Have you ever stopped praying? When life seems unfair and prayer doesn't seem to make any difference, you may quit praying. Most people who admit that they stopped praying for a while, including the author, say they felt as if they were suffocating after a period without prayer. "Sometimes I think God has called me to speak, write, and teach about prayer so I won't give up on it altogether," writes Harper. "After more than forty years of praying, I still don't understand prayer. …Prayer does not come easily for me." "In the pages of this book," Harper continues, "I will ask you to roll up your sleeves and confront your problems with prayer—and then keep praying. Sometimes you will feel as though you are talking in the dark. But the fact is, sound travels in both darkness and light." If you're frustrated in your prayer life and wonder whether prayer is worth the effort, this book is for you. Nothing daunts Harper in this wrangle with God. No doubt, experience, or unholy feeling is out of bounds as he considers life and prayer's dark patches. No matter how lost or lonely you feel, he offers assurance. During days when you feel the number one problem with prayer is an unresponsive God, you'll have the strength to dig deeper and surrender to the mysterious sustenance God offers. As you read Harper's brutally honest stories and follow his advice on how to cultivate a prayer life, you'll discover the kind of prayer that makes you want to continue even though everything in you wants to quit.

PUSH continues to break new ground with this remarkable poetry memoir of growing up, coming out, and exploring love.This is a memoir that is lived in moments. The moments you know - when you see your parents' marriage dissolving, when you realize you're a boy who likes boys, when you speak the truth and don't know if it will be heard. The moments you don't recognize until later - when you leave things unsaid (even to yourself), when you feel your boyfriend letting go, when you give up on love. And the moment you get love back. In an amazing narrative of poems, Billy Merrell tells an ordinary story in an extraordinary way.

"Etchison is one hell of a fiction writer." -- Stephen King. Talking In the Dark collects the best work by a brilliant writer at the peak of his powers -- the author's own selection of personal favorites from four decades of writing. Among these twenty-four unforgettable tales of life on the edge are the award-winning classics "The Dark Country," "The Olympic Runner," and "The Dog Park," as well as several long-out-of-print stories and a new masterpiece written especially for this volume. This collection was nominated for a World Fantasy Award and its author is a three-time World Fantasy Award winner as well as a three-time British Fantasy Award winner. From the Publishers Weekly review of Talking In The Dark: "[A] wide-ranging collection culled from the past 30 years reveals an unexpected non-genre side to his newer tales, sometimes reminiscent of John Cheever and Shirley Jackson."

From the three-time Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the New York Times bestseller Angler, who unearthed the deepest secrets of Edward Snowden's NSA archive, the first master narrative of the surveillance state that emerged after 9/11 and why it matters, based on scores of hours of conversation with Snowden and groundbreaking reportage in Washington, London, Moscow and Silicon Valley Edward Snowden chose three journalists to tell the stories in his Top Secret trove of NSA documents: Barton Gellman of The Washington Post, Glenn Greenwald of The Guardian and filmmaker Laura Poitras, all of whom would share the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. Poitras went on to direct the Oscar-winning Citizen Four. Greenwald wrote an instant memoir and cast himself as a pugilist on Snowden's behalf. Barton Gellman took his own path. Snowden and his documents were the beginning, not the end, of a story he had prepared his whole life to tell. More than 20 years as a top investigative journalist armed him with deep sources in national security and high technology. New sources reached out from government and industry, making contact on the same kinds of secret, anonymous channels that Snowden used. Gellman's old reporting notes unlocked new puzzles in the NSA archive. Long days and evenings with Snowden in Moscow revealed a complex character who fit none of the stock images imposed on him by others. Gellman now brings his unique access and storytelling gifts to a true-life spy tale that touches us all. Snowden captured the public imagination but left millions of people unsure what to think. Who is the man, really? How did he beat the world's most advanced surveillance agency at its own game? Is government and corporate spying as bad as he says? Dark Mirror is the master narrative we have waited for, told with authority and an inside view of extraordinary events. Within it is a personal account of the obstacles facing the author, beginning with Gellman's discovery of his own name in the NSA document trove. Google notifies him that a foreign government is trying to compromise his account. A trusted technical adviser finds anomalies on his laptop. Sophisticated impostors approach Gellman with counterfeit documents, attempting to divert or discredit his work. Throughout Dark Mirror, the author describes an escalating battle against unknown digital adversaries, forcing him to mimic their tradecraft in self-defense. Written in the vivid scenes and insights that marked Gellman's bestselling Angler, Dark Mirror is an inside account of the surveillance-industrial revolution and its discontents, fighting back against state and corporate intrusions into our most private spheres. Along the way it tells the story of a government leak unrivaled in drama since All the President's Men.

