"I Am Daphne" is the story of a young girl who spends her childhood feeling different because she's small. Despite wishing and hoping, and her best efforts to change her height, Daphne learns a surprising lesson from her mother -- about where her name comes from and the power behind its meaning. "I Am Daphne" is an inspiring book for anyone who has ever felt less than, and encourages children (and adults!) to embrace what makes them unique, through harnessing the power that lies within. Out there among the stars and blue, know that there lies a moon like you.

A New York Times Book Review Favorite Read of 2016 “Despair is always described as dull,” writes Daphne Merkin, “when the truth is that despair has a light all its own, a lunar glow, the color of mottled silver.” This Close to Happy—Merkin’s rare, vividly personal account of what it feels like to suffer from clinical depression—captures this strange light. Daphne Merkin has been hospitalized three times: first, in grade school, for childhood depression; years later, after her daughter was born, for severe postpartum depression; and later still, after her mother died, for obsessive suicidal thinking. Recounting this series of hospitalizations, as well as her visits to myriad therapists and psychopharmacologists, Merkin fearlessly offers what the child psychiatrist Harold Koplewicz calls “the inside view of navigating a chronic psychiatric illness to a realistic outcome.” The arc of Merkin’s affliction is lifelong, beginning in a childhood largely bereft of love and stretching into the present, where Merkin lives a high-functioning life and her depression is manageable, if not “cured.” “The opposite of depression,” she writes with characteristic insight, “is not a state of unimaginable happiness . . . but a state of relative all-right-ness.” In this dark yet vital memoir, Merkin describes not only the harrowing sorrow that she has known all her life, but also her early, redemptive love of reading and gradual emergence as a writer. Written with an acute understanding of the ways in which her condition has evolved as well as affected those around her, This Close to Happy is an utterly candid coming-to-terms with an illness that many share but few talk about, one that remains shrouded in stigma. In the words of the distinguished psychologist Carol Gilligan, “It brings a stunningly perceptive voice into the forefront of the conversation about depression, one that is both reassuring and revelatory.”

ELIF SHAFAK'S NEW YORK TIMES ISTANBUL READING LIST RUNCIMAN AWARD SHORTLIST ERIC HOFFER AWARD FINALIST & HONORABLE MENTION DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD LONGLIST WNBA GREAT GROUP READ SELECTION At the neighborhood café where pastry chef Kosmas, charming widower Fanis, and other Rum—Greek Orthodox Christian—friends meet regularly for afternoon tea, American-born Daphne arrives with her elderly aunt. Daphne unsettles hearts, provokes jealousies, and stirs up memories of the 1955 Istanbul pogrom, forcing Kosmas and Fanis to confront their painful history in order to risk new beginnings. A shrewd and humorous tale, A Recipe for Daphne invites the reader into the kitchens, loves, and secret lives of Istanbul's most ancient community.

"I Am Daphne" is the story of a young girl who spends her childhood feeling different because she's small. Despite wishing and hoping, and her best efforts to change her height, Daphne learns a surprising lesson from her mother - about where her name comes from and the power behind its meaning. "I Am Daphne" is an inspiring book for anyone who has ever felt less than, and encourages children (and adults!) to embrace what makes them unique, through harnessing the power that lies within. Out there among the stars and blue, know that there lies a moon like you.

In this “elegant meditation on modern-day emotion” (San Francisco Chronicle), best-selling, prize-winning author Will Boast reimagines the myth of Daphne and Apollo. Will Boast’s long-anticipated first novel is an “outright marvelous debut [that] breathes fresh vigor into timeless questions of love and risk” (Laura van den Berg). Born with a rare condition in which she suffers degrees of paralysis when faced with intense emotion, Daphne has had few close friends and fewer lovers. Like her mythic namesake, one touch can freeze her. But when Daphne meets shy, charming Ollie, her well-honed defenses falter, and she’s faced with a critical choice: cling to her protective isolation or risk the recklessness of real intimacy. Set against the backdrop of a San Francisco flush with money and pulsing with protest, Daphne is “an amiable exploration of how humans might come to manage their raucous hearts” (NewYorker.com).

In her latest novel, the author of the Junior Library Guild Selection "Like Vanessa" follows seventh-grader Annabelle Louis, a super geek and perennial new kid who leads a double life as a hilarious, on-the-rise vlog star named Daphne. Illustrations.

NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • A “boisterous and infectious debut novel” (The Guardian) about a group of friends and their immigrant families from Queens, New York—a tenderly observed, fiercely poetic love letter to a modern generation of brown girls. “An acute study of those tender moments of becoming, this is an ode to girlhood, inheritance, and the good trouble the body yields.”—Raven Leilani, author of Luster FINALIST: The New American Voices Award, The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction, The VCU Cabell First Novelist Award, The New American Voices Award, The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: PopSugar, Kirkus Reviews If you really want to know, we are the color of 7-Eleven root beer. The color of sand at Rockaway Beach when it blisters the bottoms of our feet. Color of soil . . . Welcome to Queens, New York, where streets echo with languages from all over the globe, subways rumble above dollar stores, trees bloom and topple over sidewalks, and the funky scent of the Atlantic Ocean wafts in from Rockaway Beach. Within one of New York City’s most vibrant and eclectic boroughs, young women of color like Nadira, Gabby, Naz, Trish, Angelique, and countless others, attempt to reconcile their immigrant backgrounds with the American culture in which they come of age. Here, they become friends for life—or so they vow. Exuberant and wild, together they roam The City That Never Sleeps, sing Mariah Carey at the tops of their lungs, yearn for crushes who pay them no mind—and break the hearts of those who do—all while trying to heed their mothers’ commands to be obedient daughters. But as they age, their paths diverge and rifts form between them, as some choose to remain on familiar streets, while others find themselves ascending in the world, beckoned by existences foreign and seemingly at odds with their humble roots. A blazingly original debut novel told by a chorus of unforgettable voices, Brown Girls illustrates a collective portrait of childhood, adulthood, and beyond, and is a striking exploration of female friendship, a powerful depiction of women of color attempting to forge their place in the world today. For even as the conflicting desires of ambition and loyalty, freedom and commitment, adventure and stability risk dividing them, it is to one another—and to Queens—that the girls ultimately return.