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Yin yoga not only strengthens your body―makes it more vital and powerful in a yin way―it can also help with a lot of typical ailments, may they be allergies, teeth grinding, menstrual pain, headaches, infertility, skin problems, or back pain. In Be Healthy with Yin Yoga, best-selling author Stefanie Arend puts together many Yin yoga sequences to activate the self-healing powers of body and mind. She offers a holistic approach that includes Western and Traditional Chinese Medicine, breathing techniques, meditation, nutrition, fascia therapy exercises, and self-reflective questions to encourage deeper explorations of the roots of readers’ ailments. Suited for both beginners and experienced yoga practitioners, and replete with high-quality pictures that make the poses and sequences easy to follow and understand, Be Healthy with Yin Yoga is a wonderful support for anyone who wants to take their health back into their own hands. Author: Stefanie Arend Publication Date: August 20, 2019 -
2015 Best Book Awards Finalist in Autobiography/Memoir 2016 IPPY Gold Medal Winner in Autobiography/Memoir 2016 International Book Award Finalist in Autobiography/Memoirs Lene Fogelberg is dying—she is sure of it—but no doctor in Sweden, her home country, believes her. Love stories enfold her, with the man who will become her husband, with her enchanting surroundings, and later, with her two precious daughters. But despite her happiness, the question she has carried in her heart since childhood—Will I die young?—is closing in, threatening all she holds dear, even her sanity. When her young family moves to the US, an answer, a diagnosis, is finally found: she is in the last stages of a fatal congenital heart disease. But is it too late? Unflinchingly honest and often harrowing, Beautiful Affliction is an inspiring account of growing up and living on the verge of death—and of the beauty, harshness, loneliness, and, ultimately, unbending love that can be found there. Author: Lene Fogelberg Publication Date: September 15, 2015 -
“An alluring story of New York nightlife and its seedy players.” —Cat Marnell, VICE columnist “Equal parts Patti Smith’s Just Kids and The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Beautiful Garbage is a voyeuristic panorama of the vice and vanity of the downtown art scene in the 1980s.” —Ivy Pochoda, author of The Art of Disappearing and Visitation Street “Beautiful Garbage offers up one woman’s tour of duty of a New York City consumed by art, sex, and ambition. By turns passionate, cruel, shocking, and engrossing, this is a novel steeped in the lure of glamour and transformation the Big Apple’s always had to offer.” —Rachel Kramer Bussel, editor of Women in Lust and Fast Girls Jodi Plum: smart, talented, ambitious, troubled. Fresh out of her teens, she leaves suburbia for Manhattan’s glam and gritty art scene, and almost immediately falls into the clutches of Monika, a beautiful photographer. With the help of her new mentor, Jodi quickly becomes a rising star—but when a skeleton from her past surfaces, her dream life crashes to a halt, and she slips into a world of parties, drugs, and high-class prostitution. Set in the crime-plagued New York City of the 1980s, Beautiful Garbage parallels an artist’s journey with her sexual epiphanies, exploring the notorious milieu of the decade’s downtown art scene from the point of view of a young female artist—and offering a satirical and irreverent look at post-’70s sexual politics and the world of elite call girls. Author: Jill Di Donato Publication Date: April 1, 2013 -
As the march of boots echoes from overseas, all nations that border the Pacific and beyond are invited to build pavilions on Treasure Island at the Golden Gate International Exposition, an event dedicated to the pursuit of world peace and brotherhood. Meanwhile, Lily Nordby, smart, strong-willed, and feisty, lands a job at the Examiner and is given a once-in-a-lifetime assignment covering the Exposition. There she meets Tokido Okamura, the host of the Japanese Pavilion—and despite being highly suspicious of his true purpose on the island, she’s swept up in a whirlwind of powerful emotions that lead her into unknown territory. Brilliant and enigmatic Woodrow Packard, a Mayan art scholar at the Expo, prefers remaining aloof and alone. But his infatuation and deepening relationship with Lily thrusts him into the limelight. He asks himself, could someone as smart and beautiful as she return the love of a man who is a dwarf? In an attempt to prevent Lily from spiraling into danger, Woodrow intercedes to help her uncover her family’s past—but when fate intervenes, they are both pulled into a destiny they could never have imagined. Mixing fact and fiction with a dash of noir, Beautiful Illusion is a story of love and deception that explores what happens when human hearts collide as the world is plotting war. Author: Christie Nelson Publication Date: May 1, 2018 -
