Everyone says that lying is wrong. But when we say that lying is bad and hurtful and that we would never intentionally tell a lie, are we really deceiving anyone? In this wise and insightful book, David Nyberg exposes the tacit truth underneath our collective pretense and reveals that an occasional lie can be helpful, healthy, creative, and, in some situations, even downright moral. Through familiar and often entertaining examples, Nyberg explores the purposes deception serves, from the social kindness of the white lie to the political ends of diplomacy to the avoidance of pain or unpleasantness. He looks at the lies we tell ourselves as well, and contrary to the scolding of psychologists demonstrates that self-deception is a necessary function of mental health, one of the mind's many weapons against stress, uncertainty, and chaos. Deception is in our nature, Nyberg tells us. In civilization, just as in the wilderness, survival does not favor the fully exposed or conspicuously transparent self. As our minds have evolved, as practical intelligence has become more refined, as we have learned the subtleties of substituting words and symbols for weapons and violence, deception has come to play a central and complex role in social life. The Varnished Truth takes us beyond philosophical speculation and clinical analysis to give a sense of what it really means to tell the truth. As Nyberg lays out the complexities involved in leading a morally decent life, he compels us to see the spectrum of alternatives to telling the truth and telling a clear-cut lie. A life without self-deception would be intolerable and a world of unconditional truth telling unlivable. His argument that deception and self-deception are valuable to both social stability and individual mental health boldly challenges popular theories on deception, including those held by Sissela Bok and Daniel Goleman. Yet while Nyberg argues that we deceive, among other reasons, so that we might not perish of the truth, he also cautions that we deceive carelessly, thoughtlessly, inhumanely, and selfishly at our own peril.

The practice of selling one's tale of woe to make a buck has long been a part of American culture. The Unvarnished Truth: Personal Narratives in Nineteenth-Century America is a powerful cultural history of how ordinary Americans crafted and sold their stories of hardship and calamity during the nineteenth century. Ann Fabian examines the tales of beggars, convicts, ex-slaves, prisoners of the Confederacy, and others to explore cultural authority, truth-telling, and the nature of print media as the country was shifting to a market economy. This well-crafted book describes the fascinating controversies surrounding these little-read tales and returns them to the social worlds where they were produced. Drawing on an enormous number of personal narratives—accounts of mostly poor, suffering, and often uneducated Americans—The Unvarnished Truth analyzes a long-ignored tradition in popular literature. Historians have treated the spread of literacy and the growth of print culture as a chapter in the democratization of refinement, but these tales suggest that this was not always the case. Producing stories that purported to be the plain, unvarnished truth, poor men and women edged their way onto the cultural stage, using storytelling strategies far older than those relying on a Renaissance sense of refinement and polish. This book introduces a unique collection of tales to explore the nature of truth, authenticity, and representation.

Along with my own personal story, I am going to write down a few things that may amuse you (or even take you down some other emotional path) and I'll let you in on a few so-far-unrevealed aspects of my life. I'll try to leave out the boring bits. Don't be thinking this is easy for me. I'm darn good at getting under other people's skin, but opening up about my own life is quite a different matter. So how shall I portray myself? There are choices, you know: Wife, mother, psychologist, writer, comedian, actor, dancer, diver, gypsy, dreamer, rich girl, poor girl, beggar girl, thief. I am all of those and more. Tell you what, you decide. You decide exactly what I am… A complicated childhood in Australia, a bold move to London, being a woman in a man's world on Not the Nine O'Clock News, becoming Mrs Billy Connolly, motherhood, career changes and then Strictly Come Dancing - told in her own inimitable style, The Varnished Untruthis Pamela Stephenson's own story.

American photographer Clifford Coffin (1973-1972) is considered by many who knew him to be the greatest of "Vogue"'s "lost" photographers. His work had challenged the photographic standards of the day and produced fashion photos of unmatched elegance and flamboyance. Now the works of this influential and innovative fashion photographer are now published in one volume.

The Belly of Paris (Le Ventre de Paris) is the third novel in Émile Zola's twenty-volume series Les Rougon-Macquart, first published in 1873. It is a novel of the teeming life which surrounds the great central markets of Paris. The book was originally translated into English by Henry Vizetelly and published in 1888 under the title Fat and Thin. After Vizetelly's imprisonment for obscene libel the novel was one of those revised and expurgated by his son, Ernest Alfred Vizetelly. The heroine is Lisa Quenu, a daughter of Antoine Macquart. She has become prosperous, and with prosperity her selfishness has increased. Her brother-in-law Florent had escaped from penal servitude in Cayenne and lived for a short time in her house, but she became tired of his presence and ultimately denounced him to the police. Émile Zola (1840 – 1902) was a French writer, the most important exemplar of the literary school of naturalism and an important contributor to the development of theatrical naturalism. He was a major figure in the political liberalization of France.

A fast and witty new fantasy novel about the magician in charge of Earth, who maintains the balance between positive and negative magic for the good of all.

This “masterful epic” spans decades and oceans from Trinidad to the American frontier during the tumultuous days of westward expansion (Publishers Weekly). Trinidad, 1796. Young Rosa Rendón quietly rebels against the life others expect her to lead. Bright, competitive, and opinionated, she does not intend to cook and keep house, for it is obvious her talents lie in running the farm she views as her birthright. But when her homeland changes from Spanish to British rule, the fate of free black property owners—Rosa’s family among them—is suddenly jeopardized. By 1830, Rosa is living among the Crow Nation in Bighorn, Montana, with her children and her husband, Edward Rose, a Crow chief. Her son Victor is of the age where he must seek his vision and become a man. But his path forward is blocked by secrets Rosa has kept from him. So Rosa must take him to where his story began and, in turn, retrace her own roots. Along the way, she must acknowledge the painful events that forced her from the middle of an ocean to the rugged terrain of a far-away land. A Booklist Editor’s Choice Book of the Year