Emily M. Danforth

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

California

A Novel

"Full of Victorian sapphic romance, metafictional horror, biting misandrist humor, Hollywood intrigue, and multiple timeliness--all replete with evocative illustrations that are icing on a deviously delicious cake." -O, THE OPRAH MAGAZINE "Brimming from start to finish with sly humor and gothic mischief. Brilliant." -- SARAH WATERS The award-winning author of The Miseducation of Cameron Post makes her adult debut with this highly imaginative and original horror-comedy centered around a cursed New England boarding school for girls--a wickedly whimsical celebration of the art of storytelling, sapphic love, and the rebellious female spirit. Our story begins in 1902, at The Brookhants School for Girls. Flo and Clara, two impressionable students, are obsessed with each other and with a daring young writer named Mary MacLane, the author of a scandalous bestselling memoir. To show their devotion to Mary, the girls establish their own private club and call it The Plain Bad Heroine Society. They meet in secret in a nearby apple orchard, the setting of their wildest happiness and, ultimately, of their macabre deaths. This is where their bodies are later discovered with a copy of Mary's book splayed beside them, the victims of a swarm of stinging, angry yellow jackets. Less than five years later, The Brookhants School for Girls closes its doors forever--but not before three more people mysteriously die on the property, each in a most troubling way. Over a century later, the now abandoned and crumbling Brookhants is back in the news when wunderkind writer, Merritt Emmons, publishes a breakout book celebrating the queer, feminist history surrounding the "haunted and cursed" Gilded-Age institution. Her bestselling book inspires a controversial horror film adaptation starring celebrity actor and lesbian it girl Harper Harper playing the ill-fated heroine Flo, opposite B-list actress and former child star Audrey Wells as Clara. But as Brookhants opens its gates once again, and our three modern heroines arrive on set to begin filming, past and present become grimly entangled--or perhaps just grimly exploited--and soon it's impossible to tell where the curse leaves off and Hollywood begins. A story within a story within a story and featuring black-and-white period illustrations, Plain Bad Heroines is a devilishly haunting, modern masterwork of metafiction that manages to combine the ghostly sensibility of Sarah Waters with the dark imagination of Marisha Pessl and the sharp humor and incisive social commentary of Curtis Sittenfeld into one laugh-out-loud funny, spellbinding, and wonderfully luxuriant read. --Joe Hill, New York Times bestselling author of The Fireman

Plain Bad Heroines

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Lindsay Ellis

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER The alternate history first contact adventure Axiom's End is an extraordinary debut from Hugo finalist and video essayist Lindsay Ellis. Truth is a human right. It’s fall 2007. A well-timed leak has revealed that the US government might have engaged in first contact. Cora Sabino is doing everything she can to avoid the whole mess, since the force driving the controversy is her whistleblower father. Even though Cora hasn’t spoken to him in years, his celebrity has caught the attention of the press, the Internet, the paparazzi, and the government—and with him in hiding, that attention is on her. She neither knows nor cares whether her father’s leaks are a hoax, and wants nothing to do with him—until she learns just how deeply entrenched her family is in the cover-up, and that an extraterrestrial presence has been on Earth for decades. Realizing the extent to which both she and the public have been lied to, she sets out to gather as much information as she can, and finds that the best way for her to uncover the truth is not as a whistleblower, but as an intermediary. The alien presence has been completely uncommunicative until she convinces one of them that she can act as their interpreter, becoming the first and only human vessel of communication. Their otherworldly connection will change everything she thought she knew about being human—and could unleash a force more sinister than she ever imagined.