East Texas, 1972. Sixteen-year-old Leni O’Hare spends her free time drawing and galloping her mare across the chaparral. Horse crazy and rebellious, she fears her dream of becoming an artist will be thwarted by her strict mother, the small-town values of her community, and her family’s meager finances. A desperate bid to save her beloved mare from being sold brings her together with Caleb McGrath, the brainy and gentle scion of the county’s richest rancher, whose dream of becoming a physicist also pushes the bounds of their town and defies his family’s expectations. When tragedy strikes Leni’s family, and Caleb’s brother returns from Vietnam angry and dangerous, the two grow closer and make a plan to leave and start a life together. Before they can go, though, Leni learns of something she fears will derail Caleb’s hard-earned shot at the future he wants. Choosing to keep what she’s learned secret, she sets them on sudden and separate paths. New York City, 1986. Leni, now an artist and activist, and Caleb, now engaged and working on Wall Street, meet once again. Their old passion reignites. Can their love for one another overcome the choices made in the past? And when Leni’s secret—one that impacts not only Leni and Caleb but also four generations of Leni’s family—is finally revealed, will it be too late for them? Pub Date: April 4, 2023 Author: Donnaldson Brown -
In the 1940s, in segregated Knoxville, Tennessee, Gail (white) and Hanna (black) shared a crib in Gail’s parents’ house, where Hanna’s mother, Sophie, was the live-in maid. When the girls were four, Sophie taught them to swim, and soon they were gleefully doing cannonballs off the diving board, playing a game they'd invented based on their favorite Billie Holiday song. By the time they’re both in college, however, the two friends have lost touch with each other. A reunion in Washington, DC, sought by Gail but resented by Hanna, sets the tone for their relationship from then on. Careers, marriage, and a tragic death further strain the already complicated friendship. Can these lifelong friends find a way to move forward, or will they remain mired in the past? Author: Jill McCroskey Coupe Publication Date: May 26, 2020 -
Will Franklin—former academic geek, now recognized as a rare talent in the “fake it ’til you make it” biotech industry—is in the wings for his dream job as next CEO of a global powerhouse. Or so he thinks, until his boss, Chet, calls him into his office and angrily tells him he is going to be fired. Chet hints at impropriety, but won’t say more—and before Will can press him he falls so ill that he’s put on ventilator care. Now, instead of losing his job, Will finds himself in the position of supporting Chet’s family through the hell of a dire illness. Just as suddenly, he finds his leadership ability tested by a crippling cyberattack that threatens the entire industry and leaves him with little time to untangle the mystery of whatever it is that Chet uncovered before he got sick. Can Will clear his name before the ax falls—or his marriage collapses—due to his lapse in judgment? And does Bella, a young and beautiful rising star making waves with her own start-up company, have anything to do with this mess? Author: Maren Cooper Pub Date: November 14, 2023 -
“A fascinating window into the frightening and relentless world of anorexia and, equally, young womanhood.” ―Katherine Boyle, Veritas Literary Agency Shani Raviv is a misfit teen whose peer-pressured diet spirals down into full-blown anorexia nervosa— something no one in her early-nineties, local South African community knows anything about. Fourteen-year-old Shani spends the next six years being “Ana” (as many anorexics call it), on the run from her feelings. She goes from aerobics addict to Israeli soldier to rave bunny to wannabe reborn, using sex, drugs, exercise and, above all, starvation, to numb out everything along the way. But one night, at age twenty, Shani faces the rude awakening that if she doesn’t slow down, break her denial, and seek help, she will starve to death. Three years later, her hardest journey of all begins: the journey to let go of being Ana and learn to love herself. Being Ana is an exploration into the soul and psyche of a young woman wrestling with anorexia’s demons— one that not only exposes the real horrors of a day in the life of an anorexic girl but also reveals the courage it takes to stop fighting and find healing. Author: Shani Raviv Publication Date: July 11, 2017 -
