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Poor Things

From filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos and producer Emma Stone comes the incredible tale and fantastical evolution of Bella Baxter, a young woman brought back to life by the brilliant and unorthodox scientist Dr. Godwin Baxter. Under Baxter's protection, Bella is eager to learn. Hungry for the worldliness she is lacking, Bella runs off with Duncan Wedderburn, a slick and debauched lawyer, on a whirlwind adventure across the continents. Free from the prejudices of her times, Bella grows steadfast in her purpose to stand for equality and liberation.

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The Color Purple

A decades-spanning tale of love and resilience and of one woman's journey to freedom. Celie faces many hardships in her life, but ultimately finds remarkable strength and hope in the unbreakable bonds of sisterhood.
 

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Ferrari

During the summer of 1957, bankruptcy looms over the company that Enzo Ferrari and his wife built 10 years earlier. He decides to roll the dice and wager it all on the iconic Mille Miglia, a treacherous 1,000-mile race across Italy.

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Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom

As Arthur Curry confronts the responsibilities of being King of the Seven Seas, a long-buried ancient power is unleashed. After witnessing the full effect of these dark forces, Aquaman must forge an uneasy alliance with an old enemy, and embark on a treacherous journey to protect his family, his kingdom, and the world from irreversible devastation.

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The Blueprint

Rae Giana Rashad

"The Blueprint is an astounding work, an unflinching portrait of misogyny and racism in a speculative world terrifyingly close to our own. Rae Giana Rashad chronicles the generational ghosts of womanhood, and how we understand ourselves through the stories of those we come from, in a way I've never read before. A remarkable new talent, and a timeless literary voice."--Ashley Audrain, New York Times bestselling author of The Push

In the vein of Octavia E. Butler and Margaret Atwood, a harrowing novel set in an alternate United States--a world of injustice and bondage in which a young Black woman becomes the concubine of a powerful white government official and must face the dangerous consequences.

Solenne Bonet lives in Texas where choice no longer exists. An algorithm determines a Black woman's occupation, spouse, and residence. Solenne finds solace in penning the biography of Henriette, an ancestor who'd been an enslaved concubine to a wealthy planter in 1800s Louisiana. But history repeats itself when Solenne, lonely and naïve, finds herself entangled with Bastien Martin, a high-ranking government official. Solenne finds the psychological bond unbearable, so she considers alternatives. With Henriette as her guide, she must decide whether and how to leave behind all she knows.

Inspired by the lives of enslaved concubines to U.S. politicians and planters, The Blueprint unfolds over dual timelines to explore bodily autonomy, hypocrisy, and power imbalances through the lens of the nation's most unprotected: a Black girl.

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So Fetch

Jennifer Keishin Armstrong

From the New York Times bestselling author of Seinfeldia comes the totally fetch story of one of the most iconic teen comedies of all time, Mean Girls, revealing how it happened, how it defined a generation, "like, invented" meme culture, and why it just won't go away, filled with exclusive interviews from the director, cast, and crew.

Get in, loser. We're going back to 2004.

It's been 20 years since Mean Girls hit theaters, winning over critics and audiences alike with its razor-sharp wit, star-making turns for its then unknown cast, and obsessively quotable screenplay by Tina Fey. Fast forward two decades and Mean Girls remains as relevant as ever. Arguably, no other movie from the 2000s has had as big of an impact on pop culture.

In So Fetch, New York Times bestselling author of Seinfeldia, Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, offers the first ever authoritative book about this beloved classic that shaped an entire generation. Based off revealing interviews with the director, cast, and crew, So Fetch tells the full story of the making of Mean Girls, from Tina Fey's brilliant adaptation of a self-help guide for parents of teen girls, to the challenges of casting Lindsay Lohan, Rachel McAdams, and the iconic supporting players. So Fetch also explores the film's lasting cultural influence, from its role in the rise of Y2K tabloid culture, impact on girls of all ages and lgbtq+ culture, to how we use it to define female relationships to this day.

Timed for the 20th anniversary and the release of the new movie musical adaptation, So Fetch is the perfect companion for fans and anyone who understands that when it comes to Mean Girls' enduring legacy, the limit does not exist!

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The Takeover

Cara Tanamachi

Sometimes, when you ask the universe for your soulmate, you wind up with your hate mate instead.

On Nami's 30th birthday, she’s reminded at every turn that her life isn’t what she planned. She’s always excelled at everything – until now. Her fiancé blew up their engagement. Her pride and joy, the tech company she helped to found, is about to lose funding. And her sister, Sora, is getting married to the man of her dreams, Jack, and instead of being happy for her, as she knows she ought to be, she’s fighting off jealousy.

Frustrated with her life, she makes a wish on a birthday candle to find her soulmate. Instead, the universe delivers her hate mate, Nami’s old high school nemesis, Jae Lee, the most popular kid from high school, who also narrowly beat her out for valedictorian. More than a decade later, Jae is still as effortlessly cool, charming, and stylish as ever, and, to make matters worse, is planning a hostile take-over of her start-up. Cue: sharp elbows and even sharper banter as the two go head-to-head to see who’ll win this time. But when their rivalry ignites a different kind of passion, Nami starts to realize that it's not just her company that's in danger of being taken over, but her heart as well.

"Readers will cheer on this pair of sparring hearts." - Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

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Legacy

Uché Blackstock, MD

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

“This book is more than a memoir—it also serves as a call to action to create a more equitable healthcare system for patients of color, particularly Black women.” —Essence

One of NPR’s 11 Books to Look Forward to in 2024

One of Good Morning America’s 15 New Books to Read for the New Year

Legacy is both a compelling memoir and an edifying analysis of the inequities in the way we deliver healthcare in America. Uché Blackstock is a force of nature.” —Abraham Verghese, MD, New York Times bestselling author of The Covenant of Water

“[An] extraordinary family story.” —Dr. Damon Tweedy, The New York Times Book Review

“This book should be required reading for all medical students.” —Gayle King, CBS Mornings

The rousing, captivating story of a Black physician, her career in medicine, and the deep inequities that still exist in the U.S. healthcare system


Growing up in Brooklyn, New York, it never occurred to Uché Blackstock and her twin sister, Oni, that they would be anything but physicians. In the 1980s, their mother headed an organization of Black women physicians, and for years the girls watched these fiercely intelligent women in white coats tend to their patients and neighbors, host community health fairs, cure ills, and save lives.

What Dr. Uché Blackstock did not understand as a child—or learn about at Harvard Medical School, where she and her sister had followed in their mother’s footsteps, making them the first Black mother-daughter legacies from the school—were the profound and long-standing systemic inequities that mean just 2 percent of all U.S. physicians today are Black women; the racist practices and policies that ensure Black Americans have far worse health outcomes than any other group in the country; and the flawed system that endangers the well-being of communities like theirs. As an ER physician, and later as a professor in academic medicine, Dr. Blackstock became profoundly aware of the systemic barriers that Black patients and physicians continue to face.

Legacy is a journey through the critical intersection of racism and healthcare. At once a searing indictment of our healthcare system, a generational family memoir, and a call to action, Legacy is Dr. Blackstock’s odyssey from child to medical student to practicing physician—to finally seizing her own power as a health equity advocate against the backdrop of the pandemic and the Black Lives Matter movement.

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West Heart Kill

Dann McDorman

LOOKING FOR AN ANYTHING-BUT-ORDINARY WHODUNIT? • Welcome to the West Heart Club. Where the drinks are neat but behind closed doors . . . things can get messy. Where upright citizens are deemed downright boring. Where the only missing piece of the puzzle is you, dear reader.

A unique and irresistible murder mystery set at a remote hunting lodge where everyone is a suspect, including the erratic detective on the scenea remarkable debut that gleefully upends the rules of the genre.


"A thoroughly original suspense novel that hops across elements of the genre—a diabolical locked-room mystery interspersed with a fascinating primer on the form—while always being tremendous fun to read."—Chris Pavone, best-selling author of Two Nights in Lisbon

An isolated hunt club. A raging storm. Three corpses, discovered within four days. A cast of monied, scheming, unfaithful characters.

When private detective Adam McAnnis joins an old college friend for the Bicentennial weekend at the exclusive West Heart club in upstate New York, he finds himself among a set of not-entirely-friendly strangers. Then the body of one of the members is found at the lake’s edge; hours later, a major storm hits. By the time power is restored on Sunday, two more people will be dead . . .

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The Universe in a Box

Andrew Pontzen

Scientists are using simulations to recreate the universe, revealing the hidden nature of reality.

Cosmology is a tricky science—no one can make their own stars, planets, or galaxies to test its theories. But over the last few decades a new kind of physics has emerged to fill the gap between theory and experimentation. Harnessing the power of modern supercomputers, cosmologists have built simulations that offer profound insights into the deep history of our universe, allowing centuries-old ideas to be tested for the first time. Today, physicists are translating their ideas and equations into code, finding that there is just as much to be learned from computers as experiments in laboratories.

In The Universe in a Box, cosmologist Andrew Pontzen explains how physicists model the universe’s most exotic phenomena, from black holes and colliding galaxies to dark matter and quantum entanglement, enabling them to study the evolution of virtual worlds and to shed new light on our reality.

But simulations don’t just allow experimentation with the cosmos; they are also essential to myriad disciplines like weather forecasting, epidemiology, neuroscience, financial planning, airplane design, and special effects for summer blockbusters. Crafting these simulations involves tough compromises and expert knowledge. Simulation is itself a whole new branch of science, one that we are only just beginning to appreciate and understand. The story of simulations is the thrilling history of how we arrived at our current knowledge of the world around us, and it provides a sneak peek at what we may discover next.

