BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from Sandra Kring's A Life of Bright Ideas. Wisconsin, 1961. Evelyn “Button” Peters is nine the summer Winnalee and her fiery-spirited older sister, Freeda, blow into her small town–and from the moment she sees them, Button knows this will be a summer unlike any other. Much to her mother’s dismay, Button is fascinated by the Malone sisters, especially Winnalee, a feisty scrap of a thing who carries around a shiny silver urn containing her mother’s ashes and a tome she calls “The Book of Bright Ideas.” It is here, Winnalee tells Button, that she records everything she learns: her answers to the mysteries of life. But sometimes those mysteries conceal a truth better left buried. And when a devastating secret is suddenly revealed, dividing loyalties and uprooting lives, no one–from Winnalee and her sister to Button and her family–will ever be the same.

Spite angers and enrages us, but it also keeps us honest. In this provocative account, a psychologist examines how petty vengeance explains human thriving. Spite seems utterly useless. You don't gain anything by hurting yourself just so you can hurt someone else. So why hasn't evolution weeded out all the spiteful people? As psychologist Simon McCarthy-Jones argues, spite seems pointless because we're looking at it wrong. Spite isn't just what we feel when a car cuts us off or when a partner cheats. It's what we feel when we want to punish a bad act simply because it was bad. Spite is our fairness instinct, an innate resistance to exploitation, and it is one of the building blocks of human civilization. As McCarthy-Jones explains, some of history's most important developments—the rise of religions, governments, and even moral codes—were actually redirections of spiteful impulses. A provocative, engaging read, Spite shows that if you really want to understand what makes us human, you can't just look at noble ideas like altruism and cooperation. You need to understand our darker impulses as well.

'Not for the faint-hearted.' Scotsman What do you do when the life you’ve carefully built for yourself comes apart? Lydia Smith lives a quiet life, spent in the company of her colleagues and customers at the bookstore where she works. But when Joey Molina, a young and mysterious regular, hangs himself in the bookstore and leaves Lydia secret messages hidden in the pages of his books, her world starts to unravel. Why did Joey do it? What did he know? And what does it have to do with Lydia?

In this gripping sci-fi noir for fans of The Martian and Quentin Tarantino, when an anarchic android begins wreaking havoc on a moon-based penal colony and bodies start turning up, an exiled detective must decide who he can trust in a city of criminals. Never bang your head against a wall. Bang someone else’s. Purgatory is the lawless moon colony of eccentric billionaire, Fletcher Brass and mecca for war criminals, murderers, and curious tourists alike. You can’t find better drugs, cheaper plastic surgery, or a more ominous travel advisory anywhere in the universe. But trouble is brewing in Brass’s black-market heaven. When an exiled cop comes to enact law and order in this wild new frontier, he finds himself the lead investigator in a series of high-profile murders that puts him toe to toe with the city’s charismatic founder and his equally ambitious daughter. Meanwhile, 2000 km away a memory-wiped android, Leonardo Black rampages across the lunar surface. Programmed with only the notorious “Brass Code”—a compendium of corporate laws that would make Ayn Rand blush—he journeys across the dark side of the moon with only one goal in mind: find Purgatory and conquer it.

How can I know something? How can I convince someone of the rightness of my position? How does reality function? What is artistic creativity? What is the role of the state? It is well known that people from various cultures give dissimilar answers to such philosophical questions. After three decades in the cross-cultural study of ideas and values, Thomas Kasulis found that culture influences not only the answers to these questions, but often how one arrives at the answers. In generalizing cultural difference, Kasulis identifies two kinds of orientation: intimacy and integrity. Both determine how we think about relations among people and among things, and each is reasonable, effective, and consistent. Yet the two are so incompatible in their basic assumptions that they cannot successfully engage each other. Cultural difference extends beyond nations. Cultural identities crystallize in relation to religion, occupation, race, gender, class. Rather than attempt to transcend cultural difference, Kasulis urges a deeper awareness of its roots by moving beyond mere cultural relativism toward a cultural bi-orientationality that will allow us to adapt ourselves to different cultural contexts as the situation demands. Wonderfully clear and unburdened by jargon, Intimacy or Integrity is accessible to readers from a variety of perspectives and backgrounds. By analyzing the synergy between thought and culture, it increases our understanding of cultural difference and guides us in developing strategies for dealing with orientations different from our own.

