Storm reigns supreme as the fixer extraordinaire, the go-to guy when things go awry. His latest gig? Clearing the name of a celebrity entangled in a murder scandal. But this time, he needs more than just his wits. He needs legal genius Laken by his side. Laken, a seasoned lawyer with a quiet demeanor and a past shadowed by loss, is drawn into Storm's world of intrigue and danger. As they work together to shield the star, a spark ignites between them, their attraction undeniable despite their age difference. They find themselves holed up in Vegas with the troubled actor, his reckless behavior threatening to derail everything. While Storm and Laken navigate the murky waters, they must confront their feelings, grappling with the ghosts of Laken's past and the possibility of a future together. Will their newfound connection withstand the storm of scandal and suspicion, or will it crumble under the weight of a past love?

Inner bonding is the process of connecting our adult thoughts with our instinctual, gut feelings -- the feelings of the "inner child" -- so that we can minimize painful conflict within ourselves. Free of inner conflict, we feel peaceful, open to joy, and open to giving and receiving love. Margaret Paul, coauthor of Healing Your Aloneness, explores how abandonment of the inner child leads to increasingly negative and destructive feelings of low self-worth, codepenclence, addiction, shame, powerlessness, and withdrawal from relationships. Her breakthrough inner bonding process teaches us to heal past wounds through reparenting and clearly demonstrates how we can learn to parent in the present. Real-life examples illustrate the dynamics of the healing process and show the benefits we can expect in every facet of our lives and in all our relationships. Inner Bonding provides the tools we need to forge and maintain the inner unity that makes our family, sexual, work, and social relationships productive, honest, and joyful.

A Glamour Best Book of 2020 • A Bustle Best Books of 2020 • Winner of an Audiofile Earphones Award • An Entertainment Weekly 30 Hottest Book of the Summer • A Refinery29 25 Book You’ll Want To Read This Summer Selection • A Chicago Review of Books 10 Must-Read Books of the Month • A LitHub Most Anticipated Book of the Year • A The Millions Most Anticipated Book of the Year • A Shondaland 15 Hot Books for Summer One of today’s most provocative literary writers—the author of the critically-acclaimed Sunshine State and the Los Angeles Times First Fiction Award finalist Binary Star—captures the confused state of modern romance and the egos that inflate it in a dark comedy about a woman's search for acceptance, identity, and financial security in the rise of Trump. Nina is a struggling writer, a college drop-out, a liar, and a cheater. More than anything she wants love. She deserves it. From the burned-out suburbs of Florida to the anonymous squalor of New York City, she eats through an incestuous cast of characters in search of it: her mother, a narcissistic lesbian living in a nudist polycule; Odessa, a single mom with even worse taste in men than Nina; Seth, an artist whose latest show is comprised of three Tupperware containers full of trash; Brian, whose roller-coaster affair with Nina is the most stable “relationship” in his life; and Aaron, an aspiring filmmaker living at home with his parents, with whom Nina begins to write her magnum opus. Nina’s quest for fulfillment is at once darkly comedic, acerbically acute, and painfully human—a scathing critique of contemporary society, and a tender examination of our anguished yearning for connection in an era defined by detachment.

“Smart and funny, with characters so real and vulnerable, you want to send them care packages. I loved this book.” —Rainbow Rowell From debut author Mary H.K. Choi comes a compulsively readable novel that shows young love in all its awkward glory—perfect for fans of Eleanor & Park and To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before. For Penny Lee, high school was a total nonevent. Her friends were okay, her grades were fine, and while she’d somehow landed a boyfriend, they never managed to know much about each other. Now Penny is heading to college in Austin, Texas, to learn how to become a writer. It’s seventy-nine miles and a zillion light years away from everything she can’t wait to leave behind. Sam’s stuck. Literally, figuratively, emotionally, financially. He works at a café and sleeps there too, on a mattress on the floor of an empty storage room upstairs. He knows that this is the god-awful chapter of his life that will serve as inspiration for when he’s a famous movie director but right this second the seventeen bucks in his checking account and his dying laptop are really testing him. When Sam and Penny cross paths it’s less meet-cute and more a collision of unbearable awkwardness. Still, they swap numbers and stay in touch—via text—and soon become digitally inseparable, sharing their deepest anxieties and secret dreams without the humiliating weirdness of having to, you know, see each other.

Are you afraid of or unable to create intimacy or closeness with your intimate partner? Do you find that sometimes you create emotional, communicative, or even physical distance from that special someone in your life, even when, deep down, you really don't want to? If so, you share the relationship style psychologists refer to as the distancer. Distancers are often afraid of being engulfed or controlled by their partners. They fear rejection, vulnerability, and dependence. Sadly, they also tend to have short and unhappy relationships. If you want to stop running from love in your life, this book offers a simple, step-by-step approach you can use to move beyond your fear of intimacy and start building strong and lasting relationships. The exercises and self-evaluations in the book will help you become aware of how you operate in romantic relationships. You'll review and reassess your relationship patterns, deciding what changes you want to make in future relationships. Then you'll commit to actions that can make it happen.