In this richly depicted story, told in vignettes relative to markers of age and experience, Patricia Eagle reveals the heartbreak and destruction of her sexual abuse, from age four to thirteen, by her father. A victim of her father’s anger and her mother’s complacency with his abusive behavior, Eagle uses dissociation and numbing in response to the abuse, and as a way to block her own sense of self. How does a child confused by episodes of abuse come to know what is safe or unsafe, right or wrong, normal or abnormal? How does a young woman learn the difference between real love and a desire for sexual pleasure stimulated by abusive childhood sexual experiences? Careening through life, Eagle wonders how to trust others and, most importantly, herself. As a mature woman struggling to understand and live with her past, she remains earnest in her pursuit of clarity, compassion, and trust to build a stronger life. Being Mean is about blocking sexual abuse memories, having them surface, then learning how to acknowledge and live with incomprehensible experiences in the healthiest ways possible. Author: Patricia Eagle Publication Date: June 11, 2019 -
It’s Pittsburgh, 1910—the golden age of steel in the land of opportunity. Eastern European immigrants Janos and Karina Kovac should be prospering, but their American dream is fading faster than the colors on the sun-drenched flag of their adopted country. Janos is exhausted from a decade of twelve-hour shifts, seven days per week, at the local mill. Karina, meanwhile, thinks she has found an escape from their run-down ethnic neighborhood in the modern home of a mill manager—until she discovers she is expected to perform the duties of both housekeeper and mistress. Though she resents her employer’s advances, they are more tolerable than being groped by drunks at the town’s boarding house. When Janos witnesses a gruesome accident at his furnace on the same day Karina learns she will lose her job, the Kovac family begins to unravel. Janos learns there are people at the mill who pose a greater risk to his life than the work itself, while Karina—panicked by the thought of returning to work at the boarding house—becomes unhinged and wreaks a path of destruction so wide that her children are swept up in the storm. In the aftermath, Janos must rebuild his shattered family with the help of an unlikely ally. Impeccably researched and deeply human, Beneath the Veil of Smoke and Ash delivers a timeless message about mental illness while paying tribute to the sacrifices America’s immigrant ancestors made. Author: Tammy Pasterick Publication Date: September 21 ,2021 -
In Benediction for a Black Swan, Mimi Zollars explores the topics of childhood, children, marriage and divorce, alcoholism, and the sensual world in a series of edgy, seductive, irreverent, and ethereal poems. Incorporating elements of magical realism, Zollars’ sexy, darkly beautiful works embrace the miraculous as ordinary—and turn the ordinary into the extraordinary. Author: Mimi Zollars Publication Date: June 2, 2015 -
When Bess and Frima―best friends, both nineteen and from the same Jewish background in the Bronx―get summer jobs in upstate hotels near Monticello, NY, in June 1940, they have visions of romance . . . but very different expectations and needs. Frima, who seeks safety in love, finds it with the “boy next door,” who is also Bess’s brother. Meanwhile, rebellious Bess renames herself Beth and plunges into a new life with Vinny, an Italian American, former Catholic, left-wing labor leader from San Francisco. Her actions are totally unacceptable to her family―which is fine with Beth. Will their young loves have happy endings? Yes and no, for the shadow of world war is growing, and Beth and Frima must grow up fast. As their love lives entangle with war, ambitions, religion, family, and politics―all kinds of conventional expectations―they face challenges they never dreamed of in their struggles for personal and creative growth. Author: Alice Rosenthal Publication Date: August 21, 2018 -
Just days after the close of World War II, Bess Myerson, the daughter of poor Russian Jewish immigrants living in the Bronx, is competing in the Miss America pageant. At stake: a $5,000 scholarship. The tension and excitement in Atlantic City’s Warner Theatre are palpable, especially for traumatized Jews rooting for one of their own. So begins Bessie.
