List

To know the name Judy Blume is to know and love literature. Her influential novels turned classics—including Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret; Tales of a Fourth Grade Nothing; Deenie; and Summer Sisters—touched the lives of tens of millions of readers. For more than fifty-five years her work has done something revolutionary: it rewired the world’s expectations of what literature for young people can be—frank, candid, earthy, and unafraid to show the messier sides of humanity. But little is known about the real woman behind the iconic persona, and the unlikely journey of her literary ascension, until now.

In Judy Blume, journalist, historian, and longtime Blume aficionado Mark Oppenheimer pens a beautiful, multidimensional portrait of the acclaimed author through extensive interviews with Blume herself, invaluable access to her papers and correspondence, and thoughtful analysis of Blume’s beloved novels, including early, unpublished works that shed light on the pathbreaking writer she would become. Oppenheimer goes deep, exploring Blume’s middle-class 1950s upbringing, complicated childhood, varied relationships and marriages, unabashed sexual experiences, bouts of heartache and loss, and enduring legacy as a champion of free speech and contemporary literature. Oppenheimer peels back the curtain to reveal the woman behind the literary empire in all her complex, multifaceted glory—a true gift for anyone who grew up reading and loving these extraordinary books.

This story begins in 2001 on top of Cave Mountain in the Arkansas Ozarks. A six-year-old girl named Haley--Benjamin Hale's cousin--got lost on a mountain trail, prompting what was at the time the largest search and rescue mission in the state's history. Her disappearance--and her account, after she was found, of the "imaginary friend" she met in the woods--would eventually become connected to another story that took place in the same wilderness more than twenty years earlier: a dark and bizarre story of a cult, brainwashing, murder, and the apocalyptic visions of a teenage prophet.
Enriched by Benjamin Hale's own family history and the lore of the Arkansas Ozarks, Cave Mountain is a gripping story about nature and survival, religion and skepticism, and good and evil. At its center are two young girls, years apart, both in danger in the verdant wilds of northern Arkansas.
 

"From Grammy-nominated singer, actress, and advocate Demi Lovato, a deeply personal cookbook focused on finding healing and nourishment in the kitchen Demi Lovato might not be the first name that comes to mind for a celebrity cookbook. In her own words: "You may be wondering, Who the heck does this girl think she is, writing a cookbook? Isn't she famous for having issues around food? Does she even know how to cook?" And yet, it is precisely this struggle that inspired One Plate at a Time. Because for Demi, learning to find joy in the kitchen was lifesaving. And now she wants to share that joy with everyone. Demi's cooking journey started when she almost thirty, after years spent in recovery from anorexia and bulimia. Getting comfortable behind the stove and preparing simple yet wholesome meals has been critical to her healing and has allowed her to connect with her creativity in a new way. In One Plate at a Time, Demi offers eighty recipes meant to inspire comfort and confidence in the kitchen. While many cookbooks can feel overwhelming-filled with a dizzying array of choices and unfamiliar ingredients-One Plate at a Time is made up of a simple, manageable selection of recipes that emphasize enjoyment over perfection. Covering everything from breakfasts to snacks to mains to desserts, Demi shares her "top five" of every dish, including five satisfying soups, five sturdy salads, five perfect pastas, five fifteen-minute dinners, five surefire comfort foods, five desserts that wow, and more. Filled with beautiful food and lifestyle photography, deeply personal anecdotes, pantry tips, cooking hacks, and reliably foolproof, satisfying recipes, this is a cookbook for Demi Lovato fans, for people who struggle to enjoy food without guilt, and for anyone looking for a gentler, more grounded approach to cooking. One Plate at a Time is Demi's set list for a delicious new way of thinking about food and how it fits into our lives"-- Provided by publisher.

Through Shrill--the book and then the Hulu series--Lindy West became an inspiration. To this day she is stopped on the street and hailed as a beacon of empowerment by women who felt badly for not conforming to a narrow set of societal norms--thin, straight, compliant. But behind the scenes, Lindy never felt like she was the self-actualized woman fans made her out to be. When she found herself in the throes of a deep depression, with her marriage and sense of self-worth hanging in the balance, she knew she needed to make a change. 

In Adult Braces, Lindy shares the story of her rock bottom, and of the journey she took to claw her way out of it. With her trademark candor and sense of humor, she examines her post-Shrill emotional implosion, her shifting feelings about traditional marriage, and her search for her long-lost self. She also tracks the highs and lows of her journey, from eye-opening natural wonders and kitschy roadside attractions to lackluster tourist traps and campground epiphanies.

The result is an engaging and laugh-out-loud narrative of becoming as Lindy transforms from a passenger into the active navigator of her own life.