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Invisible Woman

Katia Lief

Other people kill their husbands. Not her.

"Absolutely a novel of its time-and a novel of women's stories across time."--Kirkus (starred review)

In Invisible Woman, a dangerous secret held for too long between estranged best friends rises to the surface, and a long marriage comes apart with devastating consequences.

Joni Ackerman's decision to raise children, 25 years ago, came with a steep cost. She was then a pioneering filmmaker, one of the few women to break into the all-male Hollywood club of feature film directors. But she and her husband Paul had always wanted a family, and his ascending career at a premier television network provided a safety net. Now they've recently transplanted to Brooklyn, so that Paul can launch a major East Coast production studio, when a scandal rocks the film industry and forces Joni to revisit a secret from long ago involving her friend Val.

Joni is adamant that the time has come to tell the story, but Val and Paul are reluctant, for different reasons. As the marriage frays and the friends spar about whether to speak up, Joni's struggles with isolation in a new city, and old resentments about the sacrifices she made on her family's behalf start to boil over. She takes solace, of sorts, in the novels of Patricia Highsmith--particularly the masterpiece Strangers on a Train, with its duplicitous characters and their murderous impulses--until the lines between reality and fantasy become blurred.

 

Invisible Woman is at once a literary thriller about the lies we tell each other (and ourselves), and a powerful psychological examination of the complexities of friendship, marriage, and motherhood.

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Unshrinking

Kate Manne

The definitive takedown of fatphobia, drawing on personal experience as well as rigorous research to expose how size discrimination harms everyone, and how to combat it—from the acclaimed author of Down Girl and Entitled

“An elegant, fierce, and profound argument for fighting fat oppression in ourselves, our communities, and our culture.”—Roxane Gay, author of Hunger

For as long as she can remember, Kate Manne has wanted to be smaller. She can tell you what she weighed on any significant occasion: her wedding day, the day she became a professor, the day her daughter was born. She’s been bullied and belittled for her size, leading to extreme dieting. As a feminist philosopher, she wanted to believe that she was exempt from the cultural gaslighting that compels so many of us to ignore our hunger. But she was not.

Blending intimate stories with the trenchant analysis that has become her signature, Manne shows why fatphobia has become a vital social justice issue. Over the last several decades, implicit bias has waned in every category, from race to sexual orientation, except one: body size. Manne examines how anti-fatness operates—how it leads us to make devastating assumptions about a person’s attractiveness, fortitude, and intellect, and how it intersects with other systems of oppression. Fatphobia is responsible for wage gaps, medical neglect, and poor educational outcomes; it is a straitjacket, restricting our freedom, our movement, our potential.

In this urgent call to action, Manne proposes a new politics of “body reflexivity”—a radical reevaluation of who our bodies exist in the world for: ourselves and no one else. When it comes to fatphobia, the solution is not to love our bodies more. Instead, we must dismantle the forces that control and constrain us, and remake the world to accommodate people of every size.

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The Holdovers

It follows a curmudgeonly instructor at a New England prep school who is forced to remain on campus during Christmas break to babysit the handful of students with nowhere to go. Eventually, he forms an unlikely bond with one of them a damaged, brainy troublemaker, and with the school's head cook, who has just lost a son in Vietnam.

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Weird: The Al Yankovic Story

Daniel Radcliffe is "Weird" Al Yankovic in the unexaggerated true story about the greatest musician of our time. From a conventional upbringing where playing the accordion was a sin, Al rebelled and made his dream of changing the words to world-renowned songs come true. An instant success and sex symbol, Al lives an excessive lifestyle and pursues an infamous romance that nearly destroys him.

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Dumb Money

Dumb Money is the ultimate David vs. Goliath tale, based on the insane true story of everyday people who flipped the script on Wall Street and got rich by turning GameStop (yes, the mall videogame store) into the world's hottest company. In the middle of everything is regular guy Keith Gill, who starts it all by sinking his life savings into the stock and posting about it. When his social posts start blowing up, so does his life and the lives of everyone following him. As a stock tip becomes a movement, everyone gets rich until the billionaires fight back, and both sides find their worlds turned upside down.

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The Creator

Amidst a future war between the human race and the forces of artificial intelligence, Joshua, a hardened ex-special forces agent grieving the disappearance of his wife, is recruited to hunt down and kill the Creator, the elusive architect of advanced AI who has developed a mysterious weapon with the power to end the war and mankind itself. Joshua and his team of elite operatives journey across enemy lines, into the dark heart of AI-occupied territory only to discover the world-ending weapon he's been instructed to destroy is an AI in the form of a young child.
 

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Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

Daredevil archaeologist Indiana Jones races against time to retrieve a legendary dial that can change the course of history. Accompanied by his goddaughter, he soon finds himself squaring off against Jürgen Voller, a former Nazi who works for NASA.

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Housemoms

Jen Lancaster

Three grown women find escape and camaraderie on sorority row in a delightfully exhilarating novel about fresh starts, whether you want them or not, by New York Times bestselling author Jen Lancaster.

How fast can charity fundraiser CeCe Barclay's unimpeachable society life come tumbling down?

One minute she's speaking before Chicago's glitterati. The next, her financier husband is wanted for embezzlement. Her assets seized and her fall mortifyingly public, CeCe grasps for refuge--and employment--as a sorority housemom at Eli Whitney University, her daughter Hayden's alma mater.

Tasked with preparing a stately--but in CeCe's estimation shabby--house for rush, CeCe isn't the only one navigating a new life. Janelle Smith's last experience as a housemother was at a Jersey strip club, where she witnessed a mob hit. To keep her safe until trial, WITSEC finds her a new identity and a housemom position on Eli Whitney's sorority row, where Janelle's conflict mediation and tolerance for high estrogen levels make her a star employee. For Hayden, a barista at a hopelessly hip off-campus café, the goal is to flee everything Barclay: the money, the scandals, and the exasperating family nonsense. What next?

Though CeCe's not ready to sell her Chanel bag, she's open to reinvention. Hayden might even admit she needs help in her new independent life. And Janelle's due for a personal triumph. But big challenges loom between the alabaster columns of Eli Whitney, unexpected and dicey enough to bring them all together--if only to keep them from falling completely apart.

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After Elizabeth

Ed Owens

The British monarchy has been through turbulent times of late. Rocked by scandal and strife, and without it seems a clear plan for the future following the death of Queen Elizabeth II, we have been left wondering: what happens next?

Nothing seems certain. Will the monarchy survive with its continuing echoes of an Imperial past? Will young people - disenchanted with the political status quo - find the ritual and practice of the monarchy quite so mesmerising as previous generations have done? What might a republican Britain look like?

Ed Owens argues that the monarchy must embrace reform and transform itself radically. No more private jets while preaching about the importance of the environment; no more secrecy obscuring royal influence in high places; and no more hangers on enjoying grace-and-favour homes. A major slimming down is essential. And it's time the family archives were opened.

All these issues will have a direct effect on the common good of the nation as it tries to reinvent itself as a modern working democracy, and endeavours to equip itself for the coming decades. Ed Owens situates this critical moment of royal transition in its historical context in order to set out a vision for monarchy that is future-proof, but which would also see the crown play an integral role in the evolution of 21st-century Britain.

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The Favorites

Rosemary Hennigan

A graduate student competes her way into a selective Law and Literature cohort and plots a takedown of its popular professor in this provocative campus novel about privilege, power, and obsession.



"A standout dark academia thriller, with shades of Donna Tartt's modern classic The Secret History and Emerald Fennell's revenge fantasy film Promising Young Woman." --BookPage



Most students would kill to be accepted into the prestigious Law and Literature cohort at Franklin University. But for Jessie Mooney, enrollment in the course is about more than campus status, rigorous thought, and professional connections. It's her chance to get close to charismatic professor Jay Crane so she can expose who he really is.



From the moment she discovered their secret relationship, Jessie's been convinced Crane is to blame for the events leading to her sister's death. Still haunted by their last email exchange--You know what you did--she'll cross any line to hold him accountable. But when Jessie finally earns Crane's trust and the coveted position as one of his "favorites," attracting the other students' envy and suspicion, the truth becomes darkly twisted. Is it justice Jessie craves, or revenge? And what does she stand to lose if she gets her way?



Shimmering with tension, The Favorites explores the ways that love, desire, and anger reveal the best, and worst, of us.

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State of Silence

Sam Lebovic

"The Espionage Act was passed in 1917 to prosecute spies and critics during World War I. And yet, after a century of piecemeal revisions, the Espionage Act still forms the basis of our national security architecture today - a tool that lets the government keep an untold amount of information secret, without ever justifying the need for that secrecy. In State of Silence, political historian Sam Lebovic uncovers the troubling history of the Espionage Act and the shaky foundations on which our security state was built. The Espionage Act began as a series of vague statutes. Over time and aided by interventions from the executive branch and the courts, it became the basis of a patchwork system for protecting state secrets. Early drafts of the Act gave the president the authority to stop the presses. That provision was struck down after public outcry over freedom of speech, but the resulting legal ambiguities left room for decades of distortion as lawmakers leveraged Cold War paranoia into ever-tightening security. The resulting system for classifying information, Lebovic points out, is absurdly cautious: nearly 80 million documents are classified each year, and the system costs the government more than $18 billion annually to maintain. Aside from being costly, this system is shrouded in secrecy, hiding information from citizens in a way that Lebovic argues is fundamentally antithetical to our democracy. When individuals do try to make this information public, they're punished for it. As Lebovic shows, prosecuting whistleblowers (instead of journalists) has been built into our national security system from the beginning. Far before Julian Assange and Chelsea Manning, he shares with us the near-forgotten story of Colonel John Nickerson, the first whistleblower prosecuted under the Espionage Act in 1956 - and a proud Army man who had no idea that his sharing of information could be considered illegal. Finally, Lebovic calls for broad and sweeping reform, proposing a new approach to securing state secrets, one that places the interests of the people first from the very beginning. Shedding new light on the bloated governmental security apparatus that's weighing our democracy down, State of Silence offers the definitive history of America's turn toward secrecy--and its staggering human costs"--

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A Haunting in Venice

Now retired and living in self-imposed exile in the world's most glamorous city, Poirot reluctantly attends a séance at a decaying, haunted palazzo. When one of the guests is murdered, the detective is thrust into a sinister world of shadows and secrets.