Drawing on biographical and historical sources, Bessie reimagines the early life of Bess Myerson, who, in 1945 at age twenty-one, remarkably rises to become one of the most famous women in America. This intimate fictional portrait reveals the transformation of the nearly six-foot-tall, self-deprecating yet talented preteen into an exemplar of beauty, a peripheral quality in her world, where success is measured by intellectual attainment. Yet it is the focus on her beauty, and the secular world of pageantry, that she must choose to escape her roots and fulfill her fierce desire to achieve and become someone for whom great things happen.
Bessie is a tender study of a bold young woman living at a precarious moment in our cultural history as she searches for love and acceptance, eager to make her mark on the world.Author: Linda Kass
Pub Date: September 12, 2023 -
Sometimes the most enviable life is really a private hell. On the surface, Sarah Jenkins appears to have it all: a handsome, wealthy and successful husband, a precocious five-year-old daughter, and a beautiful home in an affluent Seattle neighborhood. Her quirky best friend and fellow high school teacher, Maggie, marvels at her luck―and envies her happiness. But Sarah is far from happy. She feels empty and on edge, harangued by a critical inner voice―and as the truth about her marriage and details of her past emerge, her “perfect” life begins to crumble. But just when it seems all is lost, a long forgotten, unopened letter changes everything, and with the support of friends, Sarah begins to rebuild her life. Can she quiet the critical voice in her head and learn to value herself instead? Author: Cathy Zane Publication Date: August 28, 2018 -
At twenty-one, Evelyn is naïve about life and love. Raised in a small Montana town, she moves at age sixteen with her devout Catholic family to California. There, she is drawn to Latino culture when she works among the migrant workers. During the summer of her junior year in college, Evelyn travels to a small Mexican town to help set up a school and a library—an experience that whets her appetite for a life full of both purpose and adventure. After graduation, Evelyn joins the Peace Corps and is sent to perform community development work in a small mountain town in the Andes of Perú. There, she and her roommate, Marie, search for meaningful projects and adjust to living with few amenities. Over the course of eighteen months, the two young women work in a hospital, start 4-H clubs, attend campesino meetings, and teach PE in a school with dirt floors. Evelyn is chosen queen of the local boys’ high school and—despite her resolve to resist such temptations—falls in love with a university student. As she comes of age, Evelyn learns about life and love the hard way when she must choose between following the religious rules of her youth and giving in to her sexual desires. Author: Evelyn Kohl LaTorre Publication Date: August 11, 2020 -
In the crucible of grief following a friend’s death, Presbyterian pastor Patricia Pearce sensed a dimension of existence beneath her ordinary perception—and became resolved to discover it. She soon found herself in a vortex of revelatory dreams, synchronicities, energy openings, and insights that shattered her worldview, exposed a unified Reality of Love, and unveiled the illusory nature of the ego and the world it has created. Faced with these discoveries, she struggled to remain in a religion that she now realized had been shaped by the very ego consciousness Jesus had transcended and urged others to abandon. Enlightening, revelatory, and bold, Beyond Jesus reveals how our political and religious institutions are an outward manifestation of the inner beliefs we hold about who we are, and that beneath the layers of dogma about Jesus lies a key to our spiritual evolution and the astonishing possibility it holds for the future. Author: Patricia Pearce Publication Date: July 3, 2018 -
When French troops occupy the Italian port city of Ancona, freeing the city’s Jews from their repressive ghetto, it unleashes a whirlwind of progressivism and brutal backlash as two very different cultures collide. Mirelle, a young Jewish maiden, must choose between her duty—an arranged marriage to a wealthy Jewish merchant—and her love for a dashing French Catholic soldier. Meanwhile, Francesca, a devout Catholic, must decide if she will honor her marriage vows to an abusive and murderous husband when he enmeshes their family in the theft of a miracle portrait of the Madonna. Set during the turbulent days of Napoleon Bonaparte’s Italian campaign (1796–97), Beyond the Ghetto Gates is both a cautionary tale for our present moment, with its rising tide of anti-Semitism, and a story of hope—a reminder of a time in history when men and women of conflicting faiths were able to reconcile their prejudices in the face of a rapidly changing world. Author: Michelle Cameron Publication Date: April 7, 2020 -