Axiom's End

397cb999-ec66-44aa-a1c4-d35ed26d18b6

Susan Choi

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

WINNER OF THE 2019 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION “Electrifying” (People) • “Masterly” (The Guardian) • “Dramatic and memorable” (The New Yorker) • “Magic” (TIME) • “Ingenious” (The Financial Times) • "A gonzo literary performance” (Entertainment Weekly) • “Rare and splendid” (The Boston Globe) • “Remarkable” (USA Today) • “Delicious” (The New York Times) • “Book groups, meet your next selection" (NPR) In an American suburb in the early 1980s, students at a highly competitive performing arts high school struggle and thrive in a rarified bubble, ambitiously pursuing music, movement, Shakespeare, and, particularly, their acting classes. When within this striving “Brotherhood of the Arts,” two freshmen, David and Sarah, fall headlong into love, their passion does not go unnoticed—or untoyed with—by anyone, especially not by their charismatic acting teacher, Mr. Kingsley. The outside world of family life and economic status, of academic pressure and of their future adult lives, fails to penetrate this school’s walls—until it does, in a shocking spiral of events that catapults the action forward in time and flips the premise upside-down. What the reader believes to have happened to David and Sarah and their friends is not entirely true—though it’s not false, either. It takes until the book’s stunning coda for the final piece of the puzzle to fall into place—revealing truths that will resonate long after the final sentence. As captivating and tender as it is surprising, Susan Choi's Trust Exercise will incite heated conversations about fiction and truth, and about friendships and loyalties, and will leave readers with wiser understandings of the true capacities of adolescents and of the powers and responsibilities of adults.

Trust Exercise

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T. Kingfisher

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

From USA Today bestselling author T. Kingfisher, Thornhedge is the tale of a kind-hearted, toad-shaped heroine, a gentle knight, and a mission gone completely sideways.

*A very special hardcover edition, featuring foil stamp on the casing and custom endpapers illustrated by the author.*

There's a princess trapped in a tower. This isn't her story.

Meet Toadling. On the day of her birth, she was stolen from her family by the fairies, but she grew up safe and loved in the warm waters of faerieland. Once an adult though, the fae ask a favor of Toadling: return to the human world and offer a blessing of protection to a newborn child. Simple, right?

But nothing with fairies is ever simple.

Centuries later, a knight approaches a towering wall of brambles, where the thorns are as thick as your arm and as sharp as swords. He's heard there's a curse here that needs breaking, but it's a curse Toadling will do anything to uphold...

"The way Thornhedge turns all the fairy tales inside out is a sharp-edged delight."
--Katherine Addison, author of The Goblin Emperor

Thornhedge

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Cathleen Schine

BO/OKISH. a. [from book.] Given to books. —A Dictionary of the English Language by Samuel Johnson Cathleen Schine's The Grammarians tells the story of Daphne and Laurel, word-obsessed twins bound together by their shared obsession, and also torn apart by it. One grows up to become a well-known language columnist, while the other becomes a poet—each poem an unlikely sampling of lines from a 1940s linguistics manual. Their once-united enthusiasm for words ruptures, and the twins find themselves divided by the long-standing descriptivist/prescriptivist debate about language. Daphne, the columnist, is devoted to preserving the dignity and formal elegance of traditional language; Laurel, the poet, is thrilled by the living, changing nature of English. The girls are infatuated with the beauty, mischief, and occasional treachery of language. Every chapter opens with a definition from Samuel Johnson’s dictionary; there are sibling battles over Fowler's; and the twinship finally explodes when the sisters battle, with fiery absurdity, for custody of their deceased father’s copy of Merriam Webster’s New International Dictionary, Second Edition. In their debates about language, alternately playful and fervent, Daphne and Laurel come to define themselves, too. The Grammarians is not only a story of the delights and tolls of intimacy; it is also a celebration of the unity, and joyful comedy, of language and life.

The Grammarians

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Alisa Kwitney

Meet Hildy Winters, a tough, outspoken survivor of New York city's upper West side, with her very own time travel portal. For Hildy belongs to the Guild of Independent Lady Temporalists. Their prime directive: do not alter the past without co-op board approval! G.I.L.T follows two very different women whose lives become entangled when they both slip through a portal in time to the day they first met. 

