Jeff Bayones Honors Bridge Club in New York is the largest in North America, perhaps in the world. This book is based on their beginners course, a series of six lessons that have started thousands of people on the road to enjoying the worlds most popular card game. And no, you wont be able to play bridge when youve read it but if you were to take up tennis, or the piano, how far would six lessons get you? The hope is that the reader will be hooked, and having acquired a taste for bridge, will go on to more comprehensive courses. This one is just to whet the appetite.

This is an intoxicating tale of love and wonder, mothers and daughters, spiritual values and the grim legacy of slavery on the French Antillean island of Guadeloupe. Here long-suffering Telumee tells her life story and tells us about the proud line of Lougandor women she continues to draw strength from. Time flows unevenly during the long hot blue days as the madness of the island swirls around the villages, and Telumee, raised in the shelter of wide skirts, must learn how to navigate the adversities of a peasant community, the ecstasies of love, and domestic realities while arriving at her own precious happiness. In the words of Toussine, the wise, tender grandmother who raises her, “Behind one pain there is another. Sorrow is a wave without end. But the horse mustn’t ride you, you must ride it.” A masterpiece of Caribbean literature, The Bridge of Beyond relates the triumph of a generous and hopeful spirit, while offering a gorgeously lush, imaginative depiction of the flora, landscape, and customs of Gua­deloupe. Simone Schwarz-Bart’s incantatory prose, interwoven with Creole proverbs and lore, appears here in a remarkable translation by Barbara Bray.

Hailed by critics and writers as powerful, important fiction, Monkey Bridge charts the unmapped territory of the Vietnamese American experience in the aftermath of war. Like navigating a monkey bridge—a bridge, built of spindly bamboo, used by peasants for centuries—the narrative traverses perilously between worlds past and present, East and West, in telling two interlocking stories: one, the Vietnamese version of the classic immigrant experience in America, told by a young girl; and the second, a dark tale of betrayal, political intrigue, family secrets, and revenge—her mother's tale. The haunting and beautiful terrain of Monkey Bridge is the "luminous motion," as it is called in Vietnamese myth and legend, between generations, encompassing Vietnamese lore, history, and dreams of the past as well as of the future. "With incredible lightness, balance and elegance," writes Isabel Allende, "Lan Cao crosses over an abyss of pain, loss, separation and exile, connecting on one level the opposite realities of Vietnam and North America, and on a deeper level the realities of the material world and the world of the spirits." • Quality Paperback Book Club Selection and New Voices Award nominee • A Kiriyama Pacific Rim Award Book Prize nominee

Another title in the best-selling '25' series, using the same popular format. Over the last fifteen or so years, the 2/1 Game Forcing bidding method has gained substantial popularity, but for various reasons it is not taught in beginner classes. This book is therefore designed for players who are familiar with Standard bidding and are interested in switching to the 2/1 method. It covers basic concepts as well as the differences between 2/1 and Standard auctions, and includes a discussion of more advanced ideas and conventions that fit particularly well with 2/1 methods. Existing books on this topic (notably by Max Hardy and Mike Lawrence) are too advanced and/or too technical for this level of player.

“A book that looks at existence with equal measures of fear, humility and gratitude. In a time when novelists tend to be more concerned with psychology than the soul, that makes it a rare and valuable thing.” --Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal From the author of Mr. Eternity, a darkly comic road novel about a millennial couple facing the ultimate question: how to live and love in an age of catastrophe. Young Miami couple Murphy and Eva have almost decided to have a baby when Yahweh, the Old Testament God, appears to Eva and makes an unwelcome demand: He wants her to be his prophet. He also wants her to manage his social media presence. Yahweh sends the two on a wild road trip across the country, making incomprehensible demands and mandating arcane rituals as they go. He gives them a hundred million dollars, but he asks them to use it to build a temple on top of a landfill. He forces them to endure a period of Biblical wandering in the deserts of the southwest. Along the way they are continually mistaken for another couple, a pair of North Carolina society people, and find themselves attending increasingly bizarre events in their names. At odds with their mission but helpless to disobey, Murphy and Eva search their surroundings for signs of a future they can have faith in. Through wry observations about the biggest things--cosmology and theology--and the smallest things--the joys and irritations of daily life--Thier questions the mysterious forces that shape our fates, and wonders how much free will we really have. Equal parts hilarious and poignant, The World Is a Narrow Bridge asks: What kind of hope can we pass on to the next generation in a frightening but beautiful world?

"Readers will be captivated by this beautifully written novel about young people who must use their instincts and grit to survive. Padma infuses her story with hope and bravery that will inspire readers."--Aisha Saeed, author of the New York Times Bestseller Amal Unbound Four determined homeless children make a life for themselves in Padma Venkatraman's stirring middle-grade debut. Life is harsh on the teeming streets of Chennai, India, so when runaway sisters Viji and Rukku arrive, their prospects look grim. Very quickly, eleven-year-old Viji discovers how vulnerable they are in this uncaring, dangerous world. Fortunately, the girls find shelter--and friendship--on an abandoned bridge that's also the hideout of Muthi and Arul, two homeless boys, and the four of them soon form a family of sorts. And while making their living scavenging the city's trash heaps is the pits, the kids find plenty to take pride in, too. After all, they are now the bosses of themselves and no longer dependent on untrustworthy adults. But when illness strikes, Viji must decide whether to risk seeking help from strangers or to keep holding on to their fragile, hard-fought freedom.

A collection of life stories so funny, moving that “you don’t have to be a Jewish feminist mama to love this book . . . but it wouldn’t hurt” (Tablet Magazine). Here are the collected autobiographical writings of memoirist, poet, and professor Faye Moskowitz. Known for both her sense of humor—even in the bleakest of circumstances—and her insight into the relationships that define who we are, where we come from, and where we hope to be going, Moskowitz shares her own life stories in “a book that will make you stand up and cheer” (The Detroit News). From her childhood in Detroit during the Great Depression to the time when her mother abandoning the family to pursue her own dreams; from helping a dying friend simply get through another day to a hilarious account of binge eating at a wedding; from finding love and leaving home to building her own family and legacy, these recounted experiences give us “her piercingly tender observations about unlikely friendships, transgressive love, disappointing plants, and sacred Jewish rituals of the kitchen” (Lilith Magazine).