Beyond the Next Village is Mary Anne Mercer’s memoir of discovery, growth, and awakening in 1978 Nepal, which was then a mysterious country to most of the world. After arriving in Nepal, Mercer, an American nurse, spent a year traveling on foot often in flip-flops with a Nepali health team, providing immunizations and clinical care in each village they visited. Communicating in a newly acquired language, she was often called upon to provide the only modern medicine available to the people she and her team were serving. Over time, she learned to recognize and respect the prominence of their cultural beliefs about health and illness. Encounters with life-threatening conditions such as severe malnutrition and ectopic pregnancy gave her an enlightening view of both the limitations and power of modern health care; immersed in villagers’ lives and those of her own team, she realized she was living in not just another country, but another time. This unique story of the joys and perils of one woman’s journey in the shadow of the Himalayas, Beyond the Next Village opens a window into a world where the spirits were as real as the trees, the birds, or the rain and healing could be as much magic as medicine. Author: Mary Anne Mercer Pub Date: May 3, 2022 -
Growing up in the ’50s in what was then the small town of Napa, California, Donna Brazzi had loving parents, a backyard the size of a football field with a swing and a big wooden picnic table perfect for summer barbecues, a cocker spaniel named Patty, and a cat named Stinky—everything a kid could want. She was a happy child. But as she grew older and started to reach for more than a young woman from a working-class, Swiss-Italian family was expected to want—a university education and a career in the larger world beyond her hometown—she began to see that if she was going to realize her big dreams, she was going to have to fight for them. Big Dreams is Donna’s story of pursuing her education goals while confronting society’s assumptions about women’s roles in work, marriage, and motherhood from the 1950s through the mid-2000s, helped along by the evolving social movements for equality. Her journey from obedient daughter to minister’s wife to PhD in sociology was never a smooth one—but ultimately, with passion and persistence, she broke free of the family and cultural assumptions constraining her, forged her own identity, and shaped the life she wanted. Author: Donna Brazzi Barnes Pub Date: April 5, 2022 -
Jill Sherer Murray lived in a dead-end relationship into her forties before she finally let it go. She was like millions of women who struggle with whether to stay in a loveless marriage, a bad relationship, or give up on dating altogether, believing love isn’t in the cards. You may be struggling with a similar decision yourself. Perhaps you’re terrified of being single, and yet you don’t truly feel you’re living the life you want. With warmth and honesty, Murray shows you how letting go—of feeling stuck, afraid, and alone, and of believing what you’ve got is all you deserve—can free you from a life that isn’t serving you. She knows this is true, because she did it herself—and ultimately attracted the love and life she wanted. Through her story, other women’s stories, surprising facts and statistics, and helpful exercises, Big Wild Love will show you the way back to the self you’ve lost. It will put you on the path to change and teach you that, wherever you are, it’s never too late to start anew and find the Big Wild Love you deserve. Author: Jill Sherer Murray Publication Date: May 12, 2020 -