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Normal Rules Don't Apply

Kate Atkinson

A dazzling collection of eleven interconnected stories from the bestselling, award-winning author of Shrines of Gaiety and Life After Life, with everything that readers love about her novels--the inventiveness, the verbal felicity, the sharp observations on human nature, and the deeply satisfying emotional wallop.

In this brilliant volume, nothing is quite as it seems. We meet a queen who makes a bargain she cannot keep; a secretary who watches over the life she has just left; a lost man who bets on a horse that may--or may not--have spoken to him. Everything that readers love about the novels of Kate Atkinson is here--the inventiveness, the verbal felicity, the sharp observations of human nature, and the deeply satisfying emotional wallop.

Witty and wise, with subtle connections between the stories, Normal Rules Don't Apply is a startling and funny feast for the imagination, stories with the depth and bite to create their own fully-formed worlds.

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Your Space, Made Simple

Ariel Magidson

Create beautiful spaces in your home effortlessly using this book's easy-to-follow "recipes" for a perfect room.

Your Space, Made Simple is an interior design guide for anyone who dreams of a well-designed home but doesn't know where to begin. If you feel stuck when you go shopping for home decor, or confused about how to arrange furniture, this book will give you the inspiration and tools you need to curate a space that fits you and your family's lifestyle and needs in no time. Whether you just moved into a new home or have wanted to redecorate for years, this book will help you find eye-catching and sustainable design solutions that won't break the bank.

Your Space, Made Simple includes:
• Advice for understanding your needs so you can design spaces that make day-to-day living less stressful
• Tips for sourcing well-made, sustainable, and affordable home decor
• "Recipes" for every room in your home, including a breakdown of what items you'll need and how to arrange them in your space

Author Ariel Magidson is the founder of Ariel Arts, a Bay Area-interior design studio on a mission to make sustainable and affordable design accessible for everyone. Now in her debut book, Ariel shares her years of insights and expertise to help you make interior design feel realistic and within reach.

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Menewood

Nicola Griffith

In the much anticipated sequel to Hild, Nicola Griffith’s Menewood transports readers back to seventh-century Britain, a land of rival kings and religions poised for epochal change.

Making a much-anticipated return to the world of Hild, Nicola Griffith’s Menewood transports readers back to seventh-century Britain, a land of rival kings and religions poised for epochal change. Hild is no longer the bright child who made a place in Edwin Overking’s court with her seemingly supernatural insight. She is eighteen, honed and tested, the formidable lady of Elmet, now building her personal stronghold in the valley of Menewood.

But old alliances are fraying. Younger rivals are snapping at Edwin’s heels. War is brewing—bitter war, winter war. Not knowing whom to trust, Edwin becomes volatile and recalls his young advisor to court. There Hild begins to understand the true extent of the chaos ahead—and realizes she must find a way to navigate the turbulence and fight to protect both the kingdom and her own people.

She will face the losses and devastation of total war, and then must summon the determination to forge a radically different path for herself and her people. In the valley, her last redoubt, Hild draws strength from the fierce joy she finds in the natural world, as, slowly, her community takes root. She trains herself and her unexpected allies in new ways of thinking, learning what it means to gather and wield true power. And she prepares for one last wager: risking all on a single throw for a better future.
In the last decade, Hild has become a beloved classic of epic storytelling. Menewood exceeds it in every way.

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Fear Is Just a Word

Azam Ahmed

 

A riveting true story of a mother who fought back against the drug cartels in Mexico, pursuing her own brand of justice to avenge the kidnapping and murder of her daughter—from a global investigative correspondent for The New York Times

“Azam Ahmed has written a page-turning mystery but also a stunning, color-saturated portrait of the collapse of formal justice in one Mexican town.”—Steve Coll, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Directorate S

Fear Is Just a Word begins on an international bridge between Mexico and the United States, as fifty-six-year-old Miriam Rodríguez stalks one of the men she believes was involved in the murder of her daughter Karen. He is her target number eleven, a member of the drug cartel that has terrorized and controlled what was once Miriam’s quiet hometown of San Fernando, Mexico, almost one hundred miles from the U.S. border. Having dyed her hair red as a disguise, Miriam watches, waits, and then orchestrates the arrest of this man, exacting her own version of justice.

Woven into this deeply researched, moving account is the story of how cartels built their power in Mexico, escalated the use of violence, and kidnapped and murdered tens of thousands. Karen was just one of the many people who disappeared, and Miriam, a brilliant, strategic, and fearless woman, begged for help from the authorities and paid ransom money she could not afford in hopes of saving her daughter. When that failed, she decided that “fear is just a word,” and began a crusade to track down Karen’s killers and to help other victimized families in their search for justice.

What do people do when their country and the peaceful town where they have grown up become unrecognizable, suddenly places of violence and fear? Azam Ahmed takes us into the grieving of a country and a family to tell the mesmerizing story of a brave and brilliant woman determined to find out what happened to her daughter, and to see that the criminals who murdered her were punished. Fear Is Just a Word is an unforgettable and moving portrait of a woman, a town, and a country, and of what can happen when violent forces leave people to seek justice on their own.

 

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North Woods

Daniel Mason

When two young lovers abscond from a Puritan colony, little do they know that their humble cabin in the woods will become the home of an extraordinary succession of human and nonhuman characters alike. An English soldier, destined for glory, abandons the battlefields of the New World to devote himself to growing apples. A pair of spinster twins navigate war and famine, envy and desire. A crime reporter unearths an ancient mass grave—only to discover that the earth refuse to give up their secrets. A lovelorn painter, a sinister con man, a stalking panther, a lusty beetle: As the inhabitants confront the wonder and mystery around them, they begin to realize that the dark, raucous, beautiful past is very much alive.

This magisterial and highly inventive novel from Pulitzer Prize finalist Daniel Mason brims with love and madness, humor and hope. Following the cycles of history, nature, and even language, North Woods shows the myriad, magical ways in which we’re connected to our environment, to history, and to one another. It is not just an unforgettable novel about secrets and destinies, but a way of looking at the world that asks the timeless question: How do we live on, even after we’re gone?

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Past Lives

Nora and Hae Sung, two deeply connected childhood friends, are wrest apart after Nora's family emigrates from South Korea. Two decades later, they are reunited in New York for one fateful week as they confront notions of destiny, love, and the choices that make a life, in this heartrending modern romance.
 

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Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse

After reuniting with Gwen Stacy, Brooklyn's full-time, friendly neighborhood Spider-Man is catapulted across the Multiverse, where he encounters a team of Spider-People charged with protecting its very existence. But when the heroes clash on how to handle a new threat, Miles finds himself pitted against the other Spiders, and must redefine what it means to be a hero so he can save the people he loves most

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Fast X

Over many missions and against impossible odds, Dom Toretto and his family have outsmarted, out-nerved and outdriven every foe in their path. Now, they confront the most lethal opponent they've ever faced: a terrifying threat emerging from the shadows of the past who's fueled by blood revenge, and who is determined to shatter this family and destroy everything and everyone that Dom loves, forever.
 

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Asteroid City

The production of a play is frought with drama and romance in and of itself, from its writing and casting to rehearsals and staging. Onstage, the itinerary of a Junior Stargazer/Space Cadet convention is spectacularly disrupted by world-changing events while each attendee and their family members deal with their own interpersonal issues.

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The Museum of Human History

Rebekah Bergman

After nearly drowning, eight-year-old Maeve Wilhelm falls into a strange comatose state. As years pass, it becomes clear that Maeve is not physically aging. A wide cast of characters finds themselves pulled toward Maeve, each believing that her mysterious "sleep" holds the answers to their life's most pressing questions: Kevin Marks, a museum owner obsessed with preservation; Monique Gray, a refugee and performance artist; Lionel Wilhelm, an entomologist who dreamed of being an astrophysicist; and Evangeline Wilhelm, Maeve's identical twin. As Maeve remains asleep, the characters grapple with a mysterious new technology and medical advances that promise to ease anxiety and end pain, but instead cause devastating side effects.



Weaving together speculative elements and classic fables, and exploring urgent issues from the opioid epidemic to the hazards of biotech to the obsession with self-improvement and remaining forever young, Rebekah Bergman's The Museum of Human History is a brilliant and fascinating novel about how time shapes us, asking what--if anything--we would be without it.
 

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What's Gotten Into You

Dan Levitt

 

 

For readers of Bill Bryson, Neil deGrasse Tyson and Siddhartha Mukherjee, a wondrous, wildly ambitious, and vastly entertaining work of popular science that tells the awe-inspiring story of the elements that make up the human body, and how these building blocks of life travelled billions of miles and across billions of years to make us who we are.