Trista is the Bill Murray of home health care aids, a cynical screw-up who doesn't care for anything but her Fluvog shoes and her paycheck. She meets her match in Hildy, a sarcastic second wave feminist living on a steady diet of cigarettes and regret. When Hildy seizes her last chance to return to a fateful day in 1973, she accidentally takes Trista along for the ride. But as the old saying goes, there are no accidents in time travel. And Hildy and Trista don't remember each other, but they met each other 40 years earlier - wedding day. Now they've got to come to terms with the past before they accidentally dismantle the future.

Guild of Independent Lady Temporalists

G. I. L. T.

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Nicola Griffith

A spellbinding and subversive queer recasting of Arthurian myth by the legendary author of Hild The girl knows she has a destiny before she even knows her name. She grows up in the wild, in a cave with her mother, but visions of a faraway lake come to her on the spring breeze, and when she hears a traveler speak of Artos, king of Caer Leon, she knows that her future lies at his court. And so, brimming with magic and eager to test her strength, she breaks her covenant with her mother and, with a broken hunting spear and mended armour, rides on a bony gelding to Caer Leon. On her adventures she will meet great knights and steal the hearts of beautiful women. She will fight warriors and sorcerers. And she will find her love, and the lake, and her fate. Nebula and Lambda Award-winning author Nicola Griffith returns with Spear, a glorious queer retelling of Arthurian legend, full of dazzling magic and intoxicating adventure.

Spear

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Geraldine Brooks

March

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Jenny Odell

Resisting the Attention Economy

** A New York Times Bestseller ** NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY: Time • The New Yorker • NPR • GQ • Elle • Vulture • Fortune • Boing Boing • The Irish Times • The New York Public Library • The Brooklyn Public Library "A complex, smart and ambitious book that at first reads like a self-help manual, then blossoms into a wide-ranging political manifesto."—Jonah Engel Bromwich, The New York Times Book Review One of President Barack Obama's "Favorite Books of 2019" Porchlight's Personal Development & Human Behavior Book of the Year In a world where addictive technology is designed to buy and sell our attention, and our value is determined by our 24/7 data productivity, it can seem impossible to escape. But in this inspiring field guide to dropping out of the attention economy, artist and critic Jenny Odell shows us how we can still win back our lives. Odell sees our attention as the most precious—and overdrawn—resource we have. And we must actively and continuously choose how we use it. We might not spend it on things that capitalism has deemed important … but once we can start paying a new kind of attention, she writes, we can undertake bolder forms of political action, reimagine humankind’s role in the environment, and arrive at more meaningful understandings of happiness and progress. Far from the simple anti-technology screed, or the back-to-nature meditation we read so often, How to do Nothing is an action plan for thinking outside of capitalist narratives of efficiency and techno-determinism. Provocative, timely, and utterly persuasive, this book will change how you see your place in our world.

How to Do Nothing

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Mark Kramer

A Nonfiction Writers' Guide from the Nieman Foundation at Harvard University

Interested in journalism and creative writing and want to write a book? Read inspiring stories and practical advice from America's most respected journalists.

The country's most prominent journalists and nonfiction authors gather each year at Harvard's Nieman Conference on Narrative Journalism. Telling True Stories presents their best advice--covering everything from finding a good topic, to structuring narrative stories, to writing and selling your first book. More than fifty well-known writers offer their most powerful tips, including:

* Tom Wolfe on the emotional core of the story
* Gay Talese on writing about private lives
* Malcolm Gladwell on the limits of profiles
* Nora Ephron on narrative writing and screenwriters
* Alma Guillermoprieto on telling the story and telling the truth
* Dozens of Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists from the Atlantic Monthly, New Yorker, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Washington Post and more . . .

The essays contain important counsel for new and career journalists, as well as for freelance writers, radio producers, and memoirists. Packed with refreshingly candid and insightful recommendations, Telling True Stories will show anyone fascinated by the art of writing nonfiction how to bring people, scenes, and ideas to life on the page.



