The Unlucky Sperm Club


Book Description

Maybe you were born into a tough situation where the odds were already stacked against you. Personal success and wealth might feel like a dream you were never meant to realize. The good news is that your membership in this club, if used properly, could be your greatest resource.




The Wednesday Sisters


Book Description

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Friendship, loyalty, and love lie at the heart of this beautifully written, poignant, and sweeping novel of five women who, over the course of four decades, come to redefine what it means to be family. “This generous and inventive book is a delight to read, an evocation of the power of friendship to sustain, encourage, and embolden us. Join the sisterhood!”—Karen Joy Fowler, author of The Jane Austen Book Club For thirty-five years, Frankie, Linda, Kath, Brett, and Ally have met every Wednesday at the park near their homes in Palo Alto, California. Defined when they first meet by what their husbands do, the young homemakers and mothers are far removed from the Summer of Love that has enveloped most of the Bay Area in 1967. These “Wednesday Sisters” seem to have little in common: Frankie is a timid transplant from Chicago, brutally blunt Linda is a remarkable athlete, Kath is a Kentucky debutante, quiet Ally has a secret, and quirky, ultra-intelligent Brett wears little white gloves with her miniskirts. But they are bonded by a shared love of both literature—Fitzgerald, Eliot, Austen, du Maurier, Plath, and Dickens–and the Miss America Pageant, which they watch together every year. As the years roll on and their children grow, the quintet forms a writers circle to express their hopes and dreams through poems, stories, and, eventually, books. Along the way, they experience history in the making: Vietnam, the race for the moon, and a women’s movement that challenges everything they have ever thought about themselves, while at the same time supporting one another through changes in their personal lives brought on by infidelity, longing, illness, failure, and success. Humorous and moving, The Wednesday Sisters is a literary feast for book lovers that earns a place among those popular works that honor the joyful, mysterious, unbreakable bonds between friends.




The (un)Lucky Sperm


Book Description

Living in Broken Hill, an isolated mining town in the outback, can make or break you.Until he was seventeen, Brett Preiss-Betty, to his less forgiving friends- lived in the dusty Australian outback, where he was one of four siblings in a dysfunctional family. He learned how to survive under the most bizarre and extraordinary circumstances. In this book, he shares the trials and tribulations of his youth through anecdotes that will leave you in tears of joy or sorrow. Travel back to the '60s and '70s and watch Brett transform from a sperm to adolescent. Follow him as he has his first piano lesson, complete with Hail Marys, and receives his first sewing machine ? and his first ejaculation. Cheer him along in his struggles and triumphs until he leaves the desert and heads off to college, and find out why you should never ask him to look after your budgie. The (un)Lucky Sperm is a humorous memoir-a collection of honest, harrowing and absurd accounts. If you like stories full of sarcasm and observational humour, then you are going to love this book.




Final Girls


Book Description

THE NATIONAL AND INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER - WINNER OF THE 2018 INTERNATIONAL THRILLER WRITERS AWARD FOR BEST HARDCOVER NOVEL "The first great thriller of 2017 is here: Final Girls, by Riley Sager. If you liked Gone Girl, you'll like this."--Stephen King Ten years ago, college student Quincy Carpenter went on vacation with five friends and came back alone, the only survivor of a horror movie-scale massacre. In an instant, she became a member of a club no one wants to belong to--a group of similar survivors known in the press as the Final Girls: Lisa, who lost nine sorority sisters to a college dropout's knife; Sam, who went up against the Sack Man during her shift at the Nightlight Inn; and now Quincy, who ran bleeding through the woods to escape Pine Cottage and the man she refers to only as Him. The three girls are all attempting to put their nightmares behind them and, with that, one another. Despite the media's attempts, they never meet. Now, Quincy is doing well--maybe even great, thanks to her Xanax prescription. She has a caring almost-fianc , Jeff; a popular baking blog; a beautiful apartment; and a therapeutic presence in Coop, the police officer who saved her life all those years ago. Her memory won't even allow her to recall the events of that night; the past is in the past. That is until Lisa, the first Final Girl, is found dead in her bathtub, wrists slit; and Sam, the second Final Girl, appears on Quincy's doorstep. Blowing through Quincy's life like a whirlwind, Sam seems intent on making Quincy relive the past, with increasingly dire consequences, all of which makes Quincy question why Sam is really seeking her out. And when new details about Lisa's death come to light, Quincy's life becomes a race against time as she tries to unravel Sam's truths from her lies, evade the police and hungry reporters, and, most crucially, remember what really happened at Pine Cottage, before what was started ten years ago is finished.




Marry Him


Book Description

An eye-opening, funny, painful, and always truthful in-depth examination of modern relationships, and a wake-up call for single women about getting real about Mr. Right, from the New York Times bestselling author of Maybe You Should Talk to Someone. You have a fulfilling job, great friends, and the perfect apartment. So what if you haven’t found “The One” just yet. He’ll come along someday, right? But what if he doesn’t? Or what if Mr. Right had been, well, Mr. Right in Front of You—but you passed him by? Nearing forty and still single, journalist Lori Gottlieb started to wonder: What makes for lasting romantic fulfillment, and are we looking for those qualities when we’re dating? Are we too picky about trivial things that don’t matter, and not picky enough about the often overlooked things that do? In Marry Him, Gottlieb explores an all-too-common dilemma—how to reconcile the desire for a happy marriage with a list of must-haves and deal-breakers so long and complicated that many great guys get misguidedly eliminated. On a quest to find the answer, Gottlieb sets out on her own journey in search of love, discovering wisdom and surprising insights from sociologists and neurobiologists, marital researchers and behavioral economists—as well as single and married men and women of all generations.




