SAME EXACT EXPRESSION in both.