Telling True Stories

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Gwen E. Kirby

Stories

Margaret Atwood meets Buffy in these funny, warm, and furious stories of women at their breaking points, from Hellenic times to today. Cassandra may have seen the future, but it doesn't mean she's resigned to telling the Trojans everything she knows. In this ebullient collection, virgins escape from being sacrificed, witches refuse to be burned, whores aren't ashamed, and every woman gets a chance to be a radioactive cockroach warrior who snaps back at catcallers. Gwen E. Kirby experiments with found structures--a Yelp review, a WikiHow article--which her fierce, irreverent narrators push against, showing how creativity within an enclosed space undermines and deconstructs the constraints themselves. When these women tell the stories of their triumphs as well as their pain, they emerge as funny, angry, loud, horny, lonely, strong protagonists who refuse to be secondary characters a moment longer. From "The Best and Only Whore of Cym Hyfryd, 1886" to the "Midwestern Girl Is Tired of Appearing in Your Short Stories," Kirby is playing and laughing with the women who have come before her and they are telling her, we have always been this way. You just had to know where to look.

Shit Cassandra Saw

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Bryan Washington

One of Barack Obama’s “Favorite Books of the Year” "Phenomenal" --Justin Torres, author of We the Animals "Brilliant" --Nicole Dennis-Benn, author of Here Comes the Sun “A profound exploration of the true meaning of borders.” —The New York Times Book Review NAMED ONE OF THE 10 BEST BOOKS OF 2019 in the New York Times by Dwight Garner A New York Times Notable Book of 2019 In the city of Houston - a sprawling, diverse microcosm of America - the son of a black mother and a Latino father is coming of age. He's working at his family's restaurant, weathering his brother's blows, resenting his older sister's absence. And discovering he likes boys. Around him, others live and thrive and die in Houston's myriad neighborhoods: a young woman whose affair detonates across an apartment complex, a ragtag baseball team, a group of young hustlers, hurricane survivors, a local drug dealer who takes a Guatemalan teen under his wing, a reluctant chupacabra. Bryan Washington's brilliant, viscerally drawn world vibrates with energy, wit, raw power, and the infinite longing of people searching for home. With soulful insight into what makes a community, a family, and a life, Lot explores trust and love in all its unsparing and unsteady forms.

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Melissa Bradley

40 Super Cute Crochet Patterns for Adorable Amigurumi

"Create adorable characters from food and other everyday items, which make gorgeous gifts and perfect play sets. Plus, learn all the stitches and techniques you need to make the cutest crochet ever"--Cover.

Kawaii Crochet

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Emily Henry

Book is in excellent condition with a minir ding on the back cover (pictured)

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2022 by Oprah Daily ∙ Today ∙ Parade ∙ Marie Claire ∙ Bustle ∙ PopSugar ∙ Katie Couric Media ∙ Book Bub ∙ SheReads ∙ Medium ∙ The Washington Post ∙ and more!

An insightful, delightful new novel from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Beach Read and People We Meet on Vacation. 

One summer. Two rivals. A plot twist they didn't see coming...

Nora Stephens' life is books--she's read them all--and she is not that type of heroine. Not the plucky one, not the laidback dream girl, and especially not the sweetheart. In fact, the only people Nora is a heroine for are her clients, for whom she lands enormous deals as a cutthroat literary agent, and her beloved little sister Libby.

Which is why she agrees to go to Sunshine Falls, North Carolina for the month of August when Libby begs her for a sisters' trip away--with visions of a small town transformation for Nora, who she's convinced needs to become the heroine in her own story. But instead of picnics in meadows, or run-ins with a handsome country doctor or bulging-forearmed bartender, Nora keeps bumping into Charlie Lastra, a bookish brooding editor from back in the city. It would be a meet-cute if not for the fact that they've met many times and it's never been cute.

If Nora knows she's not an ideal heroine, Charlie knows he's nobody's hero, but as they are thrown together again and again--in a series of coincidences no editor worth their salt would allow--what they discover might just unravel the carefully crafted stories they've written about themselves.