 

 

Every one of us contains a billion times more atoms than all the grains of sand in the earth's deserts. If you weigh 150 pounds, you've got enough carbon to make 25 pounds of charcoal, enough salt to fill a saltshaker, enough chlorine to disinfect several backyard swimming pools, and enough iron to forge a 3-inch nail. But how did these elements combine to make us human

All matter--everything around us and within us--has an ultimate birthday: the day the universe was born. This informative, eye-opening, and eminently readable book is the story of our atoms' long strange journey from the Big Bang to the creation of stars, through the assembly of Planet Earth, and the formation of life as we know it. It's also the story of the scientists who made groundbreaking discoveries and unearthed extraordinary insights into the composition of life. Behind their unexpected findings were investigations marked by fierce rivalries, obsession, heartbreak, flashes of insight, and flukes of blind luck. Ultimately they've helped us understand the mystery of our existence: how a quadrillion atoms made of particles from the Big Bang now animate each of our cells.

Shaped by the curious mind and bold vision of science and history documentarian Dan Levitt, this wondrous book is no less than the story of life itself.

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To Have and to Heist

Sara Desai

To exonerate her best friend, one woman must mastermind a jewelry heist during the wedding of the season in this hilarious romantic-comedy caper from the author of The Dating Plan

Simi Chopra is on a bad-luck streak. She’s lost yet another job, her student loan debt won’t stop growing, her basement apartment is a certifiable flood zone, and now her best friend has been accused of stealing a multimillion-dollar diamond necklace. To put it lightly, she’s desperate for a break—that’s right when Jack waltzes out of the bushes and into her life.

Jack is just as charming as he is mysterious. When he offers to help her find the missing necklace and steal it back, Simi jumps at the chance to clear her friend’s name and collect the substantial reward. But every good heist needs a crew. All she needs to do is transform a ragtag group of strangers into an elite heist crew, infiltrate a high-society wedding and steal the necklace from a dangerous criminal before the happy couple say "I do." Meanwhile the bride is keeping secrets, a detective with a slow-burn smile keeps showing up at her door, and the ultimate robbery might not be the wedding con, but the way Jack is stealing her heart.

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How Data Happened

Chris Wiggins

A sweeping history of data and its technical, political, and ethical impact on our world.

 

From facial recognition—capable of checking us onto flights or identifying undocumented residents—to automated decision systems that inform everything from who gets loans to who receives bail, each of us moves through a world determined by data-empowered algorithms. But these technologies didn’t just appear: they are part of a history that goes back centuries, from the census enshrined in the US Constitution to the birth of eugenics in Victorian Britain to the development of Google search.

 

Expanding on the popular course they created at Columbia University, Chris Wiggins and Matthew L. Jones illuminate the ways in which data has long been used as a tool and a weapon in arguing for what is true, as well as a means of rearranging or defending power. By understanding the trajectory of data—where it has been and where it might yet go—Wiggins and Jones argue that we can understand how to bend it to ends that we collectively choose, with intentionality and purpose.

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1923: A Yellowstone Origin Story

A Yellowstone origin story introduces a new generation of the Dutton family as they explore the early twentieth century when pandemics, historic drought, the end of Prohibition and the Great Depression all plague the mountain west, and the Duttons who call it home. The series is executive produced by Taylor Sheridan, co-creator of Yellowstone, and stars Helen Mirren and Harrison Ford. This release features all eight episodes of season one plus over two hours of special features including an extended making-of featurette, a powerful exploration of Teonna Rainwater's harrowing journey, and an exclusive sit-down interview with video editor Chad Galster.

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Guardians of the Galaxy: Volume 3

Our beloved band of misfits is looking a bit different these days. Peter Quill, still reeling from the loss of Gamora, must rally his team around him to defend the universe along with protecting one of their own. A mission that, if not completed successfully, could quite possibly lead to the end of the Guardians as we know them.

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Under the Eye of Power

Colin Dickey

From beloved cultural historian and acclaimed author of Ghostland comes a history of America's obsession with secret societies and the conspiracies of hidden power

The United States was born in paranoia. From the American Revolution (thought by some to be a conspiracy organized by the French) to the Salem witch trials to the Satanic Panic, the Illuminati, and QAnon, one of the most enduring narratives that defines the United States is simply this: secret groups are conspiring to pervert the will of the people and the rule of law. We’d like to assume these panics exist only at the fringes of society, or are unique features of the internet age. But history tells us, in fact, that they are woven into the fabric of American democracy.

Cultural historian Colin Dickey has built a career studying how our most irrational beliefs reach the mainstream, why, and what they tell us about ourselves. In Under the Eye of Power, Dickey charts the history of America through its paranoias and fears of secret societies, while seeking to explain why so many people—including some of the most powerful people in the country—continue to subscribe to these conspiracy theories. Paradoxically, he finds, belief in the fantastical and conspiratorial can be more soothing than what we fear the most: the chaos and randomness of history, the rising and falling of fortunes in America, and the messiness of democracy. Only in seeing the cycle of this history, Dickey says, can we break it.

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Fast X

Over many missions and against impossible odds, Dom Toretto and his family have outsmarted, out-nerved and outdriven every foe in their path. Now, they confront the most lethal opponent they've ever faced: a terrifying threat emerging from the shadows of the past who's fueled by blood revenge, and who is determined to shatter this family and destroy everything and everyone that Dom loves, forever.

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The Last of Us: Season 1

In 2003, a parasitic fungal infection ravages the planet, turning humans into violent creatures known as the Infected. Twenty years later, hardened survivor Joel is hired to smuggle fourteen-year-old Ellie out of an oppressive quarantine zone in hopes of delivering her to the rebel Fireflies. But what should be a quick job soon becomes a brutal and heartbreaking journey as they traverse the desolate U.S. while depending on each other's unique skills for survival.

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Scream VI

In the sixth installment, the four survivors of the Ghostface killings leave Woodsboro behind and start fresh in New York City.

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John Wick: Chapter 4

John Wick uncovers a way to defeat The High Table. But before he can earn his freedom, he must face off against a new enemy with powerful alliances worldwide, and forces that turn old friends into foes.

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The Super Mario Bros Movie

A Brooklyn plumber named Mario travels through the Mushroom Kingdom with a princess named Peach and an anthropomorphic mushroom named Toad to find Mario's brother, Luigi, and to save the world from a ruthless fire-breathing Koopa named Bowser.

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His Study in Scandal

Megan Frampton

Megan Frampton's deliciously witty A School for Scoundrels series follows the adventures of five gentlemen who navigate life--and love--in London. Here, a dashing young businessman enters into a liaison with a widowed Duchess. Perfect for fans of Sarah MacLean and anyone who loves Bridgerton!

Alexandra, Duchess of Chelmsworth, is tired of pretending to mourn a husband who squandered a fortune and never bothered to give her the time of day, much less any attentions at night. So, the still-beautiful duchess cuts up her mourning gowns, deciding to experience the pleasures long denied her by daringly visiting the Garden of Hedon. It is there the ton anonymously gives in to their deepest desires, and where Alexandra finds herself in the arms of a mysterious man. She willingly gives in to the passion he offers her, fully believing she would never see him again.

But she is shocked to soon discover he is none other than Theo Osborne, who is continually being pushed forward as a husband--for Alexandra's own stepdaughter! While his wealth would save the family from financial ruin, his intentions are clear: he has no interest in anyone but Alexandra. And though he tempts and teases her, she is determined not to give her heart to any man. But what started as a sensuous game turns into something much more...

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Blue Skies

T. C. Boyle

Denied a dog, a baby, and even a faithful fiancé, Cat suddenly craves a snake: a glistening, writhing creature that can be worn like "jewelry, living jewelry" to match her black jeans. But when the budding social media star promptly loses the young "Burmie" she buys from a local pet store, she inadvertently sets in motion a chain of increasingly dire and outrageous events that comes to threaten her very survival.

"Brilliantly imaginative . . . in a terrifying way" (Annie Proulx), Blue Skies follows in the tradition of T. C. Boyle's finest novels, combining high-octane plotting with mordant wit and shrewd social commentary. Here Boyle, one of the most inventive voices in contemporary fiction, transports us to water-logged and heat-ravaged coastal America, where Cat and her hapless, nature-loving family--including her eco-warrior parents, Ottilie and Frank; her brother, Cooper, an entomologist; and her frat-boy-turned-husband, Todd--are struggling to adapt to the "new normal," in which once-in-a-lifetime natural disasters happen once a week and drinking seems to be the only way to cope.

But there's more than meets the eye to this compulsive family drama. Lurking beneath the banal façade of twenty-first-century Californians and Floridians attempting to preserve normalcy in the face of violent weather perturbations is a caricature of materialist American society that doubles as a prophetic warning about our planet's future. From pet bees and cricket-dependent diets to massive species die-off and pummeling hurricanes, Blue Skies deftly explores the often volatile relationships between humans and their habitats, in which "the only truism seems to be that things always get worse."

An eco-thriller with teeth, Boyle's Blue Skies is at once a tragicomic satire and a prescient novel that captures the absurdity and "inexpressible sadness at the heart of everything."

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Brave the Wild River

Melissa L. Sevigny

In the summer of 1938, botanists Elzada Clover and Lois Jotter set off to run the Colorado River, accompanied by an ambitious and entrepreneurial expedition leader, a zoologist, and two amateur boatmen. With its churning waters and treacherous boulders, the Colorado was famed as the most dangerous river in the world. Journalists and veteran river runners boldly proclaimed that the motley crew would never make it out alive. But for Clover and Jotter, the expedition held a tantalizing appeal: no one had yet surveyed the plant life of the Grand Canyon, and they were determined to be the first.

Through the vibrant letters and diaries of the two women, science journalist Melissa L. Sevigny traces their daring forty-three-day journey down the river, during which they meticulously cataloged the thorny plants that thrived in the Grand Canyon's secret nooks and crannies. Along the way, they chased a runaway boat, ran the river's most fearsome rapids, and turned the harshest critic of female river runners into an ally. Clover and Jotter's plant list, including four new cactus species, would one day become vital for efforts to protect and restore the river ecosystem.

