All the stories in this book are true. Our family has decreased with six gone to be with the Lord. The ones still living are Donnie Corsby, Carrie Thorp, me, Clyde Hallmark and his wife Jean Hallmark, and the twins Vera Vandiver and Vada Landers. We still have get-togethers when we can. All of the families live within driving distance of each other and remain very close.

In Teen Angst! Naaah . . . Ned Vizzini offers an authentic and raw portrayal of the crushing anxiety many teens experience, and which often is dismissed as simple ‘angst’. In this classic testament to high school, Ned invites you into his world of school, parents, cool (and almost cool), music (the good and bad), friends, fame, camp, sex (sort of), Cancún (almost), prom, beer, video games, and more. With wit, irony, and honesty, Vizzini presents the weird, funny, and sometimes mortifying moments that made up his teen years. From the author of Broadway musical sensation Be More Chill and It's Kind of a Funny Story, this is a quasi-autobiographical examination of one high schooler’s battle with social anxiety, written when the author was just nineteen. “Fiercely intelligent and introspective . . . Insightful, and thoroughly charming.” —SLJ

Pastry chef Ben enters a competition to bring him national recognition and plans to confess his love for his musician/mechanic neighbor, Adam, on live TV.

Fall in love with Heart’s Landing, a romantic wedding destination, in the first book of a Hallmark series. Jenny always dreamed of getting married at Heart’s Landing. But when she finally visits the charming small town, she’s there to make wedding arrangements for someone else: her cousin, who also happens to be her boss and a famous movie star. To keep the event secret and avoid a media circus, Jenny pretends she’s the one getting married. Nick is intrigued by this bride-to-be who starts visiting his bakery every afternoon for sweet treats and conversation. He has to keep reminding himself that she’s already spoken for. As Jenny deals with her cousin’s ever-changing demands, she tries to hide her attraction to Nick. Planning this wedding couldn’t be more complicated…and what will happen once the truth comes to light? This funny, heartwarming romance includes a free original recipe for the best-ever Lemon Bars.

Can you really die from laughing too hard? Between 1870 and 1920, hundreds of women suffered such a fate—or so a slew of sensationalist obituaries would have us believe. How could laughter be fatal, and what do these reports of women’s risible deaths tell us about the politics of female joy? Maggie Hennefeld reveals the forgotten histories of “hysterical laughter,” exploring how women’s amusement has been theorized and demonized, suppressed and exploited. In nineteenth-century medicine and culture, hysteria was an ailment that afflicted unruly women on the cusp of emotional or nervous breakdown. Cinema, Hennefeld argues, made it possible for women to laugh outrageously as never before, with irreversible social and political consequences. As female enjoyment became a surefire promise of profitability, alarmist tales of women laughing themselves to death epitomized the tension between subversive pleasure and its violent repression. Hennefeld traces the social politics of women’s laughter from the heyday of nineteenth-century sentimentalism to the collective euphoria of early film spectatorship, traversing contagious dancing outbreaks, hysteria photography, madwomen’s cackling, cinematic close-ups, and screenings of slapstick movies in mental asylums. Placing little-known silent films and an archive of remarkable, often unusual texts in conversation with affect theory, comedy studies, and feminist film theory, this book makes a timely case for the power of hysterical laughter to change the world.

A perfectly told tale of defeat and glory—and a paean to gallantry in the face of the absurd—inspired by a real-life secret mission during World War II. Orphaned in the first months of World War One, when his father is killed in action, Willie Maryington dreams only of joining the same cavalry regiment and going to the front. The Armistice dashes seventeen-year-old Willie’s plans, but not his dreams of glory, and he makes the regiment the center of his adult existence. Yet, as the years go by, Willie falls increasingly out of step, not only with civilian life, but with the modern military, where horse charges are a thing of the past, and where a gulf yawns between those who saw action and those who did not. When hostilities break out again between Germany and England, Willie has become a relic. No one could guess that he will be chosen for a mission whose outcome might well decide the course of the Second World War. Inspired by a real-life triumph of British counterintelligence (codenamed “Operation Mincemeat”), and based on classified sources, Operation Heartbreak was suppressed by the British government until 1950. A work of “jewel-like brevity and intensity” (New York Herald Tribune), it is a study in nostalgia and bewildered idealism to place beside the novels of Joseph Roth and Ford Madox Ford.

Extraordinary stories of crime, passion, and adventure from The Atavist magazine, the trailblazing leader in longform narrative writing. Since its inception, The Atavist Magazine has been a pioneer of today’s longform journalism renaissance. Now, Love and Ruin brings ten of the magazine’s most astonishing stories into print for the first time. These writers have taken reporting to the extremes of nature, turned inward to explore what makes us human, and burrowed deep into archives in search of mysterious figures and events more surprising than anything in contemporary fiction. What unifies these nonfiction masterpieces is the keen eye with which their writers capture the details of human experience, and their knack for hooking us into a story and never letting go. With stories by: James Verini • Leslie Jamison • Vanessa Veselka • Jon Mooallem • Cris Beam • Brooke Jarvis • David Dobbs • Adam Higginbotham • Evan Ratliff • Matthew Shaer