"Emily Henry never fails to deliver ... this may just be her best yet."--Taylor Jenkins Reid

Book Lovers

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Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

When Poppy met Alex, there was no spark, no chemistry, and no reason to think they'd ever talk again. Alex is quiet, studious, and destined for a future in academia. Poppy is a wild child who only came to U of Chicago to escape small-town life. Over the years, Alex and Poppy's lives take them in different directions, but every summer the two find their way back to each other for a magical week long vacation

People We Meet on Vacation

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Louise Erdrich

This book is in great condition with the exception of a partial tear at the top of the book cover (pictured).

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER WASHINGTON POST BEST BOOK OF 2020 AMAZON BEST BOOK OF 2020 NPR BEST BOOK OF 2020 CBS SUNDAY MORNING BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR KIRKUS REVIEWS BEST FICTION OF 2020 CHICAGO PUBLIC LIBRARY'S BEST OF THE BEST GOOD HOUSEKEEPING BEST BOOK OF 2020 Based on the extraordinary life of National Book Award-winning author Louise Erdrich's grandfather who worked as a night watchman and carried the fight against Native dispossession from rural North Dakota all the way to Washington, D.C., this powerful novel explores themes of love and death with lightness and gravity and unfolds with the elegant prose, sly humor, and depth of feeling of a master craftsman. Thomas Wazhashk is the night watchman at the jewel bearing plant, the first factory located near the Turtle Mountain Reservation in rural North Dakota. He is also a Chippewa Council member who is trying to understand the consequences of a new "emancipation" bill on its way to the floor of the United States Congress. It is 1953 and he and the other council members know the bill isn't about freedom; Congress is fed up with Indians. The bill is a "termination" that threatens the rights of Native Americans to their land and their very identity. How can the government abandon treaties made in good faith with Native Americans "for as long as the grasses shall grow, and the rivers run"? Since graduating high school, Pixie Paranteau has insisted that everyone call her Patrice. Unlike most of the girls on the reservation, Patrice, the class valedictorian, has no desire to wear herself down with a husband and kids. She makes jewel bearings at the plant, a job that barely pays her enough to support her mother and brother. Patrice's shameful alcoholic father returns home sporadically to terrorize his wife and children and bully her for money. But Patrice needs every penny to follow her beloved older sister, Vera, who moved to the big city of Minneapolis. Vera may have disappeared; she hasn't been in touch in months, and is rumored to have had a baby. Determined to find Vera and her child, Patrice makes a fateful trip to Minnesota that introduces her to unexpected forms of exploitation and violence, and endangers her life. Thomas and Patrice live in this impoverished reservation community along with young Chippewa boxer Wood Mountain and his mother Juggie Blue, her niece and Patrice's best friend Valentine, and Stack Barnes, the white high school math teacher and boxing coach who is hopelessly in love with Patrice. In the Night Watchman, Louise Erdrich creates a fictional world populated with memorable characters who are forced to grapple with the worst and best impulses of human nature. Illuminating the loves and lives, the desires and ambitions of these characters with compassion, wit, and intelligence, The Night Watchman is a majestic work of fiction from this revered cultural treasure.

The Night Watchman

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Vinson Cunningham

A historic presidential campaign changes the trajectory of a young Black man's life in the highly anticipated debut novel from one of The New Yorker's rising stars. I’d seen the Senator speak a few times before my life got caught up, however distantly, with his, but the first time I can remember paying real attention was when he delivered the speech announcing his run for the Presidency. When David first hears the Senator from Illinois speak, he feels deep ambivalence. Intrigued by the Senator's idealistic rhetoric, David also wonders how he'll balance the fervent belief and inevitable compromises it will take to become the United States's first Black president. Great Expectations is about David's eighteen months working for the Senator's presidential campaign. Along the way David meets a myriad of people who raise a set of questions—questions of history, art, race, religion, and fatherhood, all of which force David to look at his own life anew and come to terms with his identity as a young Black man and father in America. Meditating on politics and politicians, religion and preachers, fathers and family, Great Expectations is both an emotionally resonant coming-of-age story and a rich novel of ideas, and marks the arrival of a major new writer.