Brave the Wild River is a spellbinding adventure of two women who risked their lives to make an unprecedented botanical survey of a defining landscape in the American West, at a time when human influences had begun to change it forever.

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Clytemnestra

Costanza Casati

"Fans of Circe and Elektra should pick up this powerful Greek myth retelling." --Cosmopolitan

For fans of Madeline Miller, a stunning debut following Clytemnestra, the most notorious villainess of the ancient world and the events that forged her into the legendary queen.

As for queens, they are either hated or forgotten. She already knows which option suits her best...

You were born to a king, but you marry a tyrant. You stand by helplessly as he sacrifices your child to placate the gods. You watch him wage war on a foreign shore, and you comfort yourself with violent thoughts of your own. Because this was not the first offence against you. This was not the life you ever deserved. And this will not be your undoing. Slowly, you plot.

But when your husband returns in triumph, you become a woman with a choice.

Acceptance or vengeance, infamy follows both. So, you bide your time and force the gods' hands in the game of retribution. For you understood something long ago that the others never did.

If power isn't given to you, you have to take it for yourself.

A blazing novel set in the world of Ancient Greece, this is a thrilling tale of power and prophecies, of hatred, love, and of an unforgettable Queen who fiercely dealt out death to those who wronged her.

"Crackles with vivid fury, passion, and strength." --Jennifer Saint, bestselling author of Elektra and Ariadne

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Yellowstone Season 5, Part 1

Determined to protect his land and legacy at any cost, John Dutton takes his fight to the halls of government in the most explosive season of Yellowstone yet. But with greater power comes further scrutiny...of his family, his land, and the morally questionable measures he's taken to protect them both. As new threats emerge and old enemies return, John, Beth, Kayce, Rip, and Jamie learn that power has a price.

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Creed III

After dominating the boxing world, Adonis Creed has been thriving in both his career and family life. When a childhood friend and former boxing prodigy, Damian, resurfaces after serving a long sentence in prison, he is eager to prove that he deserves his shot in the ring. The face-off between former friends is more than just a fight. To settle the score, Adonis must put his future on the line to battle Damian, a fighter who has nothing to lose.

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80 for Brady

Four lifelong friends who became huge fans of New England Patriots' quarterback Tom Brady fifteen years ago, when one of them was undergoing chemotherapy treatment, decide to go to the Super Bowl to see their hero play.

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Triangle of Sadness

A model-influencer couple get a ticket to the luxe life when they are invited on an all-expenses-paid cruise alongside a coterie of the rich and ghoulish, but an act of fate turns their Insta-perfect world upside down.
 

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All Quiet on the Western Front

It tells the gripping story of a young German soldier on the Western Front of World War I. Paul and his comrades experience first-hand how the initial euphoria of war turns into desperation and fear as they fight for their lives, and each other, in the trenches. 

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Small Axe

With the five films that make up his Small Axe anthology (Mangrove; Lovers Rock; Red, White and Blue; Alex Wheatle; and Education), director Steve McQueen offers a richly evocative panorama of West Indian life in London from the 1960s through the '80s; a time defined for the community by the terror of police violence, the empowering awakening of political consciousness, and the ecstatic escape of a vibrant reggae scene. Ranging in tone from the tenderly impressionistic to the devastatingly clear-eyed, these powerfully performed portraits of Black resistance, joy, creativity, and collective action, all sumptuously shot by Shabier Kirchner, form a revolutionary counter history of mid-twentieth-century Britain at a transformational moment.

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If It Sounds Like a Quack...

Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling

A bizarre, rollicking trip through the world of fringe medicine, filled with leeches, baking soda IVs, and, according to at least one person, zombies.



It's no secret that American health care has become too costly and politicized to help everyone. So where do you turn if you can't afford doctors, or don't trust them? In this book, Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling examines the growing universe of non-traditional treatments -- including some that are really non-traditional.



With costs skyrocketing and anti-science sentiment spreading, the so-called "medical freedom" movement has grown. Now it faces its greatest challenge: going mainstream. In these pages you'll meet medical freedom advocates including an international leech smuggler, a gold miner-turned health drink salesman who may or may not be from the Andromeda galaxy, and a man who says he can turn people into zombies with aerosol spray. One by one, these alternative healers find customers, then expand and influence, always seeking the one thing that would take their businesses to the next level--the support and approval of the government.



Should the government dictate what is medicine and what isn't? Can we have public health when disagreements over science are this profound? No, seriously, can you turn people into flesh-eating zombies? If It Sounds Like a Quack asks these critical questions while telling the story of how we got to this improbable moment, and wondering where we go from here. Buckle up for a bumpy ride...unless you're against seatbelts.

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The Bandit Queens

Parini Shroff

GOOD MORNING AMERICA BUZZ PICK • A young Indian woman finds the false rumors that she killed her husband surprisingly useful—until other women in the village start asking for her help getting rid of their own husbands—in this razor-sharp debut.

"A radically feel-good story about the murder of no-good husbands by a cast of unsinkable women.”—The New York Times Book Review

Five years ago, Geeta lost her no-good husband. As in, she actually lost him—he walked out on her and she has no idea where he is. But in her remote village in India, rumor has it that Geeta killed him. And it’s a rumor that just won’t die.

It turns out that being known as a “self-made” widow comes with some perks. No one messes with her, harasses her, or tries to control (ahem, marry) her. It’s even been good for business; no one dares to not buy her jewelry.

Freedom must look good on Geeta, because now other women are asking for her “expertise,” making her an unwitting consultant for husband disposal.

And not all of them are asking nicely.

With Geeta’s dangerous reputation becoming a double-edged sword, she has to find a way to protect the life she’s built—but even the best-laid plans of would-be widows tend to go awry. What happens next sets in motion a chain of events that will change everything, not just for Geeta, but for all the women in their village.

Filled with clever criminals, second chances, and wry and witty women, Parini Shroff’s The Bandit Queens is a razor-sharp debut of humor and heart that readers won’t soon forget.

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Confident and Killing It: a Practical Guide to Overcoming Fear and Unlocking Your Most Empowered Self

Tiwalola Ogunlesi

'If you've ever been dumped, fired, or experienced any semblance of rejection, then boy do we have the book for you.' GLAMOUR



An empowering, practical guide to overcoming imposter syndrome, getting sassy with negative thoughts and succeeding in all areas of life.

'Understanding that confidence is a practice and becoming intentional about my personal growth has helped me win the battle in my mind and become the confident woman I am today. Discovering my truth has brought so much joy, love and abundance into my life, and I want the same for every single one of you.'



Tiwalola Ogunlesi is on a mission to create a world of confident women. An esteemed and highly sought-after motivational speaker and confidence coach, she founded her company with the sole purpose of leading women to love themselves.



In Confident and Killing It, Tiwalola guides readers in becoming the most unapologetic and unstoppable version of themselves. No self-aggrandising or posturing, no pseudo-scientific prose or tired 'inspirational' tropes, this is simply a book designed to work. Featuring practical tips and tricks and real-life stories from everyday women, Confident and Killing It will help you master your mind, overcome fear and live life to the fullest.

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The Last Carolina Girl

Meagan Church

"Unforgettable, this a powerful debut to savor." -- Kim Michele Richardson, New York Times bestselling author of The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek

A searing book club novel for fans of Where the Crawdad's Sing and The Girls in the Stilt House following one girl fighting for her family, her body, and her right to create a future all her own

Some folks will do anything to control the wild spirit of a Carolina girl...

For fourteen-year-old Leah Payne, life in her beloved coastal Carolina town is as simple as it is free. Devoted to her lumberjack father and running through the wilds where the forest meets the shore, Leah's country life is as natural as the Loblolly pines that rise to greet the Southern sky.

When an accident takes her father's life, Leah is wrenched from her small community and cast into a family of strangers with a terrible secret. Separated from her only home, Leah is kept apart from the family and forced to act as a helpmate for the well-to-do household. When a moment of violence and prejudice thrusts Leah into the center of the state's shameful darkness, she must fight for her own future against a world that doesn't always value the wild spirit of a Carolina girl.

Set in 1935 against the very real backdrop of a recently formed state eugenics board, The Last Carolina Girl is a powerful and heart-wrenching story of fierce strength, forgotten history, autonomy, and the places and people we ultimately call home.

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Sanditon (Season 3)

The final season continues the story of high-spirited heroine, Charlotte Heywood, and her friends. What adventures, scandals, intrigue and above all else -- romance -- await them?
 

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Living

The story of an ordinary man, reduced by years of oppressive office routine to a shadow existence, who at the eleventh hour makes a supreme effort to turn his dull life into something wonderful.

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Anything Goes

Filmed live at the Barbican in London, this major new five-star production of the classic musical comedy features an all-star cast including Sutton Foster, Robert Lindsay, Felicity Kendal, and Gary Wilmot...When the S.S. American heads out to sea, etiquette and convention head out the portholes as two unlikely pairs set off on the course to true love - proving that sometimes destiny needs a little help from a crew of singing sailors, a comical disguise, and some good old-fashioned blackmail.

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A Man Called Otto

Based on the comical and moving New York Times bestseller, it tells the story of Otto Anderson, a grumpy widower whose only joy comes from criticizing and judging his exasperated neighbors. When a lively young family moves in next door, he meets his match in quick-witted and very pregnant Marisol, leading to an unexpected friendship that will turn his world upside down.

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The Whale

A reclusive English teacher suffering from severe obesity attempts to reconnect with his estranged teenage daughter for one last chance at redemption.