"David Sedaris's ability to transform the mortification of everyday life into wildly entertaining art," (The Christian Science Monitor) is elevated to wilder and more entertaining heights than ever in this remarkable new book. Trying to make coffee when the water is shut off, David considers using the water in a vase of flowers and his chain of associations takes him from the French countryside to a hilariously uncomfortable memory of buying drugs in a mobile home in rural North Carolina. In essay after essay, Sedaris proceeds from bizarre conundrums of daily life-having a lozenge fall from your mouth into the lap of a fellow passenger on a plane or armoring the windows with LP covers to protect the house from neurotic songbirds-to the most deeply resonant human truths. Culminating in a brilliant account of his venture to Tokyo in order to quit smoking, David Sedaris's sixth essay collection is a new masterpiece of comic writing from "a writer worth treasuring" (Seattle Times). Praise for When You Are Engulfed in Flames: "Older, wiser, smarter and meaner, Sedaris...defies the odds once again by delivering an intelligent take on the banalities of an absurd life." --Kirkus Reviews This latest collection proves that not only does Sedaris still have it, but he's also getting better....Sedaris's best stuff will still--after all this time--move, surprise, and entertain." --Booklist Table of Contents: It's Catching Keeping Up The Understudy This Old House Buddy, Can You Spare a Tie? Road Trips What I Learned That's Amore The Monster Mash In the Waiting Room Solutions to Saturday's Puzzle Adult Figures Charging Toward a Concrete Toadstool Memento Mori All the Beauty You Will Ever Need Town and Country Aerial The Man in the Hut Of Mice and Men April in Paris Crybaby Old Faithful The Smoking Section

With exercises, practical tools, and inspiring stories, Deeper Dating will guide you on a journey to find the love—and personal fulfillment—you long for Lose weight. Be confident. Keep your partner guessing. At the end of the day, this soulless approach to dating doesn't lead to love but to insecurity and desperation. In Deeper Dating, Ken Page presents a new path to love. Out of his decades of work as a psychotherapist and his own personal struggle to find love, Page teaches that the greatest magnet for real love lies in our "Core Gifts"—the places of our deepest sensitivity, longing, and passion. Deeper Dating guides us to discover our own Core Gifts and empowers us to express them with courage, generosity, and discrimination in our dating life. When we do this, something miraculous happens: we begin to attract people who love us for who we are, we become more self-assured and emotionally available, and we lose our taste for relationships that chip away at our self-esteem. Without losing a pound, changing our hairstyle, or buying a single new accessory, we find healthy love moving closer . . . Deeper Dating integrates the best of human intimacy theory with timeless spiritual truths and translates them into a practical, step-by-step process.

My story isn’t the beginning or the middle. It is the end of the end. It was over before it could ever really begin. A tale of nothing and everything. The world stopped in a heartbeat. We were given a mere forty-eight hours. If that. It seemed cruel. Suddenly next-day delivery meant nothing, but getting ourselves to our family the next day meant everything. Those who weren’t within driving distance of their family didn’t have a hope in hell of returning to them to be with them. Those who did manage to get to them would feel as though the time spent with them just wasn’t long enough. Nothing was enough now. A personal and intimate account of a young couple facing an almighty tragedy. Luke and Maya are still in the honeymoon period of their life, renting a small apartment, with their little dog Cassie; they are working tirelessly to save every penny they have to one day move into their own beautiful home and start a family. They didn’t see this coming. No one did. When the announcement for the end of the world comes, it is hard to believe, but with the world slowly grinding to a halt, Luke and Maya know that they have some hard decisions to make and time is running out. With less than forty-eight hours till the solar flare engulfs the earth, they are faced with impossible questions to answer. What would you do? Where would you go? What matters most?

A lyric novel about the play of grief, empathy, new and old love, and the quest to overcome blindness in human relations. Caught in the cross-currents of a fraught divorce and a new love, the death of her mother, and a global pandemic, a writer plunges into an obsession with the work of 1960s French philosopher Roland Barthes. Her struggles to make sense of his work and life—and of what can happen to a woman's settled life in a single harrowing year—result in an engrossing, funny, earthy, and innovative lyric work. The quest for authenticity in motherhood, sexuality, and tenancy on the earth and in the home, as well as the unusual lyric form, make the novel unified in spirit yet transdisciplinary in approach.

Everyone is afraid. Sometimes fear is inappropriate and unnecessary. At other times, we have good reason to be afraid. But in every case, fear reduces our ability to be ourselves. It convinces us we shouldn’t take chances or risks. This book is for people who want to let go of unreasonable fear or act more creatively in the face of reasonable fear. It explores the roots of fear—the fear of change, of self-disclosure, of giving and receiving, of being alone. Beneath all of these is the greatest fear of all: the fear of loving and being loved. This 25th anniversary edition speaks of the enduring message of the book and this new edition has been greatly updated and expanded to include more contemporary developments in psychology and current events. Every chapter of the book has been rewritten and revised with a new audience in mind. Some new sections have been added and existing sections revised. This revised and updated edition reflects the author’s growing understanding of the ageless concern in our lives—becoming free from fear so that we can be more resourceful in our life.