Twelve-year-old Annie ponders the many rhythms of life the year that her mother becomes pregnant, her grandfather begins faltering, and her best friend (and running partner) becomes distant.

"The roadmap for finding purpose, meaning, and success as we age, from bestselling author, Harvard professor, and the Atlantic's happiness columnist Arthur Brooks. Many of us assume that the more successful we are, the less susceptible we become to the sense of professional and social irrelevance that often accompanies aging. But the truth is, the greater our achievements and our attachment to them, the more we notice our decline, and the more painful...

"Much has happened since Leslie Meier first introduced her beloved sleuth Lucy Stone with Mistletoe Murder. Many holidays and bake sales have come and gone, Lucy's children have all grown up. But even after twenty-four books into the bestselling series, murder is never out of the picture . . . As Tinker's Cove, Maine, buzzes over a town-wide silver wedding anniversary bash, Lucy is reminded of her nuptials and ponders the whereabouts of Beth Gerard,...

"It's a crisp, early October weekend, and business is slowing down as fall descends at the Sherlock Holmes Bookshop and Emporium and adjacent Mrs. Hudson's Tea Room. Wealthy philanthropist and prominent Sherlockian David Masterson has rented Suffolk Gardens House, where he plans to entertain his friends in a traditional English country house weekend. As the chosen caterers, Jayne Wilson and Gemma Doyle get to work preparing lavish meals and setting...

"Patric Richardson, aka the "Laundry Evangelist," reveals his revolutionary methods for cleaning clothes--and making laundry loads more fun. Doing laundry is rarely anyone's favorite task. But to Patric Richardson, laundry isn't just fun--it's a way of life. After years of running Laundry Camp at the Mall of America for thousands of eager learners, he's ready to share his tips, tricks, and hacks--bringing surprise and delight to this commonly dreaded...

Two worlds, four stories, infinite possibilities. In "I'm Waiting for You" and "On My Way," an engaged couple coordinate their separate missions to distant corners of the galaxy to ensure-through relativity-they can arrive back on Earth simultaneously to make it down the aisle. But small incidents wreak havoc on space and time, driving their wedding date further away. As centuries on Earth pass and the land and climate change, one thing is constant:...

A conversation with a group of today's military age men and women about America's involvement in Vietnam inspired Jeff Danziger to write about his own wartime experiences: "War is interesting," he reveals, "if you can avoid getting killed, and don't mind loud noises." Fans of his cartooning will recognize his mordant humor applied to his own wartime training and combat experiences: "I learned, and I think most veterans learn, that making people or...

"The tragedies and reckonings around racism that have rocked the country have created a specific crisis for parents and other caregivers: how do we talk to our children about it? How do we guide our children to avoid repeating our racist history? While we work to dismantle racist behaviors in ourselves and the world around us, how do we raise our children to be antiracists? After he wrote the National Book Award-winning Stamped from the Beginning,...

Frédéric Gros charts the many different ways we get from A to B--the pilgrimage, the promenade, the protest march, the nature ramble--and reveals what they say about us. Gros draws attention to other thinkers who also saw walking as something central to their practice. On his travels he ponders Thoreau's eager seclusion in Walden Woods; the reason Rimbaud walked in a fury, while Nerval rambled to cure his melancholy. He shows us how Rousseau walked...

Told by fictional immigrants, the tales of arrival and survival spun by Mukherjee's protagonists often paralyze the reader with their realism. They come from Italy, Trinidad, Israel, Vietnam, Afghanistan, the Philippines and elsewhere to build new lives in such places as Ann Arbor, Atlanta, Manhattan and Miami. For all the troubles the immigrants endure, Mukherjee's portrayal of them as dauntless participants in the American experiment serves to empower...