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Women Talking

Do nothing. Stay and fight. Or leave. In 2010, the women of an isolated religious community grapple with reconciling a brutal reality with their faith.

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River Woman, River Demon

Jennifer Givhan

Award-winning Mexican-American and Indigenous author Jennifer Givhan brings us an exquisitely written, spell-binding psychological thriller--weaving together folk magick with personal and cultural empowerment--that is perfect for fans of Mexican Gothic.

When Eva's husband is arrested for the murder of a friend, she must confront her murky past and embrace her magick to find out what really happened that night on the river.

Eva Santos Moon is a burgeoning Chicana artist who practices the ancient, spiritual ways of brujería and curanderisma, but she's at one of her lowest points--suffering from disorienting blackouts, creative stagnation, and a feeling of disconnect from her magickal roots. When her husband, a beloved university professor and the glue that holds their family together, is taken into custody for the shocking murder of their friend, Eva doesn't know whom to trust--least of all, herself. She soon falls under suspicion as a potential suspect, and her past rises to the surface, dredging up the truth about an eerily similar death from her childhood.

Struggling with fragmented memories and self-doubt, an increasingly terrified Eva fears that she might have been involved in both murders. But why doesn't she remember? Only the dead women know for sure, and they're coming for her with a haunting vengeance. As she fights to keep her family out of danger, Eva realizes she must use her magick as a bruja to protect herself and her loved ones, while confronting her own dark history.

River Woman, River Demon is a mysterious incantation of reckoning with the past and claiming one's unique power and voice.

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The Disney Animation Renaissance

Mary E. Lescher

Walt Disney Feature Animation Florida opened in Orlando at the dawn of the Disney Renaissance. As a member of the crew, Mary E. Lescher witnessed the small studio’s rise and fall during a transformative era in company and movie history. Her in-depth interviews with fellow artists, administrators, and support personnel reveal the human dimension of a technological revolution: the dramatic shift from hand-drawn cel animation to the digital format that eclipsed it in less than a decade. She also traces the Florida Studio’s parallel existence as a part of The Magic of Disney Animation, a living theme park attraction where Lescher and her colleagues worked in full view of Walt Disney World guests eager to experience the magic of the company’s legendary animation process.

A ground-level look at the entertainment giant, The Disney Animation Renaissance profiles the people and purpose behind a little-known studio during a historic era.

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I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself

Marisa Crane

Dept. of Speculation meets Black Mirror in this lyrical, speculative debut about a queer mother raising her daughter in an unjust surveillance state

In a United States not so unlike our own, the Department of Balance has adopted a radical new form of law enforcement: rather than incarceration, wrongdoers are given a second (and sometimes, third, fourth, and fifth) shadow as a reminder of their crime—and a warning to those they encounter. Within the Department, corruption and prejudice run rampant, giving rise to an underclass of so-called Shadesters who are disenfranchised, publicly shamed, and deprived of civil rights protections.

Kris is a Shadester and a new mother to a baby born with a second shadow of her own. Grieving the loss of her wife and thoroughly unprepared for the reality of raising a child alone, Kris teeters on the edge of collapse, fumbling in a daze of alcohol, shame, and self-loathing. Yet as the kid grows, Kris finds her footing, raising a child whose irrepressible spark cannot be dampened by the harsh realities of the world. She can’t forget her wife, but with time, she can make a new life for herself and the kid, supported by a community of fellow misfits who defy the Department to lift one another up in solidarity and hope.

With a first-person register reminiscent of the fierce self-disclosure of Sheila Heti and the poetic precision of Ocean Vuong, I Keep My Exoskeletons to Myself is a bold debut novel that examines the long shadow of grief, the hard work of parenting, and the power of queer resistance.

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The Song of the Cell

Siddhartha Mukherjee

Winner of the 2023 PROSE Award for Excellence in Biological and Life Sciences!

Named a New York Times Notable Book and a Best Book of the Year by The Economist, Oprah Daily, BookPage, Book Riot, the New York Public Library, and more!

In The Song of the Cell, the extraordinary author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning The Emperor of All Maladies and the #1 New York Times bestseller The Gene “blends cutting-edge research, impeccable scholarship, intrepid reporting, and gorgeous prose into an encyclopedic study that reads like a literary page-turner” (Oprah Daily).


Mukherjee begins this magnificent story in the late 1600s, when a distinguished English polymath, Robert Hooke, and an eccentric Dutch cloth-merchant, Antonie van Leeuwenhoek looked down their handmade microscopes. What they saw introduced a radical concept that swept through biology and medicine, touching virtually every aspect of the two sciences, and altering both forever. It was the fact that complex living organisms are assemblages of tiny, self-contained, self-regulating units. Our organs, our physiology, our selves—hearts, blood, brains—are built from these compartments. Hooke christened them “cells.

The discovery of cells—and the reframing of the human body as a cellular ecosystem—announced the birth of a new kind of medicine based on the therapeutic manipulations of cells. A hip fracture, a cardiac arrest, Alzheimer’s dementia, AIDS, pneumonia, lung cancer, kidney failure, arthritis, COVID pneumonia—all could be reconceived as the results of cells, or systems of cells, functioning abnormally. And all could be perceived as loci of cellular therapies.

Filled with writing so vivid, lucid, and suspenseful that complex science becomes thrilling, The Song of the Cell tells the story of how scientists discovered cells, began to understand them, and are now using that knowledge to create new humans. Told in six parts, and laced with Mukherjee’s own experience as a researcher, a doctor, and a prolific reader, The Song of the Cell is both panoramic and intimate—a masterpiece on what it means to be human.

“In an account both lyrical and capacious, Mukherjee takes us through an evolution of human understanding: from the seventeenth-century discovery that humans are made up of cells to our cutting-edge technologies for manipulating and deploying cells for therapeutic purposes” (The New Yorker).

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Tár

Set in the international world of classical music, the film centers on Lydia Tar, widely considered one of the greatest living composer/conductors and first-ever female chief conductor of a major German orchestra.
 

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Till

Till is a profoundly emotional and cinematic film about the true story of Mamie Till Mobley's relentless pursuit of justice for her 14-year-old son, Emmett Till, who, in 1955, was lynched while visiting his cousins in Mississippi. In Mamie's poignant journey of grief turned to action, we see the universal power of a mother's ability to change the world.
 

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The Menu

A young couple travels to a faraway secluded island to eat at an exclusive restaurant where the chef has prepared an extravagant menu, with some shocking surprises.
 

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She Said

New York Times reporters Megan Twohey and Jodi Kantor break one of the most important stories in a generation, a story that helped launch the #MeToo movement and shattered decades of silence around the subject of sexual assault in Hollywood.
 

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Black Adam

Nearly 5,000 years after he was bestowed with the almighty powers of the Egyptian gods - and imprisoned just as quickly - Black Adam is freed from his earthly tomb, ready to unleash his unique form of justice on the modern world.

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Sirens & Muses

Antonia Angress

Four artists are drawn into a web of rivalry and desire at an elite art school and on the streets of New York in this “gripping, provocative, and supremely entertaining” (BuzzFeed) debut

“Captures the ache-inducing quality of art and desire . . . a deeply relatable and profoundly enjoyable read, one drenched in prismatic color and light.”—Kristen Arnett, New York Times bestselling author of With Teeth

 
ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Glamour, PopSugar, Debutiful
 
It’s 2011: America is in a deep recession and Occupy Wall Street is escalating. But at the elite Wrynn College of Art, students paint and sculpt in a rarefied bubble. Louisa Arceneaux is a thoughtful, observant nineteen-year-old when she transfers to Wrynn as a scholarship student, but she soon finds herself adrift in an environment that prizes novelty over beauty. Complicating matters is Louisa’s unexpected attraction to her charismatic roommate, Karina Piontek, the preternaturally gifted but mercurial daughter of wealthy art collectors. Gradually, Louisa and Karina are drawn into an intense sensual and artistic relationship, one that forces them to confront their deepest desires and fears. But Karina also can’t shake her fascination with Preston Utley, a senior and anti-capitalist Internet provocateur, who is publicly feuding with visiting professor and political painter Robert Berger—a once-controversial figurehead seeking to regain relevance.   
  
When Preston concocts an explosive hoax, the fates of all four artists are upended as each is unexpectedly thrust into the cutthroat New York art world. Now all must struggle to find new identities in art, in society, and among each other. In the process, they must find either their most authentic terms of life—of success, failure, and joy—or risk losing themselves altogether. 

With a canny, critical eye, Sirens & Muses overturns notions of class, money, art, youth, and a generation’s fight to own their future. 
 
ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Vanity Fair, BuzzFeed, The Millions, Bustle, Electric Lit, Autostraddle, Lambda Literary

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Hester

Laurie Lico Albanese

Named a Most Anticipated Book for Fall by Goodreads Washington Post New York PostBuzzFeed PopSugar Business Insider • An October Indie Next List Pick • An October LibraryReads Pick

"A hauntingly beautiful––and imagined––origin story to The Scarlet Letter." ––People

WHO IS THE REAL HESTER PRYNNE?

Isobel Gamble is a young seamstress carrying generations of secrets when she sets sail from Scotland in the early 1800s with her husband, Edward. An apothecary who has fallen under the spell of opium, his pile of debts have forced them to flee Glasgow for a fresh start in the New World. But only days after they've arrived in Salem, Edward abruptly joins a departing ship as a medic––leaving Isobel penniless and alone in a strange country, forced to make her way by any means possible.

