A traditional American woman, a “tradwife” influencer, suddenly awakens in the brutal reality of 1855—where she must unravel whether this living nightmare is an elaborate hoax, a twisted reality show, or something far more sinister in this sensational debut novel. My name was Natalie Heller Mills, and I was perfect at being alive. Natalie lives a traditional lifestyle. Her charming farmhouse is rustic, her husband a handsome cowboy, her six children each more delightful than the last. So what if there are nannies and producers behind the scenes, her kitchen hiding industrial-grade fridges and ovens, her husband the heir to a political dynasty? What Natalie’s followers—all 8 million of them—don’t know won’t hurt them. And The Angry Women? The privileged, Ivy League, coastal elite haters who call her an antifeminist iconoclast? They’re sick with jealousy. Because Natalie isn’t simply living the good life, she’s living the ideal—and just so happens to be building an empire from it. Until one morning she wakes up in a life that isn’t hers. Her home, her husband, her children—they’re all familiar, but something’s off. Her kitchen is warmed by a sputtering fire rather than electricity, her children are dirty and strange, and her soft-handed husband is suddenly a competent farmer. Just yesterday Natalie was curating photos of homemade jam for her Instagram, and now she’s expected to haul firewood and handwash clothes until her fingers bleed. Has she become the unwitting star of a ruthless reality show? Could it really be time travel? Is she being tested by God? By Satan? When Natalie suffers a brutal injury in the woods, she realizes two things: This is not her beautiful life, and she must escape by any means possible. A gripping, electrifying novel that is as darkly funny as it is frightening, Yesteryear is a gimlet-eyed look at tradition, fame, faith, and the grand performance of womanhood.

When was the last time you thought something through by yourself, without a screen? There is a version of you that has stopped thinking; you just haven’t noticed yet. It happens quietly. You stop drafting emails and start approving them. You cannot answer a question without checking your phone. You stop wrestling with the idea and start accepting the summary. Every shortcut feels like a win until you’ve outsourced your mind to machines that don’t doubt, don’t feel, and don’t care. The atrophy is subtle; the cost is staggering. It’s the promotion lost to the person who can still reason out loud. It’s your child freezing at an open-ended question because no one ever let her sit in the discomfort of not knowing. We are becoming a generation that prompts brilliantly and thinks almost nothing, and the most dangerous part is how good it feels on the way down. But you don’t have to go down. Use Your Brain is a field guide for revitalizing your creativity and original thinking when the generic answer is always a tap away, whether it’s in the boardroom or around the kitchen table. From CEOs to artists to students to parents, the most effective navigators of the modern era have one thing in common: they aren’t afraid to pick up a new tool, but they know exactly when to put it down and think for themselves. Drawing on years of research, globally-recognized leadership expert Erica Dhawan delivers common-sense habits for protecting your judgment in the age of AI that you can start building tonight. You will learn how to catch yourself on autopilot before you act, how to interrogate an answer that looks finished, how to separate signal from noise under pressure, and how to own a decision instead of laundering it through a machine. The thinking class and the prompting class are separating in real time, and the gap is going to be brutal. The window to keep your edge is still open. It won’t stay open long.

A groundbreaking work of history and reportage that unveils the stranger-than-fiction world of multilevel marketing, from the shadowy cabals at the top to the strivers at the bottom, whose deferred dreams churn a massive money-making scam that has remade American society. Multilevel marketing companies like Amway, Mary Kay, and Herbalife advertise the ultimate business opportunity: the chance to be your own boss. In exchange for peddling their wares, they offer a world of pink Cadillacs, white-columned mansions, tropical vacations, and—most precious of all—financial freedom. If, that is, you’re willing to shell out for expensive products, recruit everyone you know to buy them, and make them recruit everyone they know to do the same—thus creating the “multiple levels” of multilevel marketing, or MLM. Despite overwhelming evidence that multilevel marketing causes most of its participants to lose their money, and that many MLM companies are pyramid schemes, the industry’s dubious origins, inextricably tied to well-known ideological figures like Ronald Reagan, have escaped public scrutiny. Behind the scenes of American life, MLM has slithered in the wake of every economic crisis of the last century, from the Depression to the pandemic, ensnaring laid-off workers, stay-at-home moms, teachers, nurses—anyone who has been left behind by inequality. In Little Bosses Everywhere, journalist Bridget Read tells the gripping story of multilevel marketing in full for the first time, winding from sunny post-war California, where a failed salesman started a vitamin business, through the suburbs of Michigan and North Carolina, where MLM bought its political protection, to the stadium-sized conventions where top sellers today preach to die-hard recruits. MLM has been endorsed by multiple American presidents, has its own Congressional caucus, and enriched powerful people, like the DeVos and Van Andel families, Warren Buffet, and Donald Trump. Along the way, Read delves into the heartbreaking stories of those enmeshed in the majority-female industry: a veteran in Florida searching for healing; a young mom in Texas struggling to feed her children; a waitress scraping by in Brooklyn. A wild trip down an endless rabbit hole of greed and exploitation, Little Bosses Everywhere exposes multilevel marketing as American capitalism’s stealthiest PR campaign: a cunning right-wing political project that has shaped nearly everything about how we live.

The Isle of Lewis is the most remote, harshly beautiful place in Scotland, where the difficulty of existence seems outweighed only by people's fear of God. But older, pagan values lurk beneath the veneer of faith, the primal yearning for blood and revenge. When a brutal murder on the island bears the hallmarks of a similar slaying in Edinburgh, police detective Fin Macleod is dispatched north to investigate. But since he himself was raised on Lewis, the investigation also represents a journey home and into his past. Each year the island's men perform the hunting of the gugas, a savage custom no longer necessary for survival, but which they cling to even more fiercely in the face of the demands of modern morality. For Fin the hunt recalls a horrific tragedy, which after all this time may have begun to demand another sacrifice. The Blackhouse is a crime novel of rare power and vision. Peter May has crafted a page-turning murder mystery that explores the darkness in our souls, and just how difficult it is to escape the past.