Money or love? Alien Warrior Brides is a series of standalone stories with a connected universe. Each book can be read separately. Guaranteed HEA. No cliffhangers. No cheating. Expect lots of steam. DONNCHADH I only had one mission: steal Princess Celeste from her kingdom and bring her to be married to a warlord. I didn’t mean to fall in love. But the more time I spent with her, the more I knew that I’d never be able to leave her in the hands of a cruel man. I couldn’t let her go. My job and family were at stake. My brother left the planet and my sister and I were paying for his mistakes, a huge debt that was nearly impossible to pay. If I delivered Princess Celeste to the warlord, the slate would be wiped clean. But I don’t think I can, not when my heart says that she’s the one for me.

When a bookshop patron commits suicide, his favorite store clerk must unravel the puzzle he left behind in this “intriguingly dark, twisty” (Kirkus Reviews) debut novel from an award-winning short story writer. Lydia Smith lives her life hiding in plain sight. A clerk at the Bright Ideas bookstore, she keeps a meticulously crafted existence among her beloved books, eccentric colleagues, and the BookFrogs—the lost and lonely regulars who spend every day marauding the store’s overwhelmed shelves. But when Joey Molina, a young, beguiling BookFrog, kills himself in the bookstore’s upper room, Lydia’s life comes unglued. Always Joey’s favorite bookseller, Lydia has been bequeathed his meager worldly possessions. Trinkets and books; the detritus of a lonely, uncared for man. But when Lydia flips through his books she finds them defaced in ways both disturbing and inexplicable. They reveal the psyche of a young man on the verge of an emotional reckoning. And they seem to contain a hidden message. What did Joey know? And what does it have to do with Lydia? As Lydia untangles the mystery of Joey’s suicide, she unearths a long buried memory from her own violent childhood. Details from that one bloody night begin to circle back. Her distant father returns to the fold, along with an obsessive local cop, and the Hammerman, a murderer who came into Lydia’s life long ago and, as she soon discovers, never completely left. “Both charming and challenging” (Marilyn Stasio, The New York Times Book Review), Midnight at the Bright Ideas Bookstore is a “multi-generational tale of abandonment, desperation, and betrayal…inventive and intricately plotted” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).

Musaicum Books presents to you this unique and meticulously edited sea adventure collection: Content: Captain Charles Johnson: The History of Pirates R. L. Stevenson: Treasure Island Jack London: The Sea Wolf The Mutiny of the Elsinore A Son of the Sun Daniel Defoe: Robinson Crusoe Captain Singleton Tobias Smollett: The Adventures of Roderick Random Walter Scott: The Pirate Frederick Marryat: Mr. Midshipman Easy Masterman Ready; Or, The Wreck of the "Pacific" Edgar Allan Poe: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket James Fenimore Cooper: The Pilot: A Tale of the Sea The Red Rover Afloat and Ashore: A Sea Tale Miles Wallingford Homeward Bound; Or, The Chase: A Tale of the Sea Thomas Mayne Reid: The Ocean Waifs: A Story of Adventure on Land and Sea Victor Hugo: Toilers of the Sea Herman Melville: Redburn White-Jacket Moby Dick Benito Cereno R. M. Ballantyne: The Coral Island: A Tale of the Pacific Ocean Fighting the Whales Jules Verne: The Voyages and Adventures of Captain Hatteras In Search of the Castaways; Or, The Children of Captain Grant 20 000 Leagues under the Sea Dick Sand: A Captain at Fifteen An Antarctic Mystery L. Frank Baum: Sam Steele's Adventures on Land and Sea Randall Parrish: Wolves of the Sea Charles Boardman Hawes: The Dark Frigate The Mutineers Joseph Conrad: The Nigger of the 'Narcissus' Lord Jim Typhoon The Shadow Line The Arrow of Gold Rudyard Kipling: Captains Courageous Ralph Henry Barbour: The Adventure Club Afloat Rafael Sabatini: Captain Blood The Sea-Hawk Jeffery Farnol: Black Bartlemy's Treasure Martin Conisby's Vengeance Henry De Vere Stacpoole: The Blue Lagoon The Garden of God

Super Science Lab: Bright Ideas introduces budding scientists to the world of light and electricity with exciting do-it-yourself experiments. Using the materials included in the kit, kids can make a lava lamp, light up their fridge with illuminated magnets, build an electric motor, and see how Jell-o makes light bend.