I read No Exit in my early twenties, and I remember thinking hell might very well be other people, okay, sure, but under what far-fetched conditions would anyone ever actually be trapped forever in the company of strangers with no sleep or means of escape? Then I became a parent. From Deborah Copaken Kogan, the acclaimed author of the national bestseller Shutterbabe, comes this edgy, insightful, and sidesplitting memoir about surviving in the trenches of modern parenting. Kogan writes situation comedy in the style of David Sedaris and Spalding Gray with a dash of Erma-Bombeck-on-a-Vespa: wry, acutely observed, and often hilarious true tales, in which the narrator is as culpable as any character. In these eleven linked pieces, Kogan and her husband are almost always broke while working full-time and raising three children in New York City, one of the most expensive and competitive cities in the world. In one episode, exhausted from a particularly difficult childbirth, Kogan finds herself sharing a hospital room with a foul-mouthed teen mother and her partying posse. In another, Kogan manages to crawl her way to her own emergency appendectomy, which inconveniently strikes the same week her infant's babysitter is away on vacation, her adolescents are off from school, her New York Times editor needs his edit, and the whole family catches the flu. And in the book's capper essay, she drives twelve hours, solo, with a screaming toddler in a rent-a-car in a futile effort to catch a glimpse of her eldest child in his summer camp play. Yes, Shutterbabe is all grown up and slightly worse for the wear, but her clear-eyed vision while under fire has remained intact: You've never read funnier war stories.

Evocative tribute to Somerset's railway heritage

The attacks come out of nowhere and leave behind a blood-soaked trace of destruction and death. Just one unexpected moment is all it needs to unfold its reign of terror and fear. Nobody knows this better than an old homeless man and two brothers from the rundown outskirts of a big city.

Klein argues that adult success is often established in the developmental preschool years. She shares advice for parents on how to promote such success-driving positive attributes as resilience, self-regulation, and empathy.

It took a baby to bring them together… Max Jamison had been a good cop, and now he was a good P.I. Still, it shook him to be faced with what seemed to be a replay of his past—a baby depending on him for rescue! And his only ally was "The Black Widow, " Chelsea Markum. Chelsea Markum, relentless reporter for Tattle Today TV, knew a hot story when she saw one—and a trapped toddler was it! Yet here she was with no camcorder, thanks to Max Jamison, and the strangest urge to help! In her wildest dreams, Chelsea wouldn?t have seen herself singing at the scene of a disaster, but if that's what it took to comfort the child… Neither would she ever have imagined teaming up with Max Jamison, or their falling in love… But she was beginning to believe the old saying that "truth is stranger than fiction. "