This Someone I Call Stranger, by James Diaz, is absolutely transcendent. Diaz's evocative and courageous writing conjures up cinematic imagery with heartbreaking vulnerability and unpretentious strength. Reading his poetry, I could feel myself leaning in, yearning alongside him for such things as the affirmation of love, beauty, and release in the face of brokenness, loss, and pain. Diaz's poems will make you feel deeply. His poems will make you want to write, even if you're not a writer. His poems will make you look at your world through a new lens, see and feel things through a bigger, perhaps broken, yet wide-open heart. Kym Tuvim In our era of irony, disposability, and impatience, the poems of This Someone I Call Stranger, James Diaz's debut collection, reverberate with rare authenticity and lyrical pain. Threading through a past of blind forests and dark basements, empty cupboards, dirty needles, hospital floors, and bad men who won't die, this book is a necessary example of duende for the twenty-first century. These poems will arrest you. They have hungry souls, and they ache without breaking. They will hang in your brain and settle in your bones, and they will also move you forward, bravely, toward uncertain light. Jessie Janeshek Authentic, unafraid, and unassuming, James Diaz's This Someone I Call Stranger is a personal yet dynamic landscape of the darker parts of the soul, which somehow remains "impossibly alive" no matter how far from home one has strayed. The poems are equal parts vulnerable and strong, a breathing example of how those qualities are inextricable, how there is something about the darkness that cannot put out the light, how there is something about the light that gains its brightness from the shadows. Diaz writes as if no one outside is listening, which is to say, as if these poems are not poems at all but whispered murmurs from one aspect of the self to another, and we the readers just happen to be lucky enough to catch these glimpses of humanity in its most raw essence: determined yet mysterious, messy yet transcendent. Sarah Certa

Malcolm Gladwell, host of the podcast Revisionist History and author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Outliers, offers a powerful examination of our interactions with strangers and why they often go wrong—now with a new afterword by the author. A Best Book of the Year: The Financial Times, Bloomberg, Chicago Tribune, and Detroit Free Press How did Fidel Castro fool the CIA for a generation? Why did Neville Chamberlain think he could trust Adolf Hitler? Why are campus sexual assaults on the rise? Do television sitcoms teach us something about the way we relate to one another that isn’t true? Talking to Strangers is a classically Gladwellian intellectual adventure, a challenging and controversial excursion through history, psychology, and scandals taken straight from the news. He revisits the deceptions of Bernie Madoff, the trial of Amanda Knox, the suicide of Sylvia Plath, the Jerry Sandusky pedophilia scandal at Penn State University, and the death of Sandra Bland—throwing our understanding of these and other stories into doubt. Something is very wrong, Gladwell argues, with the tools and strategies we use to make sense of people we don’t know. And because we don’t know how to talk to strangers, we are inviting conflict and misunderstanding in ways that have a profound effect on our lives and our world. In his first book since his #1 bestseller David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell has written a gripping guidebook for troubled times.

For anyone who needs a little help finding love, this book is the ultimate dating makeover kit! The line at Starbucks. The movies. The Internet. Even the dry cleaners... there are dozens of opportunites to seize the date, but millions of lonely singles pass them by! David Wygant shows readers just how easy it can be to overcome fear and meet new people in their daily routines. David explains the three simple steps to getting a date with ease: being prepared, being aware, and making contact. Always Talk to Strangers breaks away from pop psychology, gimmicks, and rules to offer concrete information on how single people actually meet--and successfully date--other singles. No mind games, cheap tricks, or corny pickup lines here. Just common sense, and specific information on: - Where to go to meet people, and when - Why bars and clubs are the worst places to get a date - Overcoming fear and negative thinking - Using props to start a natural conversation - Making a great first impression - Spotting opportunity--and going for it!

In the tradition of The Stranger and The Old Man and the Sea, this taut novella by critically acclaimed novelist Michael Farris Smith (Rivers, 2013) explores the human spirit and its capacity for faith and forgiveness in an imperfect world. What happens to a marriage when a child vanishes? Jon and Estelle walk the picturesque Paris streets, but are living through the cruelest of realties—the disappearance of their nine-year-old daughter Jennifer, abducted from the Musée D’Orsay during a class field trip. Jon spends his day slugging through bus terminals and metro halls, posting flyers of his daughter, while Estelle has become a recluse, unwilling to leave the apartment in case the telephone rings. Their relationship suffers as the passing time chips away at the hope of Jennifer’s return. Then, a free-spirited artist enters their life as unexpectedly as Jennifer has left it, luring Jon down a reckless path as he searches desperately for courage in the smallest signs. If their daughter is ever returned to them, will Jon and Estelle both be there to welcome her home?

Have you ever wished you could understand that soldier you know and love better? Or perhaps youre a soldier yourself who feels as if no one really understands what youve been through. In Hope on a Strange Planet, author Chaplain Stephen Dicks seeks to provide a deeper understanding of the experiences of an American in the military by sharing this personal narrative. He came up through the ranks in the US Army from a private to an officer, with two long tours in Iraq. From Baghdad and Mosul, attached to a combat support hospital during some of the hardest fighting, to his final tour with the Fortieth MPs out of Fort Leavenworth and the 2011 withdrawal of US troops, Chaplain Dicks offers insight into the life and thoughts of a US soldier deployed to a strange planet in the middle of a combat zone. He gives hope to those who have been there that they can survive. In this memoir, an army chaplain presents his life story with humor, pride, and sorrow, along with a firsthand understanding of the sacrifices the soldiers and their families make each day.