Great Expectations

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Taylor Jenkins Reid

"Set against the backdrop of the Malibu surf culture of the 1980s [this book] follows the daughter of a famous singer who, once she finds fame, must grapple with the fact that her father abandoned her and her siblings when they were young"--

Malibu Rising

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Jim Collins

Why Some Companies Make the Leap... and Others Don't

The Challenge Built to Last, the defining management study of the nineties, showed how great companies triumph over time and how long-term sustained performance can be engineered into the DNA of an enterprise from the verybeginning. But what about the company that is not born with great DNA? How can good companies, mediocre companies, even bad companies achieve enduring greatness? The Study For years, this question preyed on the mind of Jim Collins. Are there companies that defy gravity and convert long-term mediocrity or worse into long-term superiority? And if so, what are the universal distinguishing characteristics that cause a company to go from good to great? The Standards Using tough benchmarks, Collins and his research team identified a set of elite companies that made the leap to great results and sustained those results for at least fifteen years. How great? After the leap, the good-to-great companies generated cumulative stock returns that beat the general stock market by an average of seven times in fifteen years, better than twice the results delivered by a composite index of the world's greatest companies, including Coca-Cola, Intel, General Electric, and Merck. The Comparisons The research team contrasted the good-to-great companies with a carefully selected set of comparison companies that failed to make the leap from good to great. What was different? Why did one set of companies become truly great performers while the other set remained only good? Over five years, the team analyzed the histories of all twenty-eight companies in the study. After sifting through mountains of data and thousands of pages of interviews, Collins and his crew discovered the key determinants of greatness -- why some companies make the leap and others don't. The Findings The findings of the Good to Great study will surprise many readers and shed light on virtually every area of management strategy and practice. The findings include: Level 5 Leaders: The research team was shocked to discover the type of leadership required to achieve greatness. The Hedgehog Concept (Simplicity within the Three Circles): To go from good to great requires transcending the curse of competence. A Culture of Discipline: When you combine a culture of discipline with an ethic of entrepreneurship, you get the magical alchemy of great results. Technology Accelerators: Good-to-great companies think differently about the role of technology. The Flywheel and the Doom Loop: Those who launch radical change programs and wrenching restructurings will almost certainly fail to make the leap. “Some of the key concepts discerned in the study,” comments Jim Collins, "fly in the face of our modern business culture and will, quite frankly, upset some people.” Perhaps, but who can afford to ignore these findings?

Good to Great

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Harvard Business Review

Daniel Goleman

Richard E. Boyatzis

Annie McKee

Sydney Finkelstein

Big Ideas and Practical Advice on How to Be Human at Work

Fundamental frameworks for emotional intelligence and how to apply them every day. According to research by Daniel Goleman, emotional intelligence has proved to be twice as important as other competencies in determining outstanding leadership. It is now one of the crucial criteria in hiring and promotion processes, performance evaluations, and professional development courses. And it's not innate--it's a skill that all of us can improve. With this double volume you'll get HBR's 10 Must Reads on Emotional Intelligence and the HBR Guide to Emotional Intelligence. That's 10 definitive HBR articles on emotional intelligence by Goleman and other leaders in the field, curated by our editors--paired with smart, focused advice from HBR experts about how to implement those ideas in your daily work life. With Everyday Emotional Intelligence, you'll learn how to: Recognize your own EQ strengths and weaknesses Regulate your emotions in tough situations Manage difficult people Build the social awareness of your team Motivate yourself through ups and downs Write forceful emails people won't misinterpret Make better, less emotionally biased decisions Help an employee develop emotional intelligence Handle specific situations like crying at work and tense communications across different cultures

Harvard Business Review Everyday Emotional Intelligence

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IBARRA

Working Identity

A powerful model for career reinvention that reverses conventional wisdom Includes fascinating case studies of personal and professional reinventions—from literature professor to stockbroker, from psychiatrist to Buddhist monk, and from investment banker to fiction writer, among others. Gives readers a new way to understand change in their lives. Career change is not a step-by-step linear process—it’s crooked and takes much longer than we think. Nor is change the result of one big event. Rather, many small steps add up to a successful change.

