LIFE GETS BETTER BY WENDY LUSTBADER

“Life does not get better so long as we avoid the pain that spurs us to evolve. We do not develop emotionally, because we block out our feelings rather than bear them. We cannot become fluent in intimacy, because we keep ourselves hidden. We do not become confident, because we duck challenges rather than do the kind of work that instills self-worth. There are no shortcuts to life’s bounty.” 

THE DOLLHOUSE BY FIONA DAVIS

Fiona Davis's stunning debut novel pulls readers into the lush world of New York City's glamorous Barbizon Hotel for Women, where in the 1950s a generation of aspiring models, secretaries, and editors lived side by side while attempting to claw their way to fairy-tale success, and where a present-day journalist becomes consumed with uncovering a dark secret buried deep within the Barbizon's glitzy past.

When she arrives at the famed Barbizon Hotel in 1952, secretarial school enrollment in hand, Darby McLaughlin is everything her modeling agency hall mates aren't: plain, self-conscious, homesick, and utterly convinced she doesn't belong—a notion the models do nothing to disabuse. Yet when Darby befriends Esme, a Barbizon maid, she's introduced to an entirely new side of New York City: seedy downtown jazz clubs where the music is as addictive as the heroin that's used there, the startling sounds of bebop, and even the possibility of romance.

Over half a century later, the Barbizon's gone condo and most of its long-ago guests are forgotten. But rumors of Darby's involvement in a deadly skirmish with a hotel maid back in 1952 haunt the halls of the building as surely as the melancholy music that floats from the elderly woman's rent-controlled apartment. It's a combination too intoxicating for journalist Rose Lewin, Darby's upstairs neighbor, to resist—not to mention the perfect distraction from her own imploding personal life. Yet as Rose's obsession deepens, the ethics of her investigation become increasingly murky, and neither woman will remain unchanged when the shocking truth is finally revealed. 

DAILY OM LEARNING TO LIVE BY MADISYN TAYLOR

Wouldn’t it be great if we were born with instruction manuals? Each one would be different based on what we needed to learn, but the basics would be the same: how to create healthy relationships, how to deal with sorrow and pain, how to reach our goals, and how to know what we want to do with our lives when we grow up. We would continue to receive our own unique life lessons, but we would have a manual to refer to when feeling overwhelmed or lost.

In this book, based on the popular Website DailyOM (www.dailyom.com), co-founder Madisyn Taylor seamlessly weaves together her award-winning inspirational thoughts with her achingly honest personal story, revealing the inspiration behind many of the DailyOM messages that touch millions of people every day. Learning to Live is the next best thing to a personal instruction manual: a guiding light to reassure us that we’re on the right path, and to help fix us when we feel broken.

CREATING MIND HOW THE BRAIN WORKS BY JOHN E. DOWLING

What makes us human and unique among all creatures is our brain. Consciousness, perception, emotion, memory, learning, language, and intelligence all originate in and depend on the brain. Over the past century, our understanding of the brain has raced forward to reveal many of the mechanisms by which the brain creates mind and consciousness. In this brief introduction to the brain, neuroscientist John Dowling conveys to the general reader the essence and vitality of the field of neuroscience-the progress we are making in understanding how brains work and some of our strategies for studying brain function. Dowling often relates the exciting discoveries of neuroscience to specific examples of brain phenomena such as disease, mental illness, aging, or brain injury, demonstrating how these alterations in brain function cast light on normalcy and describing some of the therapies enabled by our understanding of the brain. 

WALKING LIONS BY AYELET GUNDAR GOSHEN

Dr. Eitan Green is a good man. He saves lives. Then, speeding along a deserted moonlit road in his SUV, he hits someone. Seeing that the man, an African migrant, is beyond help, he flees the scene. It is a decision that changes everything. Because the dead man’s wife knows what happened. When she knocks at Eitan’s door the next day, tall and beautiful, he discovers that her price is not money. It is something else entirely, something that will shatter Eitan’s safe existence and take him into a world of secrets and lies. Waking Lions is a gripping, suspenseful and morally devastating drama of guilt and survival, shame and desire. 

DEFEATING DEPRESSION BY DR. LEO BATTENHAUSEN

Do you feel stuck, trapped in a cycle of loneliness, despair, discontent and sadness? Do you have trouble sleeping, have to "wind” yourself up to get out of bed in the morning, have difficulty concentrating and focusing on work, loved ones and family? According to a recent survey 54 million people do. Defeating Depression will guide you toward identifying, understanding, coping with and healing conflicts and issues in your life so you will no longer feel powerless and filled with pain. Finally, you will be free to find and enjoy happiness and satisfaction.

Defeating Depression will teach you how to identify these problem areas in your life and overcome barriers before you feel like they are paralyzing you. It will provide you with the tools to face life's issues and show you how to handle undesirable feelings, attitudes, reactions and falsities that cause too many people to feel powerless. Compiled from his twenty-five years of experience, Battenhausen's revolutionary "Calm and Sense"approach will empower you to take control of your life and feelings, not just today, but in the future. 

LESS BY ANDREW SEAN GREER

You are a failed novelist about to turn fifty. A wedding invitation arrives in the mail: your boyfriend of the past nine years is engaged to someone else. You can't say yes--it would be too awkward--and you can't say no--it would look like defeat. On your desk are a series of invitations to half-baked literary events around the world.

QUESTION: How do you arrange to skip town?

ANSWER: You accept them all.

What would possibly go wrong? Arthur Less will almost fall in love in Paris, almost fall to his death in Berlin, barely escape to a Moroccan ski chalet from a Saharan sandstorm, accidentally book himself as the (only) writer-in-residence at a Christian Retreat Center in Southern India, and encounter, on a desert island in the Arabian Sea, the last person on Earth he wants to face. Somewhere in there: he will turn fifty. Through it all, there is his first love. And there is his last.

Because, despite all these mishaps, missteps, misunderstandings and mistakes, LESS is, above all, a love story.

A scintillating satire of the American abroad, a rumination on time and the human heart, a bittersweet romance of chances lost, by an author The New York Times has hailed as "inspired, lyrical," "elegiac," "ingenious," as well as "too sappy by half," LESS shows a writer at the peak of his talents raising the curtain on our shared human comedy.