When New Yorker staff writer Lauren Collins moves to Geneva, Switzerland, she decides to learn French—not just to be able to go about her day-to-day life, but in order to be closer to her French husband and his family. When in French is at once a hilarious and idiosyncratic memoir about the things we do for love, and an exploration across cultures and history into how we learn languages, and what they say about who we are.
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Daredevils
At the heart of this exciting debut novel, set in Arizona and Idaho in the mid-1970s, is fifteen-year-old Loretta, who slips out of her bedroom ev- ery evening to meet her so-called gentile boyfriend. Her strict Mormon parents catch her returning one night, and promptly marry her off to Dean Harder, a devout yet materialistic fundamentalist who already has a wife and a brood of kids. The Harders relocate to his native Idaho, where Dean’s teenage nephew Jason falls hard for Loretta. A Zeppelin and Tolkien fan, Jason worships Evel Knievel and longs to leave his close-minded community. He and Loretta make a break for it. A riveting story of desire and escape, Daredevils boasts memorable set pieces and a rich cast of secondary characters.
The Portable Veblen
When free-spirited office temp Veblen (named after the great iconoclastic economist Thorstein Veblen) gets engaged to Paul, a brilliant and ambitious neurologist developing a device to reduce battlefield head trauma, it seems like a perfect match. But why do they feel on edge? One answer: Veblen’s parents (a domineering, hypochondriacal mom, a shell-shocked dad). Another answer: Paul’s parents, ex-hippies who dote on his developmentally disabled brother. With exuberance and wit, McKenzie explores dysfunctional families, the military-medical complex, and the inner lives of squirrels (or one particular squirrel), and asks: Where do our families end and we begin? How do we stay true to our ideals? In the words of Karen Joy Fowler, The Portable Veblen is “filled with an electric energy. A book like no other. I read it and I was never the same!”
Superbetter
In 2009, game designer and author Jane McGonigal suffered a severe concussion that wouldn’t heal. Unable to work or think clearly, she decided to get better by doing what she does best: by turning her recovery process into a game. What started as a simple motivational exercise quickly grew into a digital game, then an online portal and a major research study with the National Institutes of Health. In SuperBetter, McGonigal reveals a decade’s worth of scientific research into the ways all games change how we respond to stress, challenge, and pain. She explains how we can cultivate new powers of recovery and resilience in everyday life simply by bringing the same psychological strengths we naturally display when we play games—such as optimism, creativity, courage, and determination—to real-world situations. As inspiring as it is down to earth, grounded in rigorous research, and powered by game design, SuperBetter is a proven game plan for a better life. Never again will you say that something is “just a game.”
The Last Bookaneer
The bestselling author of The Dante Club takes us deep into a shadowy era in publishing ruled by a forgotten class of criminal. For a hundred years, loose copyright laws and a hungry reading public created a unique opportunity: Books could be published without an author’s permission with extraordinary ease. Authors gained fame but suffered financially—Charles Dickens, Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, to name a few—but publishers reaped enormous profits while readers got their books on the cheap. The literary pirates who stalked the harbors, coffeehouses, and printer shops for the latest manuscript to steal were known as bookaneers.
Yet on the eve of the twentieth century, a new international treaty is signed to protect authors and grind this literary underground to a sharp halt. The bookaneers, of course, would become extinct. In The Last Bookaneer, Matthew Pearl gives us a historical novel set inside the lost world of these doomed outlaws and the incredible heist that brought their era to a close. On the island of Samoa, a dying Robert Louis Stevenson labors over a new novel. The thought of one last book from the great author fires the imaginations of the bookaneers, and soon two adversaries—the gallant Pen Davenport and the monstrous Belial—set out for the south Pacific island. Yet Samoa holds many secrets of its own, and the duo’s bookish concerns clash with the island’s violent destiny. Illuminating the heroics of the bookaneers even while conjuring Stevenson himself to breathtaking life, Pearl’s The Last Bookaneer is a pageturning journey to the dark heart of a forgotten literary era.