Working Identity: Unconventional Strat

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Katie Heaney

Growing up, Coming Out, and (Occasionally) Getting It Right

"When Katie Heaney published her first book of essays, chronicling her singledom up to age twenty-five, she was still waiting to meet the right guy. Three years later, a lot changed. For one thing, she met the right girl. Here, for the first time, Katie opens up about realizing at the age of twenty-eight that she is gay. In these poignant, funny essays, she wrestles with her shifting sexuality and identity, and describes what it was like coming out to everyone she knows (and everyone she doesn't). As she revisits her past, looking for any "clues" that might have predicted this outcome, Katie reveals that life doesn't always move directly from point A to point B--no matter how much we would like it to. In a warm and relatable voice, Katie tackles everything from the trials of dating in New York City to the growing pains of her first relationship, from obsessing over Harry Styles (because, actually, he does look a bit like a lesbian) to learning to accept herself all over again. Exploring love and sexuality with her neurotic wit and endearing intimacy, Katie Heaney shares the message that it's never too late to find love--or yourself."--Page [4] of cover.

Would You Rather?

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Naohiro Matsumura

The Japanese Art of Shaping Behavior Through Playful Design

The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up meets Nudge in this irresistible design method from Japan. We are living in a time when behavioral change is necessary for our health and survival. Yet we find it exceedingly difficult to transform our own habits, let alone those of other people. Enter Naohiro Matsumura, whose powerful new design method is as astonishingly simple in its logic as it is sophisticated in its psychology. It allows any of us—from UX designers and marketers to concerned citizens and overworked parents—to address challenges in our homes, our public spaces, and our social interactions. As Matsumura shows, a shikake—or “device” in Japanese—is a design that exerts influence on us through subtle nudging, rather than direct command; it encourages a particular behavior without telling its (often unwitting) user the primary purpose of that behavior. For example: • Footprints in a store guide shoppers and keep them socially distant • A basketball hoop placed over a trash can entices children to tidy up their rooms • A symbol of a shrine in a public square encourages respectfulness • A staircase painted to look like piano keys prompts exercise through play Combining traditional Japanese aesthetics with the lessons of behavioral economics, Matsumura reveals how to identify the hidden design cues that already shape our world, and how shikakes can help us confront some of the most pressing challenges of our era, from pandemics to declining civic engagement to climate change and beyond. Mind-bending yet elegant, Shikake presents a tool kit for anyone who wants to create their own mindful designs, for the delight and betterment of us all.

Shikake

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Raven Leilani

Sharp, comic, disruptive, tender, Raven Leilani's debut novel, Luster, sees a young black woman fall into art and someone else's open marriage Edie is stumbling her way through her twenties—sharing a subpar apartment in Bushwick, clocking in and out of her admin job, making a series of inappropriate sexual choices. She's also, secretly, haltingly figuring her way into life as an artist. And then she meets Eric, a digital archivist with a family in New Jersey, including an autopsist wife who has agreed to an open marriage—with rules. As if navigating the constantly shifting landscapes of contemporary sexual manners and racial politics weren't hard enough, Edie finds herself unemployed and falling into Eric's family life, his home. She becomes hesitant friend to his wife and a de facto role model to his adopted daughter. Edie is the only black woman young Akila may know. Razor sharp, darkly comic, sexually charged, socially disruptive, Luster is a portrait of a young woman trying to make her sense of her life in a tumultuous era. It is also a haunting, aching description of how hard it is to believe in your own talent and the unexpected influences that bring us into ourselves along the way.

Browse by categories

Emily M. Danforth

Plain Bad Heroines

Lindsay Ellis

Axiom's End

Susan Choi

Trust Exercise

T. Kingfisher

Thornhedge

Cathleen Schine

The Grammarians

Alisa Kwitney

G. I. L. T.

Nicola Griffith

Spear

Geraldine Brooks

March

Jenny Odell

How to Do Nothing

Mark Kramer

Telling True Stories

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