Two writers show you how to turn a worthy sentence into a memorable one. Starting where The Elements of Style leaves off, Good Writing can improve your book, your essay, your memo, your blog post, speech, or script. These essential rules for persuasive language work on any type of writing, and anyone can learn them quickly.

Each rule is accompanied by examples and a lively pair of essays, the first by Neal Allen, who developed the list of tips over the course of his journalism and corporate careers; the second by his wife, Anne Lamott, acclaimed author of Bird by Bird and nineteen other nonfiction works and novels. The authors don’t always agree on the specifics, but they are passionate about making better sentences.

As Neal writes, “These rules economize, favor the plainspoken and the specific, keep the reader’s attention sharp, and in other ways show respect for the audience’s time and desire for novelty.”

Some rules are fundamental: Use strong verbs. Remove the boring stuff. Twist clichés. Some are more subtle: Draw on all five senses. Give your sentence a finale. Along the way, Good Writing addresses practicalities such as finishing projects despite challenges, trusting editors, and knowing when to break the rules to serve your story.

Whether you're a novice writer or a seasoned author, this entertaining guide will revolutionize your approach to crafting sentences.

Nearly two decades after the publication of Whistling Vivaldi, a landmark work that analyzed stereotype threats and how we can mitigate their corrosive effects, the legendary social psychologist Claude M. Steele returns with an equally ambitious work that examines "churn"--the mental agitation and physical stress we can experience in diverse settings in everyday life--and the surprising role that trust-building can achieve in reducing churn across identity divides.

Opening with a striking vignette of a parent-teacher conference between a well-meaning white teacher and the concerned Black parents of a seventh grader, the book demonstrates how churn threatens the high level of trust that is essential to mentoring and teaching the young. Drawing from decades of psychological research, Churn is rich with examples, such as a young woman entering a boardroom as one of only a few women; a white male feeling conspicuous during an intense diversity training session; a Chinese grandmother shopping in a public market where anti-Asian violence has occurred; and the lessons gleaned from remarkable student improvement and graduation rates at Georgia State University.

Too often, we deal with the commonplace tensions of diversity and difference by pretending they don't exist, by avoiding talking and relating to one another across what can seem like wide chasms of identity difference. Steele highlights a different path forward, a path rooted in trying to see full humanity and potential in human difference. He spells out practices--as he puts it, "a game played on the ground"--for how to build trust across all kinds of human divides: between individuals, or in larger settings, like classrooms, board rooms, even in whole institutions, corporations, and organizations. It is a game we can all play, he believes. Churn doesn't dwell on age-old tensions that continue to fester. It provides tangible ways to make a better world in the fractured society we inhabit.

Carefully intertwining state-of-the-art research with poignant anecdotes drawn from Steele's own biracial background, Churn is essential reading for anyone dedicated to fostering a community rooted in love and commitment. "Wise to its core" (Lee C. Bollinger, president emeritus, Columbia University) and filled with a deep well of hope, Steele's summa work brilliantly succeeds in teaching us how to work through the churn that continues to suffuse our lives.

We live on a floral planet, yet flowers don’t get the credit they deserve. We admire them for their aesthetics, not their power. In this exquisite exploration of the role flowers played in creating the world we know today, David George Haskell observes, smells, and studies flowers such as magnolias, orchids, and roses, as well as fascinating but less celebrated flowers such as seagrasses and tea to show us what we’ve been missing.

Flowers are beautiful revolutionaries. When they evolved, they remade the natural world: Gorgeous petals and alluring aromas transformed former enemies into cooperative partners. Flowers reinvented plant sexuality and motherhood, bringing male and female together in the same flower and amply provisioning seeds and fruits, innovations that also feed legions of animals, ourselves included. Through radical genetic flexibility, flowers turned past environmental upheavals into opportunities for renewal. This inventiveness allowed them to build and sustain rainforests, savannahs, prairies, and even ocean shores.

Without flowers, human beings would not exist. We are a floral species. Flowers catalyzed our evolution, and we now depend on them for food and a healthy planet. When we perfume ourselves, give a loved one a bouquet, or use blooms in gardens and religious ceremonies, we honor the special bond between people and flowers. The study of flowers also shaped modern science and horticulture in ways both marvelous and, sometimes, unjust.

Looking to the future, flowers offer us lessons on resilience and creativity in the face of rapid environmental change. We need floral creativity, beauty, and joy more than ever. How Flowers Made Our World combines lyrical writing, sensual exploration, and the latest in scientific research to explore some of the most consequential life forms ever to have evolved, showing how our planet came to be and how it thrives today.