#1 New York Times bestselling author of Tidelands—the “searing portrait of a woman that resonates across the ages” (People)—returns with an evocative historical novel tracking the rise of the Tidelands family in London, Venice, and New England. Midsummer Eve 1670. Two unexpected visitors arrive at a shabby warehouse on the south side of the River Thames. The first is a wealthy nobleman seeking the lover he deserted twenty-one years earlier. Now James Avery has everything to offer: a fortune, a title, and the favor of the newly restored King Charles II. He believes that the warehouse’s poor owner Alinor has the one thing he cannot buy—his son and heir. The second visitor is a beautiful widow from Venice in deepest mourning. She claims Alinor as her mother-in-law and tells her of the death of Rob—Alinor’s son—drowned in the dark tides of the Venice lagoon. Meanwhile, Alinor’s brother Ned, in faraway New England, is making a life for himself between in the narrowing space between the jarring worlds of the English newcomers and the American Indians as they move towards inevitable war. Alinor writes to him that she knows—without doubt—that her son is alive and the widow is an imposter. But how can she prove it? Set in the poverty and glamour of Restoration London, in the golden streets of Venice, and on the tensely contested frontier of early America, this is a novel of greed and desire: for love, for wealth, for a child, and for home.

"Data describe and represent the world. However, no matter how big they may be, data sets don't - indeed cannot - capture everything. Data are measurements - and, as such, they represent only what has been measured. They don't necessarily capture all the information that is relevant to the questions we may want to ask. If we do not take into account what may be missing/unknown in the data we have, we may find ourselves unwittingly asking questions that our data cannot actually address, come to mistaken conclusions, and make disastrous decisions. In this book, David Hand looks at the ubiquitous phenomenon of "missing data." He calls this "dark data" (making a comparison to "dark matter" - i.e., matter in the universe that we know is there, but which is invisible to direct measurement). He reveals how we can detect when data is missing, the types of settings in which missing data are likely to be found, and what to do about it. It can arise for many reasons, which themselves may not be obvious - for example, asymmetric information in wars; time delays in financial trading; dropouts in clinical trials; deliberate selection to enhance apparent performance in hospitals, policing, and schools; etc. What becomes clear is that measuring and collecting more and more data (big data) will not necessarily lead us to better understanding or to better decisions. We need to be vigilant to what is missing or unknown in our data, so that we can try to control for it. How do we do that? We can be alert to the causes of dark data, design better data-collection strategies that sidestep some of these causes - and, we can ask better questions of our data, which will lead us to deeper insights and better decisions"--

Why has music so often served as an accomplice to transcendent expressions of gender? Why did the query "is he musical?" become code, in the twentieth century, for "is he gay?" Why is music so inherently queer? For Sasha Geffen, the answers lie, in part, in music’s intrinsic quality of subliminal expression, which, through paradox and contradiction, allows rigid gender roles to fall away in a sensual and ambiguous exchange between performer and listener. Glitter Up the Dark traces the history of this gender fluidity in pop music from the early twentieth century to the present day. Starting with early blues and the Beatles and continuing with performers such as David Bowie, Prince, Missy Elliot, and Frank Ocean, Geffen explores how artists have used music, fashion, language, and technology to break out of the confines mandated by gender essentialism and establish the voice as the primary expression of gender transgression. From glam rock and punk to disco, techno, and hip-hop, music helped set the stage for today’s conversations about trans rights and recognition of nonbinary and third-gender identities. Glitter Up the Dark takes a long look back at the path that led here.

Whether homages to "Old Cadillacs" or reflections on "Why We Need Poetry," these poems demonstrate Wesley McNair's ability to tell a life in a line and to disclose the knowledge of the heart. How McNair's characters talk about their difficulties -- or why they can't -- is central to this collection, as are meditations in which the poet speaks directly to the reader about the trials and affirmations of human experience.

Malcolm Gladwell, host of the podcast Revisionist History and author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Outliers, offers a powerful examination of our interactions with strangers and why they often go wrong—now with a new afterword by the author. A Best Book of the Year: The Financial Times, Bloomberg, Chicago Tribune, and Detroit Free Press How did Fidel Castro fool the CIA for a generation? Why did Neville Chamberlain think he could trust Adolf Hitler? Why are campus sexual assaults on the rise? Do television sitcoms teach us something about the way we relate to one another that isn’t true? Talking to Strangers is a classically Gladwellian intellectual adventure, a challenging and controversial excursion through history, psychology, and scandals taken straight from the news. He revisits the deceptions of Bernie Madoff, the trial of Amanda Knox, the suicide of Sylvia Plath, the Jerry Sandusky pedophilia scandal at Penn State University, and the death of Sandra Bland—throwing our understanding of these and other stories into doubt. Something is very wrong, Gladwell argues, with the tools and strategies we use to make sense of people we don’t know. And because we don’t know how to talk to strangers, we are inviting conflict and misunderstanding in ways that have a profound effect on our lives and our world. In his first book since his #1 bestseller David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell has written a gripping guidebook for troubled times.

This "intense reading experience"* is a Printz Honor Book. Shawn McDaniel's life is not what it may seem to anyone looking at him. He is glued to his wheelchair, unable to voluntarily move a muscle—he can't even move his eyes. For all Shawn's father knows, his son may be suffering. Shawn may want a release. And as long as he is unable to communicate his true feelings to his father, Shawn's life is in danger. To the world, Shawn's senses seem dead. Within these pages, however, we meet a side of him that no one else has seen—a spirit that is rich beyond imagining, breathing life. *Booklist starred review