When she meets a young Nathaniel Hawthorne, the two are instantly drawn to each other: he is a man haunted by his ancestors, who sent innocent women to the gallows––while she is an unusually gifted needleworker, troubled by her own strange talents. As the weeks pass and Edward's safe return grows increasingly unlikely, Nathaniel and Isobel grow closer and closer. Together, they are a muse and a dark storyteller; the enchanter and the enchanted. But which is which?

In this sensuous and hypnotizing tale, a young immigrant woman grapples with our country's complicated past, and learns that America's ideas of freedom and liberty often fall short of their promise. Interwoven with Isobel and Nathaniel's story is a vivid interrogation of who gets to be a "real" American in the first half of the 19th century, a depiction of the early days of the Underground Railroad in New England, and atmospheric interstitials that capture the long history of "unusual" women being accused of witchcraft. Meticulously researched yet evocatively imagined, Laurie Lico Albanese's Hester is a timeless tale of art, ambition, and desire that examines the roots of female creative power and the men who try to shut it down.

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Hell Bent

Leigh Bardugo

“Readers will be wowed." –Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Wealth. Power. Murder. Magic. The Ivy League is going straight to hell in the sequel to the smash New York Times bestseller Ninth House from #1 bestselling author Leigh Bardugo.


"Bardugo’s imaginative reach is brilliant." –Stephen King

Find a gateway to the underworld. Steal a soul out of hell. A simple plan, except people who make this particular journey rarely come back. But Galaxy “Alex” Stern is determined to break Darlington out of purgatory—even if it costs her a future at Lethe and at Yale.

Forbidden from attempting a rescue, Alex and Dawes can’t call on the Ninth House for help, so they assemble a team of dubious allies to save the gentleman of Lethe. Together, they will have to navigate a maze of arcane texts and bizarre artifacts to uncover the societies’ most closely guarded secrets, and break every rule doing it. But when faculty members begin to die off, Alex knows these aren’t just accidents. Something deadly is at work in New Haven, and if she is going to survive, she’ll have to reckon with the monsters of her past and a darkness built into the university’s very walls.

Thick with history and packed with Bardugo’s signature twists, Hell Bent brings to life an intricate world full of magic, violence, and all too real monsters.

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Abolition Geography

Ruth Wilson Gilmore

The first collection of writings from one of the foremost contemporary critical thinkers on racism, geography and incarceration

Gathering together Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s work from over three decades, Abolition Geography presents her singular contribution to the politics of abolition as theorist, researcher, and organizer, offering scholars and activists ways of seeing and doing to help navigate our turbulent present.

Abolition Geography moves us away from explanations of mass incarceration and racist violence focused on uninterrupted histories of prejudice or the dull compulsion of neoliberal economics. Instead, Gilmore offers a geographical grasp of how contemporary racial capitalism operates through an “anti-state state” that answers crises with the organized abandonment of people and environments deemed surplus to requirement. Gilmore escapes one-dimensional conceptions of what liberation demands, who demands liberation, or what indeed is to be abolished. Drawing on the lessons of grassroots organizing and internationalist imaginaries, Abolition Geography undoes the identification of abolition with mere decarceration, and reminds us that freedom is not a mere principle but a place.

Edited with an introduction by Brenna Bhandar and Alberto Toscano.

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The Milky Way

Moiya McTier

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2022 BY PUBLISHERS WEEKLY AND SCIENCENET
NAMED A BEST AUDIOBOOK OF 2022 BY BOOKPAGE

Astrophysicist and folklorist Dr. Moiya McTier channels The Milky Way in this approachable and utterly fascinating autobiography of the titular galaxy, detailing what humans have discovered about everything from its formation to its eventual death, and what more there is to learn about this galaxy we call home.

After a few billion years of bearing witness to life on Earth, of watching one hundred billion humans go about their day-to-day lives, of feeling unbelievably lonely, and of hearing its own story told by others, The Milky Way would like a chance to speak for itself. All one hundred billion stars and fifty undecillion tons of gas of it.

It all began some thirteen billion years ago, when clouds of gas scattered through the universe's primordial plasma just could not keep their metaphorical hands off each other. They succumbed to their gravitational attraction, and the galaxy we know as the Milky Way was born. Since then, the galaxy has watched as dark energy pushed away its first friends, as humans mythologized its name and purpose, and as galactic archaeologists have worked to determine its true age (rude). The Milky Way has absorbed supermassive (an actual technical term) black holes, made enemies of a few galactic neighbors, and mourned the deaths of countless stars. Our home galaxy has even fallen in love.

After all this time, the Milky Way finally feels that it's amassed enough experience for the juicy tell-all we've all been waiting for. Its fascinating autobiography recounts the history and future of the universe in accessible but scientific detail, presenting a summary of human astronomical knowledge thus far that is unquestionably out of this world.

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At the Edge of the Woods

Masatsugu Ono

"Balances wonder and disquiet with incomparable grace and precision...Ono continues to captivate." --Bryan Washington, author of Memorial

In an unnamed foreign country, a family of three is settling into a house at the edge of the woods. But something is off. A sound, at first like coughing and then like laughter, emanates from the nearby forest. Fantastical creatures, it is said, live out there in a castle where feudal lords reigned and Resistance fighters fell. When the mother, fearing another miscarriage, returns to her family's home to give birth to a second child, father and son are left to their own devices in rural isolation. Haunted by the ever-present woods, they look on as the TV flashes with floods and processions of refugees. The boy brings a mysterious half-naked old woman home, but before the father can make sense of her presence, she disappears. A mail carrier with gnashing teeth visits to deliver nothing but gossip of violence. A tree stump in the yard refuses to die, no matter how generously the poison is applied.

An allegory for alienation and climate catastrophe unlike any other, At the Edge of the Woods is a psychological tale where myth and fantasy are not the dominion of childhood innocence but the poison fruit borne of the paranoia and violence of contemporary life.

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Woman, Eating

Claire Kohda

An IndieNext Pick! A Best Book of 2022 in Harper's Bazaar, Daily Mail, Glamour, and Thrillist!

Most Anticipated of 2022 in The Millions, Ms. Magazine, LitHub

A young, mixed-race vampire must find a way to balance her deep-seated desire to live amongst humans with her incessant hunger in this stunning debut novel from a writer-to-watch.

Lydia is hungry. She's always wanted to try Japanese food. Sashimi, ramen, onigiri with sour plum stuffed inside - the food her Japanese father liked to eat. And then there is bubble tea and iced-coffee, ice cream and cake, and foraged herbs and plants, and the vegetables grown by the other young artists at the London studio space she is secretly squatting in. But, Lydia can't eat any of these things. Her body doesn't work like those of other people. The only thing she can digest is blood, and it turns out that sourcing fresh pigs' blood in London - where she is living away from her vampire mother for the first time - is much more difficult than she'd anticipated.

Then there are the humans - the other artists at the studio space, the people at the gallery she interns at, the strange men that follow her after dark, and Ben, a boyish, goofy-grinned artist she is developing feelings for. Lydia knows that they are her natural prey, but she can't bring herself to feed on them. In her windowless studio, where she paints and studies the work of other artists, binge-watches Buffy the Vampire Slayer and videos of people eating food on YouTube and Instagram, Lydia considers her place in the world. She has many of the things humans wish for - perpetual youth, near-invulnerability, immortality - but she is miserable; she is lonely; and she is hungry - always hungry.

As Lydia develops as a woman and an artist, she will learn that she must reconcile the conflicts within her - between her demon and human sides, her mixed ethnic heritage, and her relationship with food, and, in turn, humans - if she is to find a way to exist in the world. Before any of this, however, she must eat.

"Absolutely brilliant - tragic, funny, eccentric and so perfectly suited to this particularly weird time. Claire Kohda takes the vampire trope and makes it her own in a way that feels fresh and original. Serious issues of race, disability, misogyny, body image, sexual abuse are handled with subtlety, insight, and a lightness of touch. The spell this novel casts is so complete I feel utterly, and happily, bitten." -- Ruth Ozeki, Booker-shortlisted author of A Tale for the Time Being

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The Miracle of Salt

Naomi Duguid

Naomi Duguid, who’s taken food lovers to many corners of the globe, now invites readers and cooks on a very different journey—a deep dive into the miracle of salt and its essential role in preserving, fermenting, and transforming food.
 
Learn age-old techniques for making sauerkraut, miso, butter, prosciutto, kimchi, salt-fermented pickles, basturma, salt-preserved lemons, brined eggs, and much more. Create a vibrant “salt pantry” filled with enticing blends of salt and spices, and with easy condiments and preserves such as Spiced Green Mango Pickle and Dried Shrimp and Garlic Chutney. Read about essential salt-preserved flavorings such as soy sauce, fish sauce, pickled plums, salted anchovies, and salt cod.
 
The wide range of international recipes that follow invite you to use this umami-rich larder of salt-preserved ingredients and salted flavorings to transform vegetables, soups, mains, pasta dishes, and desserts. Orange and Black Olive Salad balances tangy and salty. Black Bean Sauce adds intense flavor to stir-fries. Bacalao Tortilla is a nod to salt cod as a cornerstone of European kitchens. Shio Koji, a simple salt-fermented ingredient, flavors grilled vegetables and other foods with subtlety and power. Kebabs marinated with a blend of pomegranate molasses and fish sauce are a triumph of salty-sweet-tart umami. And there’s nothing like a layer of saltiness to bring out the best in sweets and desserts, from Creamy Candied Ginger and Miso Ice Cream to Yogurt Cake with Salted Lemon and Nuts, from Breton Salted-Butter Cake to Miso Cookies with Dark Chocolate Chips.
 
Working with salt-preserved and salt-fermented ingredients not only opens up a rich new world of flavors and techniques but also offers cooks the gift of connecting with generations of culinary wisdom.