In 1835, Johannes Ebel and Georg Heinrich Diestel were tried for having started a cult. Worse: It was a cult that encouraged scandalous sexual behavior in women, including the daughters of prestigious Prussian families—causing the deaths of two young women from sexual exhaustion. The trial would absorb and polarize the city of Königsberg for half a decade and ruin the lives and careers of its defendants, despite their eventual legal exoneration. The historical moment it encapsulates—a Europe reeling from the triumph and horror of a new industrial, imperial era, struggling to decide which principles will reign in the aftermath of Enlightenment reason—is a fable for our present time of political, social, and existential disquiet.

The great Cambridge historian Christopher Clark—known for The Sleepwalkers, his monumental, defining study of the causes of the First World War—came across the files containing this story three decades ago; it has been swirling in his mind ever since. In gripping, narrative prose, Clark immerses us in a Königsberg scarred by the horrors of the Napoleonic Wars, where Immanuel Kant had recently inaugurated the theory of consciousness that completely reshaped humanity’s understanding of itself—but where the distinction between reason and fanaticism was now up for grabs. A Scandal in Königsberg is a European history in exquisite miniature—and a peerless lesson in the theological and philosophical debates that animated the Western world at one of its great moments of transformation. 

Rich and provocative, A Scandal in Königsberg articulates an unsettling antecedent for our most fiercely litigated contemporary questions of sexual identity, freedom of thought, and who gets to decide what constitutes the truth.

Named a Best Book of the Year by TheTimes (London)

Love is humankind's supreme gift. Paulo Coelho, the internationally bestselling author of The Alchemist, teaches us how to embrace it.

"I thought that I had already thought about everything you could think about Love when Henry Drummond's sermon fell into my hands. My life changed a lot from the moment I read the words in this book and tried to put his teaching into practice."--Paulo Coelho

What is love In the 19th century, the young missionary Henry Drummond defined love as the culmination of nine elements:

• patience,
• kindness,
• generosity,
• humility,
• gentleness,
• dedication,
• tolerance,
• sincerity, and
• innocence.

He laid this out in his sermon, "The Greatest Thing in the World," which has become a classic and is, without doubt, one of the most beautiful texts ever written on love. Reflecting on this sermon and its subject, St. Paul's Letter to the Corinthians, the admired spiritual teacher Paulo Coelho, author of The Alchemist, a fable of following your dream and one of Oprah's "Best Self-Help Books of a Generation," brings us on his own journey of deepening his practice of Love.

Contrary to what we are used to hearing, the greatest treasure in the spiritual life is not faith, but love. No matter what your religious beliefs are, this feeling is, without doubt, the most rewarding way to live. In The Supreme Gift, Paulo Coelho adapts Henry Drummond's text, offering a real and powerful message that will help us incorporate love into our daily life and experience all its transformational power in our lives.

Freely adapted from the text by Henry Drummond

We are living through a time of crisis. The problems we face grow more serious, while our divisions continue to widen. But our history overflows with people who used the power of our foundational virtues to overcome impossible obstacles.

In Stand, Senator Cory Booker offers a hopeful and practical path forward, weaving together powerful stories and stirring personal reflections to remind us that our country’s shared ideals can serve as a North Star to guide us, even when our journey feels especially dark and perilous. He argues that our principles are not luxuries; they are vital, strategic keys to our survival and success. By wielding these tools, we can reclaim our sense of common cause and change the course of our country’s history.

Stand takes readers on a trip through America’s past and present, showcasing moments when individuals and communities—in unexpected situations and against staggering odds—prevailed by embodying the best of our nation’s virtues. Through the stories of leaders from President George Washington and Congressman John Lewis, to suffragist Alice Paul and Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, to environmental justice advocate Ron Finley and disability rights activist Jennifer Keelan-Chaffins, Booker offers inspiring and actionable insights for Americans from all walks of life.

Published ahead of America’s 250th anniversary, Stand is a defiantly optimistic challenge to reclaim our national story and work together to redeem the American dream.

"You don't really have any friends, do you, Dad?" 

A seemingly innocuous, if direct, question from Andrew McCarthy's son left him reeling. McCarthy did have friends, but like so many other men, the necessities of modern adult life had forced his friendships to the background. At one point his friends had been instrumental in broadening his horizons, bolstering his courage, providing safe harbor. Now, McCarthy found himself questioning what had happened to those friendships, whether he needed them, what he valued, and what he had to offer. A simple question had become a moment that demanded a reckoning. 

Who Needs Friends charts McCarthy's journey over nearly ten thousand miles behind the wheel, following him on often-unexpected travels through Appalachia, the Mississippi Delta, the Chihuahuan Desert, the Rocky Mountains with one driving purpose: to reconnect. Along the way he talks to countless men about their male friendships, from cowboys and blues musicians to preachers and rootless teens. What began as a simple desire to catch up with a few friends turned into a deep exploration of the challenges and rewards that men experience in forming bonds with each other.

