"My life was close to being perfect until my brother Alex got killed. Then my mother started drinking and my father started having sex with Donna, my best friend's stepmother. She's not even thirty years old." With an equal mix of joy and sorrow, All That's True follows Andi's poignant—and sometimes laugh out loud—journey to young adulthood, where she struggles with the elusive nature of truth and the devastating consequences of deception. "Jackie Lee Miles is a wise and perceptive writer with a keen understanding of human frailties."—Julie Cannon, author of Truelove and Homegrown Tomatoes "Perfect in voice and detail, chock full of girl talk and seat-of-the pants crises, Miles' book is a winner." —Rosemary Daniell, award-winning author of Secrets of the Zona Rosa: How Writing (and Sisterhood) Can Change Women's Lives "Miles is a fascinating new voice in Southern fiction. Readers will rejoice." —Karin Gillespie, author of Bet Your Bottom Dollar "For those of us looking for relationships that feel authentic, you will find them in this novel!" —Edward Mooney, Jr. author of The Pearls of the Stone Man

In Loving What Is, bestselling author Byron Katie introduced thousands of people to her simple and profound method of finding happiness through questioning the mind. Now, I Need Your Love—Is That True? examines a universal, age-old source of anxiety: our relationships with others. In this groundbreaking book, Katie helps you question everything you have been taught to do to gain love and approval. In doing this, you discover how to find genuine love and connection. The usual advice offered in self-help books and reinforced by our culture advocates a stressful, all-consuming quest for love and approval. We are advised to learn self-marketing and manipulative skills—how to attract, impress, seduce, and often pretend to be something we aren’t. This approach doesn’t work. It leaves millions of walking wounded—those who, having failed to find love or appreciation, blame themselves and conclude that they are unworthy of love. I Need Your Love—Is That True? helps you illuminate every area in your life where you seem to lack what you long for most—the love of your spouse, the respect of your child, a lover’s tenderness, or the esteem of your boss. Through its penetrating inquiry, you will quickly discover the falseness of the accepted ways of seeking love and approval, and also of the mythology that equates love with need. Using the method in this book, you will inquire into painful beliefs that you’ve based your whole life on—and be delighted to see them evaporate. Katie shows you how unraveling the knots in the search for love, approval, and appreciation brings real love and puts you in charge of your own happiness. “Everyone agrees that love is wonderful, except when it’s terrible. People spend their whole lives tantalized by love—seeking it, trying to hold on to it, or trying to get over it. Not far behind love, as major preoccupations, come approval and appreciation. From childhood on, most people spend much of their energy in a relentless pursuit of these things, trying out different methods to be noticed, to please, to impress, and to win other people’s love, thinking that’s just the way life is. This effort can become so constant and unquestioned that we barely notice it anymore. This book takes a close look at what works and what doesn’t in the quest for love and approval. It will help you find a way to be happier in love and more effective in all your relationships. What you learn here will bring fulfillment to all kinds of relationships, including romantic love, dating, marriage, work, and friendship.” —Byron Katie

This collection of provocative new essays, mainly by French scholars, on Shakespeare’s great tragedy, focuses on linguistic, aesthetic and philosophical issues with specific attention paid to the dimension of early modern desire, sexuality and gender relations. King Lear is here re-examined in the perspective of Lucrece, Montaigne, Renaissance medicine and anatomy, the grotesque, myth and imagery as well as negative theology. It is hoped that this will serve to update our approaches to this elusive, undecided play, neither Christian nor as completely nihilistic as some critics have argued, which nevertheless remains quite popular on French and English stages alike.

Across disciplines, critical thinking is praised, taught, and put into practice. But what does it actually mean to think critically? In this brief volume, sociologist Joel Best examines how to evaluate arguments and the evidence used to support them as he hones in on how to think in the field of sociology and beyond. With inimitable style that melds ethnographic verve with dry humor, Best examines the ways in which sociologists engage in fuzzy thinking through bias, faddish cultural waves, spurious reasoning, and implicit bias. The short chapters cover: A general introduction to critical thinking and logic in the social sciences Sociology as an enterprise Key issues in thinking critically about sociological research Challenging questions that confront sociologists and a call for the discipline to meet those challenges. Students across disciplines will learn the building blocks of critical thinking in a sociological context and come away with key concepts to put into practice.

As Maggie listens to a story about a little girl who grew up on the prairies, about a ruler who cut a knot in two, about a shepherd who went looking for a lost sheep, about a king who made a foolish wish, and finally, about a giant who lived in a beautiful garden, she discovers that some stories are true because they actually happened. Other stories are true because they tell us something true about a real person, place, or event, even if what they describe did not happen. And some stories are true - even if they are completely made up - because they tell us something true about our own experiences.