Jaroldeen Edwards has discovered that the best thing about adult life is "the privilege to choose my own patterns, to put first the things that matter the most to me and my family."The journey through this book will be inspiring to all mothers as well as to those without children, as Edwards says, "I have always felt that... in meaningful ways, we are alike."Her insights evolve through the book and are filled with humor, common sense, and pure joy of life. She considers mot...

Lively, entertaining, and inspiring, THE SHAPING OF A LIFE is in the tradition of the beloved bestsellers by Kathleen Norris and Anne Lamott*,* an intimate, lyrical, and thought-provoking memoir from one of the most respected and admired writers on religion in America today.In THE SHAPING OF A LIFE, Phyllis Tickle recounts her life with honesty and humor, richly conveying both the external events and the internal insights and emotions. She shares stories of her childhood in eastern...

In her funny and wistful new book, Reeve Lindbergh contemplates entering a new stage in life, turning sixty, the period her mother, Anne Morrow Lindbergh, once described as "the youth of old age." It is a time of life, she writes, that produces some unexpected surprises. Age brings loss, but also love; disaster, but also delight. The second-graders Reeve taught many years ago are now middle-aged; her own children grow, marry, have children themselves. "Time flies," she obs...

Ever cry while folding old baby clothes into a give-away box? Summon your last ounce of grace while being bitten and kicked and scratched by a three-year-old? Admitted a new respect for your mom and the things you put her through? Welcome to the wild world of motherhood, defined by author Lori-Anne Poirier as “the most blessed, hilarious, frustrating, daunting and rewarding of adventures.” After a decade of interviewing rock stars, television personalities, poli...

Sally Nugent Hintzen had an idea for a book to be drawn from her own experience and seasoned by her wonderfully wise understandings of how women keep themselves in unsatisfying relationships long beyond their value. It benefits not only from her skills as a writer, but from a number of years as a family counselor.

Whatever floats your boat, go ahead and float it. Do not have large untenable quantities of despair. Do not go to parades. When you feed orphaned wild animals, do not expect them to make it. Be forewarned. Be careful that your genitals do not show outside the strict confines of your underwear. Learn at least three racquet games during your lifetime.In this brand new short, Padgett Powell takes the reader on a completely new kind of journey. Just as The Interrogative Mo...

A bestselling collection of short stories from the author of The Stone Diaries (winner of the Pulitzer prize) and Larry’s Party (winner of the Orange prize)All over town people are putting on their costumes; X slips into his wife’s lace-trimmed night gown and waltzes around his bedroom; Tamara is no longer the dull clerk receptionist when she wears that yellow skirt, she evolves into a stunning creature exuding passion and vitality. In ‘Weather’ a...

After years of talking with others whose primary or seccondary relationships are failing, I have learned the basic mistakes that you can learn and avoid. Come and laugh with me at some true-crime--well, not really crime in the crimal sense--habits that have not worked for others and don't stand a snowball's chance in H--- of working for you! Any resemblance between your friends and those described in this book is entirely intentional--in fact, if none of the anecdotes sound familiar, you a...

For better or worse, teachers talk all day long. Part of teaching is helping students to recognize and manage their behavior. Where would a teacher be without a well behaved class?

Jan Blackburn grew up watching Harriet Nelson, June Cleaver, and Marion Cunningham. These women, who joyfully cleaned their houses in pantyhose and heels, embodied the characteristics of the wife and mother Jan believed she would become one day. Unfortunately, somewhere along the line, Jan thinks she may have been misinformed. Unlike her television heroines of the fifties, she is perpetually late, constantly dieting, and always busy; she cannot remember the last time she enjoyed a bubble b...

Alexander Smith stated that a good essayist needed “an ability to discern the infinite suggestiveness of common things.” Arthur Benson seconded the idea, saying an essayist needed a “far-ranging curiosity.” For three decades Sam Pickering has written essays, his words rolling in a fine frenzy over ordinary life discovering the marvelous and the absurd. His curiosity ranges, but it also rumpuses and rollicks. He wanders the Cumberland Plateau in Tennessee, rural Connecticut, farmland in Nova S...

In this book, writer-poet Luci Shaw has given us a lifetime of exquisite reflections on nature, love, death, suffering, loss, faith, doubt, creativity, curiosity, lifelong learning—all of it drawn from the breadth of her own experience, harvestedin penetrating and lyrical insights. Still active in her eighties, Luci now turns her attention to the season of edging toward the borders. Her spirit of adventure, her brave transparency, and her openness to all that life offers (as well as inflic...