In McCarthy's own words, "It turns out that guys have a difficult time with friendship." But that's not the way it needs to be.

From the time the country was founded, early Americans assumed that the land’s natural resources were infinite, including its birds, which were zealously hunted for food, game, and fashion. With the rapid extinction of the passenger pigeon—a bird once so numerous that its flocks darkened the sky in flight—many realized actions needed to be taken if other birds were to be saved. What followed was both a spiritual awakening and a great crusade to save birds and their habitat. The campaign took place on many battlefields: society teas in Boston, hunt clubs on the East Coast, the mangroves in the Everglades, and in the editorial pages of newspapers and periodicals. From many corners of the country the bird protection movement was born and brought together a remarkable coalition of people and organizations to save America’s birds.

The Feather Wars is an entertaining and expansive work of American history, an incredible story about how disparate characters—progressive politicians, free-thinking society belles, nature writers and artists, bird-loving U.S. presidents, gunmakers, business titans, and brave game wardens—came together to save hundreds of species of birds. Heroes, martyrs, villains, and conflicted do-gooders—the early bird conservation movement had them all. Together they transformed how Americans thought and cared about birds, forever altering the American landscape.

Jenny Lawson is full of contradictions. She’s a celebrated author but battles self-doubt, paralysis, and anxiety. She’s an award-winning humorist but struggles with treatment-resistant depression. The questions people most often ask her are, “How do you do it? How do you keep going even when it feels impossible? How do you keep creating?” This book is her answer. 

In How to Be Okay When Nothing Is Okay, Jenny shares more than one hundred humorous, heartfelt, and genuine tools and tricks that she relies on to keep her going even when her brain isn’t working properly due to depression, anxiety, and ADHD. She also offers tips to stay passionate and focused on creative endeavors, especially when everything around you is saying to give up.

With chapters like “Wash Your Brain More Than You Wash Your Bra” (sleep, you beautiful human), “Working on Easy Mode Is Still Working” (asking for accommodations is okay!), “Celebrate Good Times, Come On!” (make it a habit to celebrate the good things), and many more, How to Be Okay When Nothing Is Okay is a balm and companion, reminding us all that we are not alone. It’s for anyone who struggles with self-doubt, guilt, motivation, and mental blocks and wants to rekindle their passion for creating. Funny, simple, empathetic, and full of hope, it will encourage you not to just survive but to find and curate joy in the face of difficult times.

Recall the words chanted in Charlottesville, Virginia: “You will not replace us!” Recall the string of mass shooters across the globe—in Oslo, Christchurch, Buffalo, El Paso, and Pittsburgh—who claimed their crimes were a defense against “White genocide.” Recall business and media figures cultivating anxiety and furor over demographic change. These incidents only scratch the surface: Popular and ruling politicians in every region of the world have expressed some version of great replacement theory, eroding democratic norms in the name of preventing demographic change. 

The term was coined in 2011 by a French novelist who argued that Black and Brown immigrants were “invading” Europe, brought by shadowy elites to “replace” the White population. From there, politicians and theorists in the United States and elsewhere repackaged it as a story of “globalists” welcoming “migrant criminals” and promoting diversity to take away the jobs, cultures, electoral power, and very lives of White people. Over time, great replacement theory has expanded those under threat to include citizens, men, Jews, Christians, heterosexuals, and ethnic majorities in countries as distinct as Russia, El Salvador, Brazil, Italy, and India, all targeted with the message that they are facing an existential attack that only a strongman can prevent.

In Chain of Ideas, internationally bestselling author Ibram X. Kendi offers an unsettling but indispensable global history of how great replacement theory brought humanity into this authoritarian age—and how we can free ourselves from it.

Kids, Wait Till You Hear This! is the autobiography of EGOT icon Liza Minnelli. This fascinating, untold story reveals the intimate truth of the only child born to Hollywood legends Vincente Minnelli and Judy Garland. For the first time, here is Liza up close: Raw, strong, sexy, hilarious and heartbreaking.

Liza decided at the age of 16 that "sympathy is my mother's business. I give people joy." That veil of joy, however, masks a lifelong struggle with Substance Use Disorder ("SUD," which Liza inherited from her mother's branch of her family), boundless love to give and an equal need to receive it, broken marriages, multiple miscarriages, and hospitalizations--the highs and lows of unparalleled artistic success and lifelong friendships, as well as chronic anxiety and the threat of financial ruin. 

Despite every challenge, Liza's is a life wrapped in laughter and her tremendous capacity to give and receive love. Today at nearly 80, she opens her heart, mind and memories, sharing secrets we never knew. Liza's book celebrates supreme artistry and, more importantly, her human rights activism.

"It's time to tell the truth," Liza says, "and help people heal, as I have, one day at a time."