2015 IPPY Winner: Silver (tie) Contemporary Fiction After a four-month estrangement from her family, thirty-two-year-old Emma Michaels visits The Harbor View Assisted Living Home to tell her grandmother, Gussie, that she has made a decision: she’s going to sell the family property—her inheritance. Sitting on the dock of Poquatuck Village, Connecticut, looking across the harbor to their family’s longtime home, the two women debate over Emma’s choice—and their conversation lays the framework for the book, which flows over the decades, all the way back to Gussie’s youth and marriage, then forward through the lives of her three children, Auggie, Livy, and Alyssa, whose hopes and talents are warped by their mother’s influence and disappointed expectations. Expectations passed down through the generations. Subtle. Unspoken. Implacable. As Emma and Gussie remember the choices and dynamics that have produced the complicated tapestry that is their family’s history, Emma makes a number of surprising discoveries about her loved ones—and herself—and she prepares to do what no one else in her family has dared: let go of the past to make room for the future, though doing so will destroy the thing her grandmother holds most dear. Author: Tory McCagg Publication Date: May 6, 2014 -
Writer Susan Tweit and her economist-turned-sculptor husband Richard Cabe had just settled into their version of a “good life” when Richard saw thousands of birds one day—harbingers of the brain cancer that would kill him two years later. This compelling and intimate memoir chronicles their journey into the end of his life, framed by their final trip together, a 4,000-mile-long delayed honeymoon road trip. As Susan and Richard navigate the unfamiliar territory of brain cancer treatment and learn a whole new vocabulary—craniotomies, adjuvant chemotherapy, and brain geography—they also develop new routines for a mindful existence, relying on each other and their connection to nature, including the real birds Richard enjoys watching. Their determination to walk hand in hand, with open hearts, results in profound and difficult adjustments in their roles. Bless the Birds is not a sad story. It is both prayer and love song, a guide to how to thrive in a world where all we hold dear seems to be eroding, whether simple civility and respect, our health and safety, or the Earth itself. It’s an exploration of living with love in a time of dying—whether personal or global—with humor, unflinching courage, and grace. And it is an invitation to choose to live in light of what we love, rather than what we fear. Publication Date: April 27, 2021 Author: Susan J. Tweit -
“Her candid tale is followed by a useful list of substance-abuse and mental- illness websites, books, and organizations, making this a helpful resource for parents struggling to make sense of teen or adult children’s struggles.” ―Booklist “As her heartfelt and moving story descends further into the realms of despair and desperation, the author remains a beacon of hope and sets an amazing example for readers caught in a similar situation involving mental illness and a family member. The bond between mother and child knows no bounds in this intense memoir darkened by addiction and bipolar disorder yet buoyed by love and possibility.” ―Kirkus Reviews One day a teenage boy gets on his bike and rides forty miles up California’s Pacific Coast Highway to avoid causing an earthquake he fears will endanger his mother and sister. But the quake he is experiencing is not coming from beneath the earth; it’s the onset of bipolar illness. Blinded by Hope describes what it’s like to have an unusually bright, creative child—and then to have that child suddenly be hit with an illness that defies description and cure. Over the years, McGuire attributes her son’s lost jobs, broken relationships, legal troubles, and periodic hospitalizations to the manic phase of his illness, denying the severity of his growing drug use—but ultimately, she has to face her own addiction to rescuing him, and to forge a path for herself toward acceptance, resilience, and love. A wakeup call about the epidemic of mental illness, substance abuse, and mass incarceration in our society, Blinded by Hope shines a light on the shadow of family dynamics that shame, ignorance, and stigma rarely let the public see, and asks the question: How does a mother cope when love is not enough? Author: Meg McGuire Publication Date: June 6, 2017 -
When Pam Valois, a young photographer, met Jacomena Maybeck in 1979, she saw the woman she wanted to be in her own later years. Tarring roofs and splitting logs into her eighties, Jackie presided over the legacy of Bernard Maybeck and his clan on Berkeley’s legendary Nut Hill. The friendship between the two women led to a best-selling book—Gifts of Age, a treasury of stories about successful aging. Blooming in Winter is an intimate portrait of Jackie that gives us a paradigm for living exuberantly until the very end. Publication Date: June 29, 2021 Author: Pam Valois