A deeply rendered self-portrait of a lifelong surfer by the acclaimed New Yorker writer Barbarian Days is William Finnegan’s memoir of an obsession, a complex enchantment. Surfing only looks like a sport. To initiates, it is something else entirely: a beautiful addiction, a demanding course of study, a morally dangerous pastime, a way of life. Raised in California and Hawaii, Finnegan started surfing as a child. He has chased waves all over the world, wandering for years through the South Pacific, Australia, Asia, Africa. A bookish boy, and then an excessively adventurous young man, he went on to become a distinguished writer and war reporter. Barbarian Days takes us deep into unfamiliar worlds, some of them right under our noses—off the coasts of New York and San Francisco. It immerses the reader in the edgy camaraderie of close male friendships annealed in challenging waves. Finnegan shares stories of life in a whites-only gang in a tough school in Honolulu even while his closest friend was a Hawaiian surfer. He shows us a world turned upside down for kids and adults alike by the social upheavals of the 1960s. He details the intricacies of famous waves and his own apprenticeships to them. Youthful folly—he drops LSD while riding huge Honolua Bay, on Maui—is served up with rueful humor. He and a buddy, their knapsacks crammed with reef charts, bushwhack through Polynesia. They discover, while camping on an uninhabited island in Fiji, one of the world’s greatest waves. As Finnegan’s travels take him ever farther afield, he becomes an improbable anthropologist: unpicking the picturesque simplicity of a Samoan fishing village, dissecting the sexual politics of Tongan interactions with Americans and Japanese, navigating the Indonesian black market while nearly succumbing to malaria. Throughout, he surfs, carrying readers with him on rides of harrowing, unprecedented lucidity. Barbarian Days is an old-school adventure story, an intellectual autobiography, a social history, a literary road movie, and an extraordinary exploration of the gradual mastering of an exacting, little understood art. Today, Finnegan’s surfing life is undiminished. Frantically juggling work and family, he chases his enchantment through Long Island ice storms and obscure corners of Madagascar.

Vikram Seth's novel is, at its core, a love story: Lata and her mother, Mrs. Rupa Mehra, are both trying to find—through love or through exacting maternal appraisal—a suitable boy for Lata to marry. Set in the early 1950s, in an India newly independent and struggling through a time of crisis, A Suitable Boy takes us into the richly imagined world of four large extended families and spins a compulsively readable tale of their lives and loves. A sweeping panoramic portrait of a complex, multiethnic society in flux, A Suitable Boy remains the story of ordinary people caught up in a web of love and ambition, humor and sadness, prejudice and reconciliation, the most delicate social etiquette and the most appalling violence.

The book is structured as a series of loosely connected vignettes. Burroughs stated that the chapters are intended to be read in any order. The reader follows the narration of junkie William Lee, who takes on various aliases, from the U.S. to Mexico, eventually to Tangier and the dreamlike Interzone. The vignettes are drawn from Burroughs' own experiences in these places and his addiction to drugs (heroin, morphine, and while in Tangier, majoun [a strong hashish confection] as well as a German opioid, brand name Eukodol, of which he wrote frequently). [source wiki}

Parce qu'elle a laissé ses amies organiser leur escapade sororale durant la Toussaint, Clotilde se retrouve dans une ville qu'elle avait rayée de la carte. Ici, il y a vingt ans, elle a vécu avec Monsieur, un homme qui fit d'elle sa Madame sous prétexte de lui faire du bien. Les demoiselles en détresse qui guettent le chevalier blanc omettent d'être lucides, croire en l'existence de l'âme sœur fait oublier que, sous son heaume, le chevalier peut être un loup. De son assujettissement d'alors, Clotilde a encore honte, et elle a beaucoup de mal à se découdre la bouche pour reconnaître les faits. La preuve : ni Adélaïde, ni Judith, ni Bérengère, ni Hermeline ne connaissent cette histoire, et aucune ne se doute qu'à deux rues de leur location, dans son immense maison, habite toujours Monsieur. Clotilde se demande si libérer sa parole pourrait aider la honte à enfin changer de camp.

From popular The Atlantic columnist Ian Bogost, a lively reflection about how we’ve become disconnected from the physical world—and how to reclaim gratification in your day-to-day life. In an era dominated by convenience and efficiency, one would think that life would be simpler, easier, and most importantly, happier. After all, shouldn’t all the time saved with machines and technology leave us with more time for ourselves? The Atlantic columnist Ian Bogost thinks not. From digital tickets to automated faucets, he argues that the simple pleasures of daily life have been stripped away, replaced by sleek, but soulless, design. Through engaging anecdotes and sharp analysis, Bogost uncovers how modern conveniences not only fail to deliver on their promises but also rob us of small, satisfying tasks and moments that keep us grounded and human. He challenges us to rethink our daily interactions with the material world and illuminates how the loss of these tangible interactions has contributed to widespread feelings of disconnection and dissatisfaction. But all hope is not lost. Bogost guides us to identify and appreciate the overlooked joys hidden in everyday life. By reforming how we approach ordinary tasks, we can rediscover the gratification embedded in the tactile world around us. Humorous, thought-provoking, and practical, The Small Stuff reveals that finding joy isn’t about achieving monumental happiness or prolonged satisfaction. It’s about doing small things, deliberately and with attention, to unlock the basic pleasures that flavor our daily lives.