Guns, Germs, and Steel: The Fates of Human Societies


Book Description

"Fascinating.... Lays a foundation for understanding human history."—Bill Gates In this "artful, informative, and delightful" (William H. McNeill, New York Review of Books) book, Jared Diamond convincingly argues that geographical and environmental factors shaped the modern world. Societies that had had a head start in food production advanced beyond the hunter-gatherer stage, and then developed religion --as well as nasty germs and potent weapons of war --and adventured on sea and land to conquer and decimate preliterate cultures. A major advance in our understanding of human societies, Guns, Germs, and Steel chronicles the way that the modern world came to be and stunningly dismantles racially based theories of human history. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the Phi Beta Kappa Award in Science, the Rhone-Poulenc Prize, and the Commonwealth club of California's Gold Medal.




The Sense of an Ending


Book Description

BOOKER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A novel that follows a middle-aged man as he contends with a past he never much thought about—until his closest childhood friends return with a vengeance: one of them from the grave, another maddeningly present. A novel so compelling that it begs to be read in a single setting, The Sense of an Ending has the psychological and emotional depth and sophistication of Henry James at his best, and is a stunning achievement in Julian Barnes's oeuvre. Tony Webster thought he left his past behind as he built a life for himself, and his career has provided him with a secure retirement and an amicable relationship with his ex-wife and daughter, who now has a family of her own. But when he is presented with a mysterious legacy, he is forced to revise his estimation of his own nature and place in the world.




Sophie's World


Book Description

A page-turning novel that is also an exploration of the great philosophical concepts of Western thought, Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World has fired the imagination of readers all over the world, with more than twenty million copies in print. One day fourteen-year-old Sophie Amundsen comes home from school to find in her mailbox two notes, with one question on each: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" From that irresistible beginning, Sophie becomes obsessed with questions that take her far beyond what she knows of her Norwegian village. Through those letters, she enrolls in a kind of correspondence course, covering Socrates to Sartre, with a mysterious philosopher, while receiving letters addressed to another girl. Who is Hilde? And why does her mail keep turning up? To unravel this riddle, Sophie must use the philosophy she is learning—but the truth turns out to be far more complicated than she could have imagined.




The Soul-Sourced Entrepreneur


Book Description

Can you succeed in business when your strength is more about sensitivity than swagger? If you're moved by meaning, more than manipulation? In other words: Can you succeed while still being you? Christine Kane is living proof that the answer is yes. Far too many of us have swallowed the notion that business owners have to be a certain way to be successful—strategy-obsessed, data-driven, and relentlessly aggressive. Bookstore shelves are lined with guides for entrepreneurs that urge them to "Crush it! "10X It!" or "Unf**k it!" Those who aren't crushers or unf**kers of anything are left wondering if something's wrong with them. Like,maybe they're just not cut out for business. A former songwriter and performer, and then founder of Uplevel YOU—a multi-million-dollar business coaching company—Christine Kane shows a new class of entrepreneurs another way. It's time to connect, not crush. In The Soul-Sourced Entrepreneur, Kane shares the insights that have helped thousands find success without losing themselves. In these pages, readers will find a practical plan to: • Toss out ineffective, old-school goal-setting models. • Reframe your intuition and sensitivity as valuable assets, not as flaws to hide. • Examine old patterns for clues as to what's been holding you back. • Clean up the spaces and distractions draining your energy and power. • Learn to confidently trust in your own wisdom. • Break free from fear-based decision-making that plagues most businesses. Throughout the book, you'll hear stories from other soul-sourced entrepreneurs, who employ their own reliable, unique set of best practices based as much in intuition and self-awareness as on specific skills and strategies. Forget business as usual. Your business is personal, and in this new era, authenticity, creativity, and sensitivity are what set businesses apart. The Soul-Sourced Entrepreneur is your unconventional plan to build the business of your dreams, and being wildly successful by being you.




Witch Please


Book Description

Practical Magic meets Gilmore Girls in this adorable witchy rom-com by New York Times bestselling author Ann Aguiree, with a bisexual cinnamon roll hero, a commitment-averse heroine, and a chemistry between them that causes literal sparks. Danica Waterhouse is a fully modern witch—daughter, granddaughter, cousin, and co-owner of the Fix-It Witches, a magical tech repair shop. After a messy breakup that included way too much family "feedback," Danica made a pact with her cousin: they'll keep their hearts protected and have fun, without involving any of the overly opinionated Waterhouse matriarchs. Danica is more than a little exhausted navigating a long-standing family feud where Gram thinks the only good mundane is a dead one and Danica's mother weaves floral crowns for anyone who crosses her path. Three blocks down from the Fix-It Witches, Titus Winnaker, owner of Sugar Daddy's bakery, has family trouble of his own. After a tragic loss, all he's got left is his sister, the bakery, and a lifetime of terrible luck in love. Sure, business is sweet, but he can't seem to shake the romantic curse that's left him past thirty and still a virgin. He's decided he's doomed to be forever alone. Until he meets Danica Waterhouse. The sparks are instant, their attraction irresistible. For him, she's the one. To her, he's a firebomb thrown in the middle of a family war. Can a modern witch find love with an old-fashioned mundane who refuses to settle for anything less than forever? Praise for Witch Please: "The start to Aguirre's Fix-It Witches series is a delightful, laugh-out-loud small-town tale...Ann Aguirre's sexy, sweet, funny, and oh-so-fulfilling witchy love story will leave readers hungry for Clementine's story"—Library Journal, starred review "Readers will be enchanted."—Publishers Weekly "WITCH PLEASE is a lovely breath of fresh, cinnamon-scented air. It's sexy and sweet, and it's the soft, adorable romance we need right now."—Kristen Callihan, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of the Game On series