This playful and profound French bestseller about finding the miraculous in the mundane offers 101 experiments in the philosophy of everyday life.

Roger Pol-Droit's highly original book is a reassessment of our day-to-day engagement with life. In 101 short texts, written with limpid elegance, Droit invites us to reconsider our most ordinary actions as unexpected philosophical events: peeling an apple, trying to lie in a hammock, watching someone sleep, hearing your voice on an answering machine, playing with a small child - activities that, when considered outside of their routine, invite us to experience the familiar in startling new ways. Droit encourages us to go further: pretend to be an animal of your choice, create a wall with your hands, try to walk around your room in total darkness, spend time in the Underground - and observe your oddity.

From the bestselling author of Great Circle—for years Joan has been trying to forget her past, to find peace and satisfaction in her role as wife and mother. Few in her drowsy California suburb know her thrilling history: as a young American ballerina in Paris, she fell into a doomed, passionate romance with Soviet dance superstar Arslan Rusakov. After playing a leading role in his celebrated defection, Joan bowed out of the spotlight for good, heartbroken by Arslan and humbled by her own modest career. But when her son turns out to be a ballet prodigy, Joan is pulled back into a world she thought she'd left behind—a world of dangerous secrets, of Arslan, and of longing for what will always be just out of reach. “The inner lives of [Shipstead’s] characters feel as real and immediate as the shifting settings they inhabit: still-gritty mid-1970s Manhattan, shabbily elegant Paris, the sunbaked suburban sprawl of Southern California.” —Entertainment Weekly

Is the year ahead looking much the same as the last? Another 365-day grind of meetings, dinner dates, and deadlines? If so, try this book--the perfect gift for the adventurous reader. Part instruction manual, part therapy, part religious cult, part sheer anarchy, This Book Will Change Your Life will help you poke a stick in the spokes of your routine. It's not the soft-hearted kind of book that's interested in what you have to say; rather it contains 365 daily orders, each one of which could turn your humdrum existence into a daily free-fall. Whether learning to tell one joke properly, spending an hour talking to a tree, or choosing a motto to live by, This Book Will Change Your Life will lead you to make every day of the next year the first day of your new life.

It is important to thoughtfully choose our careers but for many reasons many of us take a job because it is the first decent offer that comes along. Over time we are content to move up in salary, rather than personal satisfaction. We have no choice, as we have bills to pay and a family to support. But Orison Swett Marden says that we must not settle. We have a personal obligation to find our own happiness and success. In fact, the world demands that we experience fulfillment for ourselves as our happiness also affects those around us. In this book, Discovering Yourself, Marden goes through the preparation and pursuit of fulfillment and includes the life stories of successful men and women as told by themselves. Chapters include: • The Victorious Attitude • According to Thy Faith • Doubt the Traitor • Making Dreams Come True • Making Yourself a Prosperity Magnet • Where Your Supply Is • You Are Headed Toward Your Ideal • Education Under Difficulties • Misfit Occupations • This One Thing I Do • Enthusiasm • Doing Everything To A Finish • The Help Yourself Society • How to Find Oneself • Life Stories of Successful Men and WomenTold By Themselves “To be a conqueror in appearance, in one’s bearing, is the first step toward success. It inspires confidence in others as well as in one self. Walk, talk and act as though you were a somebody, and you are more likely to become such. Move about among others as though you believe you are a person of importance. Let victory speak from your face and express itself in your manner. Carry yourself like one who is conscious of having a splendid mission, a grand aim in life. Radiate a hopeful, expectant, cheerful atmosphere. In other words, be a good advertisement of the winner you are trying to be.”

From the beloved author of Love, Nina, a frank, tender, and poignantly funny story about the ebb and flow of female friendship over half a lifetime. Susan and Norma have been best friends for years, at first thrust together by force of circumstance (a job at The Pin Cushion, a haberdashery shop in 1990s Leicestershire) and then by force of character (neither being particularly inclined to make friends with anyone else). But now, thirty years later, faced with a husband seeking immortality and Norma out of reach on a wave of professional glory, Susan begins to wonder whether she has made the right choices about life, love, work, and, most importantly, friendship. Nina Stibbe's new novel is the story of the wonderful and sometimes surprising path of friendship: from its conspiratorial beginnings, along its irritating wrong turns, to its final gratifying destination.

Deluxe -- Thank You -- Pelham Road -- There Is No Mike Here -- Things People Said: An Essay in Seven Steps -- Temporary Talismans -- Six Hours from Anywhere You Want to Be -- No One Is Ordinary; Everyone Is Ordinary -- Ring Theory -- Saris and Sorrows -- Voice Texting with My Mother.

Chosen by Joanna Scott as winner of the 2003 Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction.

Blow Your Mindfulness An encyclopedia for the curious and courageous, The Book of Highs catalogs the hundreds of ways humans can alter consciousness, minus drugs and alcohol. Drawn from cultures around the world, here are positive techniques—Self-Hypnosis, Alterations of Breathing, Fervent Prayer, Spinning. And here are “negative” techniques—Self-Flagellation, Sleep Deprivation, Fire Walking. Methods derived from religious and mystic traditions—Transcendental Meditation, Tea Ceremony, Tantric Sex. Methods that use devices, from the domestic Metronome Watching, to the state-of-the-art Brain-Wave Biofeedback, Electrodermal Activity (EDA), Ganzfeld Effect, and Psychedelic Bathtub. Whether you’re looking for a life-changing adventure—like Skydiving—or something to do every day, just to change things up—like Zen Morning Laugh—The Book of Highs will get you there.