"Joe Keen and Ana Urbanek have been a couple for a long time, with all the requisite lulls and temptations, yet they remain unmarried and without children or a mortgage, as their Midwestern values (and parents) seem to require. Now on the cusp of forty, they are both working at jobs that they're not even sure they believe in anymore, but with significantly varying returns. Ana is successful, Joe is floundering--both in limbo, caught somewhere between...

"A luminous collection of essays from one of our most original and influential poets. Five decades after her debut poetry collection, Firstborn, Louise Glück is a towering figure in American letters. Written with the same probing, analytic control that has long distinguished her poetry, American Originality is Glück's second book of essays--her first, Proofs and Theories, won the 1993 PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Nonfiction. Glück's moving...

In this provocative book, author Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic connects the dots and asks a powerful question: what if the reason for the lack of women at the top--and the presence of so many incompetent leaders who also happen to be men--is not that there are too many obstacles slowing women's advancement, but that there aren't enough career-testing obstacles for men? Marshalling decades of rigorous research on leadership to build his case, Chamorro-Premuzic...

When Diane, a psychologist, falls in love with Charles, a charming and brilliant psychiatrist, there is laughter and flowers-and also darkness. After moving through infertility treatments and the trials of the adoption process as a united front, the couple is ultimately successful in creating a family. As time goes on, however, Charles becomes increasingly critical and controlling, and Diane begins to feel barraged and battered. When she is diagnosed...

In these essays, social satirist Rakoff journeys into the land of unchecked plenty that is contemporary America, skewering overconsumption, greed, vanity, selfishness, and vapidity. Somewhere along the line, our healthy self-regard has exploded into obliterating narcissism; our manic getting and spending have now become celebrated as moral virtues. Whether contrasting the elegance of one of the last flights of the supersonic Concorde with the good-times-and-chicken-wings...

For most of us, the questions of life continue to perplex : Who am I? Why am I here? How shall I live? In the late nineteenth century, a class of thinkers emerged who made solving these problems central to their work: psychotherapists. They examined unhappiness up close and sought to unroot its causes. They rejected religous dogma and philosophical abstraction and instead developed theories from frequent and systematic observation. They understood...

It's 1991, and Tara Maureen Murphy is finally on top. A frightening cross between Regina George and Tracy Flick, Tara Maureen Murphy is any high school's worst nightmare, bringing single-minded ambition, narcissism, manipulation, and jealousy to new extremes in this outrageous, satirical twist on the coming-of-age novel. She's got a hot jock boyfriend in Christopher Patrick Caparelli, her best friend Stef Campbell by her side, and she's a SENIOR,...

Do you find yourself feeling emotionally bruised, upset and confused after being in contact with your mother? Are you left doubting yourself - feeling crazy - as she remembers some incidents totally differently to how you remember them, and denies other events even happened at all? Do you somehow feel like you're not a real person in her company? Does it seem that she gets cross, angry or upset when good things happen in your life? And does she seem...

Hayden Herrera’s parents each married five times; following their desires was more important to them than looking after their children. When Herrera was only three years old, her parents separated and she and her sister moved from Cape Cod to New York City to live with their mother and their new hard-drinking stepfather. They saw their father only during summers on the Cape, when they and the other neighborhood children would be left to their own...

"Combining a high level of nurture with an emphasis on boundaries and structure, toughLOVE is the sanity-saving guide to raising school-age children who will be kind, confident adults. Our eighteen leading experts help you find solutions that come from decades in the trenches as the country's most esteemed and well-known coaches, therapists, teachers, and counselors. And, perhaps most significantly, as parents themselves,"--page [4] of cover.