From the creator of The Good Place and the cocreator of Parks and Recreation, a hilarious, thought-provoking guide to living an ethical life, drawing on 2,500 years of deep thinking from around the world.Most people think of themselves as “good,” but it’s not always easy to determine what’s “good” or “bad”—especially in a world filled with complicated choices and pitfalls and booby traps and bad advice. Fortunately, many smart philosophers have been pondering this conundrum for millennia and they have guidance for us. With bright wit and deep insight, How to Be Perfect explains concepts like deontology, utilitarianism, existentialism, ubuntu, and more so we can sound cool at parties and become better people. Schur starts off with easy ethical questions like “Should I punch my friend in the face for no reason?” (No.) and works his way up to the most complex moral issues we all face. Such as: Can I still enjoy great art if it was created by terrible people? How much money should I give to charity? Why bother being good at all when there are no consequences for being bad? And much more. By the time the book is done, we’ll know exactly how to act in every conceivable situation, so as to produce a verifiably maximal amount of moral good. We will be perfect, and all our friends will be jealous. OK, not quite. Instead, we’ll gain fresh, funny, inspiring wisdom on the toughest issues we face every day.

Cormoran Strike is back, with his assistant Robin Ellacott, in a mystery based around soldiers returning from war. When a mysterious package is delivered to Robin Ellacott, she is horrified to discover that it contains a woman’s severed leg. Her boss, private detective Cormoran Strike, is less surprised but no less alarmed. There are four people from his past who he thinks could be responsible – and Strike knows that any one of them is capable of sustained and unspeakable brutality. With the police focusing on the one suspect Strike is increasingly sure is not the perpetrator, he and Robin take matters into their own hands, and delve into the dark and twisted worlds of the other three men. But as more horrendous acts occur, time is running out for the two of them… Career of Evil is the third in the series featuring private detective Cormoran Strike and his assistant Robin Ellacott. A mystery and also a story of a man and a woman at a crossroads in their personal and professional lives.

Recalling Olive Kitteridge in its richness, structure, and complexity, Anything Is Possible explores the whole range of human emotion through the intimate dramas of people struggling to understand themselves and others. Here are two sisters: One trades self-respect for a wealthy husband while the other finds in the pages of a book a kindred spirit who changes her life. The janitor at the local school has his faith tested in an encounter with an isolated man he has come to help; a grown daughter longs for mother love even as she comes to accept her mother’s happiness in a foreign country; and the adult Lucy Barton (the heroine of My Name Is Lucy Barton, the author’s celebrated New York Times bestseller) returns to visit her siblings after seventeen years of absence. Reverberating with the deep bonds of family, and the hope that comes with reconciliation, Anything Is Possible again underscores Elizabeth Strout’s place as one of America’s most respected and cherished authors.

A scathing critique of the colonial legal system’s denial of children’s rights One afternoon in 2016, law professor Robin Hansen receives a call. On the other end of the line is “Jacquie”—a pregnant Indigenous woman, nine weeks from her due date and terrified for the welfare of her unborn son. Jacquie has been sentenced to a custodial prison sentence and her son will be automatically separated from her immediately after his birth. As Hansen works to help Jacquie with her appeal, she uncovers the legal system’s inherent discrimination against mothers in custody and the children born to them. Using Access to Information requests along with extensive research, Hansen examines the legal rights of these women—the majority of whom are Indigenous—and finds that Jacquie and her son are by no means automatic mother-infant separation without due process remains the norm in most jurisdictions in Canada. Prison Born calls attention to the colonial and gendered assumptions that continue to underpin the legal system—assumptions that so frequently lead to the violation of the rights and denial of personhood for children and their mothers.

A scathing critique of the colonial legal system’s denial of children’s rights One afternoon in 2016, law professor Robin Hansen receives a call. On the other end of the line is “Jacquie”—a pregnant Indigenous woman, nine weeks from her due date and terrified for the welfare of her unborn son. Jacquie has been sentenced to a custodial prison sentence and her son will be automatically separated from her immediately after his birth. As Hansen works to help Jacquie with her appeal, she uncovers the legal system’s inherent discrimination against mothers in custody and the children born to them. Using Access to Information requests along with extensive research, Hansen examines the legal rights of these women—the majority of whom are Indigenous—and finds that Jacquie and her son are by no means automatic mother-infant separation without due process remains the norm in most jurisdictions in Canada. Prison Born calls attention to the colonial and gendered assumptions that continue to underpin the legal system—assumptions that so frequently lead to the violation of the rights and denial of personhood for children and their mothers.

An undocumented activist and a social scientist come together to tally of the structural costs of undocumented lifeAn inhumane math pervades this even as our government extracts labor and often taxes from undocumented workers, it excludes these same workers from its social safety net. As a result, these essential workers struggle to get their own basic needs met, from healthcare to education, from freedom of association to the ability to drive to work without looking for ICE in the rearview mirror.When Alíx Dick's family found themselves in the crosshairs of cartel violence in Sinaloa, Mexico, she and her siblings were forced to flee to the U.S. Many of the scenes that she shares are difficult and escaping from a relationship in which her partner threatened to report her to immigration; getting root canals done in an underground dental clinic. But there are moments of triumph, founding her own nonprofit; working on films that tell important stories; and working with her co-author Dr. Garcia to tell her story in a framework that lays bare the realities of structural oppression.As Alíx and Antero tally the costs of undocumented life, they present a final bill of what is owed to the immigrant community. In this way, their book flips the traditional narrative about the economics of immigration on its head.