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How Do We Know Ourselves?

David G. Myers

“Each chapter is a gem of insight into the human experience, cut and polished to perfection by the renowned psychologist David Myers. Better than any book I can recall, this book answers questions about why we think, feel, and act as we do—but also makes us curious to learn more.” —Angela Duckworth

A delightful tour of the wonders of our humanity from David G. Myers, the award-winning professor and author of psychology’s bestselling textbook.

Over the past three decades, millions of students have learned about psychology from textbooks by David G. Myers. To create these books and to satisfy his own endless curiosity about the human mind, Myers monitors the leading journals to discover the most extraordinary new developments in psychological science.

How Do We Know Ourselves? is a compendium of the most wondrous verities that Myers has found: a thought-provoking book about psychological science’s insights into our everyday lives. His astute observations and sharp-witted wisdom enable readers to think smarter and live happier.

Myers’s explorations range from why we so often fear the wrong things to how simply going for a walk with someone can increase rapport and empathy. He explains why we repeatedly mishear song lyrics and how the color of President Obama’s suits aided in his decision-making. Myers also explores the powers and perils of our intuition, explaining why anything can seem obvious once it happens.

Each of these forty essays offers fresh insight into our sometimes bewildering but ever-fascinating lives, all drawn from psychology’s latest research. Myers is engaging and intellectually provocative, and he brings a wealth of knowledge from more than fifty years of teaching and writing about psychology to this lively and informative collection. He inspires us to ponder timeless questions, including what might be the most intriguing one of all: How do we know ourselves?

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Nope

Two siblings on a ranch in southern California who neighbor a theme park begin to experience unexplained phenomena and attempt to capture evidence of a UFO on camera.

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Bodies Bodies Bodies

When a group of rich twenty-somethings plan a hurricane party at an isolated family mansion, a party game turns deadly in this fresh and funny look at backstabbing, fake friends, and one party gone very, very wrong.
 

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Bullet Train

Ladybug, an unlucky assassin, is determined to do his job peacefully after one too many gigs gone off the rails. However, fate seems to have other plans, as Ladybug's latest mission puts him on a collision course with lethal adversaries from around the globe. All of them have connected, yet conflicting objectives on the world's fastest train. The end of the line is just the beginning in this non-stop thrill-ride through modern-day Japan.

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Beast

Recently widowed Dr. Nate Daniels and his two teenage daughters travel to a South African game reserve managed by Martin Battles, an old family friend and wildlife biologist. However, what begins as a journey of healing soon turns into a fearsome fight for survival when a lion, a survivor of bloodthirsty poachers, begins stalking them.

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The Birdcatcher

Gayl Jones

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD LONGLIST 2022

“Gayl Jones’s work represents a watershed in American literature."
—Imani Perry


Legendary writer Gayl Jones returns with a stunning new novel about Black American artists in exile


Gayl Jones, the novelist Toni Morrison discovered decades ago and Tayari Jones recently called her favorite writer, has been described as one of the great literary writers of the 20th century. Now, for the first time in over 20 years, Jones is publishing again. In the wake of her long-awaited fifth novel, Palmares, The Birdcatcher is another singular achievement, a return to the circles of her National Book Award finalist, The Healing.

Set primarily on the island of Ibiza, the story is narrated by the writer Amanda Wordlaw, whose closest friend, a gifted sculptor named Catherine Shuger, is repeatedly institutionalized for trying to kill a husband who never leaves her. The three form a quirky triangle on the white-washed island.

A study in Black women’s creative expression, and the intensity of their relationships, this work from Jones shows off her range and insight into the vicissitudes of all human nature - rewarding longtime fans and bringing her talent to a new generation of readers.

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I Was the President's Mistress!!

Miguel Syjuco

“Brilliant . . . Miguel Syjuco is his country’s most original and unflinching literary voice.” —Salman Rushdie

"It’s a rare novel that leaves you reeling simultaneously with admiration, exhaustion, amazement at its author’s reach and skill, and desolation at the world it spreads out before you . . . [A] raging protest of a book.” —James Lasdun, The New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice)

From Miguel Syjuco, the winner of the Man Asian Literary Prize for Ilustrado, I Was the President's Mistress!! is an unflinching satire about power, corruption, sex, and all the other topics you were told never to discuss in polite company.

First came the Sexy-Sexygate scandal. Then an impeachment trial. Finally, a battle royale for the presidency. At the center of this political typhoon is Vita Nova, the most famous movie star in the Philippines and a former paramour of the country’s most powerful man. Now, for the first time ever, she bares herself completely in a tell-all memoir that puts the sensational in sensationalistic.

The setting: a sweating, heaving country. The time: right now. The plot: a drug war rages, an assassin brandishes a pistol, a damsel rises from ashes to power, and a government teeters on the brink. Among the players: a dreamer who boxed and acted his way to the presidency, his Koran-toting nemesis in the senate, a horny bishop, a cowboy turned warlord, a poor little rich boy dying with his dynasty, a washed-up reporter redeemed by one last scoop, a high-school sweetheart driven mad by decades of disappointment, and an American naval officer tempting our heroine with a way out. As Vita warns, viewer discretion is advised.

In this masterful and audacious novel, Miguel Syjuco’s signature style—hilarious, insightful, playful, provocative—animates thirteen indelible voices whose stories present a cross-section of a complicated society. I Was the President’s Mistress!! hurtles headlong into love, politics, faith, history, memory, and the ongoing war over who will tell the stories the world shall know as truth.

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Loving People Who Are Hard to Love

Joyce Meyer

Renowned Bible teacher and #1 New York Times bestselling author Joyce Meyer teaches readers to love the people in their life who are hard to love.

We're never going to be able to prevent people from saying or doing things that hurt our feelings. We will always have opportunities to get offended. But if we do things God's way, we can choose to save ourselves a lot of misery and hardship. This doesn't mean we allow people to abuse us. No, there is a time for confronting people and dealing with situations. However, the Bible commands us to love our enemies and forgive those who have wronged us, even when it feels impossible.

Everything the Lord asks us to do in the Bible is ultimately for our good. In fact, when we choose to love our enemies and forgive those who have hurt us, we are actually helping ourselves more than anyone else. Because whatever the Lord commands us to do, He is going to give us the power of the Holy Spirit to accomplish it--and that includes loving and being good to difficult people! God's love flowing through us is strong enough to melt even the hardest hearts, so use kindness as a weapon to overcome the meanness in people.

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Teaching White Supremacy

Donald Yacovone

A powerful exploration of the past and present arc of America's white supremacy--from the country's inception and Revolutionary years to its 19th century flashpoint of civil war; to the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s and today's Black Lives Matter.

"The most profoundly original cultural history in recent memory." --Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Harvard University

"Stunning, timely ... an achievement in writing public history ... Teaching White Supremacy should be read widely in our roiling debate over how to teach about race and slavery in classrooms. --David W. Blight, Sterling Professor of American History, Yale University; author of the Pulitzer-prize-winning Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom

In Teaching White Supremacy, Donald Yacovone shows us the clear and damning evidence of white supremacy's deep-seated roots in our nation's education system in a fascinating, in-depth examination of America's wide assortment of texts, from primary readers to college textbooks and other higher-ed course materials. Sifting through a wealth of materials, from the colonial era to today, Yacovone reveals the systematic ways in which white supremacist ideology has infiltrated American culture and how it has been at the heart of our collective national identity.

And, the author argues that it is the North, not the South, that bears the greater responsibility for creating the dominant strain of race theory, inculcated throughout the culture and in school textbooks, that restricted and repressed African Americans and other minorities, even as Northerners blamed the South for its legacy of slavery, segregation and racial injustice.

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Where the Crawdads Sing

For years, rumors of the "Marsh Girl" have haunted Barkley Cove, a quiet town on the North Carolina coast. So, in late 1969, when handsome Chase Andrews is found dead, the locals immediately suspect Kya Clark, the so-called Marsh Girl. But Kya is not what they say. Sensitive and intelligent, she has survived for years alone in the marsh that she calls home, finding friends in the gulls and lessons in the sand. Then the time comes when she yearns to be touched and loved. When two young men from town become intrigued by her wild beauty, Kya opens herself to a new life, until the unthinkable happens.

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Elvis

From his rise to fame to his unprecedented superstardom, rock 'n' roll icon Elvis Presley maintains a complicated relationship with his enigmatic manager, Colonel Tom Parker, over the course of 20 years. Central to Presley's journey and happiness is one of the most influential people in his life -- Priscilla.
 

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The Second First Chance

Mona Shroff

"Striking a perfect balance between drama and romance, this is sure to please."--Publishers Weekly

The Second First Chance is a big, wonderful, messy love story about family, heartbreak, strength and courage. It shows us that sometimes what we want is what we least expect, and that everything we need is often right in front of us.

Strength comes in many different forms.

Riya Desai and Dhillon Vora grew up together. Sharing secrets, hiding in their tree house, they were playmates, best friends and later--as teenagers--almost something more. Until the devastating house fire that ripped them apart, claiming the life of Dhillon's father and Riya's big brother, Samir. Riya and Dhillon have barely spoken since that terrible night, but they both made big decisions based on that fire.

Riya has chosen to fight fire with everything she's got, but it's not easy. As the only female firefighter and one of the only people of color at her fire hall, she has to prove herself over and over. Plus, she's hidden her career from her family.

Dhillon wanted to heal things, so he became a veterinarian. When a chance encounter with a rescue dog throws Riya and Dhillon together again, he's furious at her career choice. After what happened to them, how can she run into fires on purpose? For Riya, Dhillon's anger is unacceptable: How can he not see that she's protecting others from the very losses they both experienced?

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