After her parents' deaths, Aria Jones is sent to live with her reclusive starlet aunt at the Chateau Marmont, the hotel on Hollywood Boulevard with a notorious reputation.Left alone to wander the hotel, Aria sees everything - all the ways people wheel and deal for fame. But the Marmont isn't meant for young girls with big hearts, and Aria discovers an insidious secret that will haunt her childhood.As she matures, she finds solace in the hotel's library. Her sole goal is to be as inconspicuous as possible. Until one day, the hotel is sold to mysterious rock star Theo Winchester and his troubled daughter, Adele. Will Aria realise there's more to life than being invisible?Captivating from its very first page, The Chateau on Sunset blends the beloved Jane Eyre story with the rich and colourful history of the entertainment industry from the 1950s to the 1970s.

America was not founded as a Christian nation. Who gains what from myths about the past? Why are many of us susceptible to their power? And how can the truth about a nation's past prevail? In this lively book, Warren Throckmorton, coauthor of Getting Jefferson Right, investigates the gloss that Christian nationalist storytellers put on history and equips readers to debunk seven myths that they propagate. Working in the tradition of muckraking journalists, Throckmorton, whose fact-checking of David Barton's book The Jefferson Lies convinced the publisher to pull it from the shelves, picks a fight with fables told about the past by those who are trying to erase the separation of church and state. Did the Puritans actually establish a covenant with God, and were all the founders evangelical Christians? Are the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution based on the Bible, and did delegates at the constitutional convention in Philadelphia actually kneel for daily prayers? With keen attention to primary sources, Throckmorton dismantles the myths, piece by historical piece. And he How are the genocide of Indigenous people and enslavement of millions of Africans not definitive repudiations of some righteous Christian past? It's never been more important to understand why myths about the past wield so much force--and who those myths empower. White Christian nationalism thrives on origin stories, and Throckmorton equips readers to debunk the false ones. The real heritage of America is neither as a Christian state nor pure secularism; it is a more nuanced story, he says, one of religious tolerance and pluralism. To understand Christian nationalism, we must know the power of myth. To counter it, we must know the facts.

Recalling Olive Kitteridge in its richness, structure, and complexity, Anything Is Possible explores the whole range of human emotion through the intimate dramas of people struggling to understand themselves and others. Here are two sisters: One trades self-respect for a wealthy husband while the other finds in the pages of a book a kindred spirit who changes her life. The janitor at the local school has his faith tested in an encounter with an isolated man he has come to help; a grown daughter longs for mother love even as she comes to accept her mother’s happiness in a foreign country; and the adult Lucy Barton (the heroine of My Name Is Lucy Barton, the author’s celebrated New York Times bestseller) returns to visit her siblings after seventeen years of absence. Reverberating with the deep bonds of family, and the hope that comes with reconciliation, Anything Is Possible again underscores Elizabeth Strout’s place as one of America’s most respected and cherished authors.

With Bibles and baptism, a movement was born. From renegade gatherings of Christian believers in the 1500s to a global communion of more than 2.1 million members, the Anabaptist-Mennonite movement has been marked by faithfulness and failure, continuity and conflict, radicalism and reformation. In this engaging history, Radicals and Reformers traces the origins and development of the Anabaptist and Mennonite movements from their beginnings in Europe through their spread across the globe. In this new authoritative introduction to Anabaptist history, historian Troy Osborne reflects on the ways that Anabaptists have defined their identity in new settings and in response to new theological, intellectual, geographic, and political contexts. Drawing from current scholarship and a range of written and visual sources, this book provides an overview of how Mennonites from Zurich to Zimbabwe have adapted to or resisted the world around them.

Haunted by the freak accident that killed their father when they were children, Jim and Bob Burgess escaped from their Maine hometown of Shirley Falls for New York City as soon as they possibly could. Jim, a sleek, successful corporate lawyer, has belittled his bighearted brother their whole lives, and Bob, a Legal Aid attorney who idolizes Jim, has always taken it in stride. But their long-standing dynamic is upended when their sister, Susan—the Burgess sibling who stayed behind—urgently calls them home. Her lonely teenage son, Zach, has gotten himself into a world of trouble, and Susan desperately needs their help. And so the Burgess brothers return to the landscape of their childhood, where the long-buried tensions that have shaped and shadowed their relationship begin to surface in unexpected ways that will change them forever. With a rare combination of brilliant storytelling, exquisite prose, and remarkable insight into character, Elizabeth Strout has brought to life two deeply human protagonists whose struggles and triumphs will resonate with readers long after they turn the final page. Tender, tough-minded, loving, and deeply illuminating about the ties that bind us to family and home, The Burgess Boys is Elizabeth Strout's newest and perhaps most astonishing work of literary art.