"Insouciant" and "irreverent" are the sort of words that come up in reviews of Dinty W. Moore's books--and, invariably, "hilarious." Between Panic and Desire, named after two towns in Pennsylvania, finds Moore at the top of his astutely funny form. A book that could be named after one of its chapters, "A Post-Nixon, Post-panic, Post-modern, Post-mortem," this collection is an unconventional memoir of one man and his culture, which also happens to be our own. Blending narrative and quizzes, memory and numerology, and imagined interviews and conversations with dead presidents on TV, the book dizzily documents the disorienting experience of growing up in a postmodern world. Here we see how the major events in the author's early life--the Kennedy assassination, Nixon's resignation, watching Father Knows Best, and dropping acid atop the World Trade Center, to name a few--shaped the way he sees events both global and personal today. More to the point, we see how these events shaped, and possibly even distorted, today's world for all of us who spent our formative years in the '50s, '60s, and '70s. A curious meditation on family and bereavement, longing and fear, self-loathing and desire, Between Panic and Desire unfolds in kaleidoscopic forms--a coroner's report, a TV movie script, a Zen koan--aptly reflecting the emergence of a fractured virtual America. Dinty W. Moore is a professor of English at Ohio University and the author of several books, including Dear Mister Essay Writer Guy: Advice and Confessions on Writing, Love, and Cannibals, The Truth of the Matter: Art and Craft in Creative Nonfiction, and The Accidental Buddhist: Mindfulness, Enlightenment, and Sitting Still.

Unmasteredis a new kind of book that allows us to think afresh about desire. Incisive, moving, and lyrical, it opens up a larger space for the exploration of feelings that can be difficult to express. Touching on experiences of desire and pleasure, as well as grief and pain, the book probes the porousness between masculine and feminine, thought and sensation, self and culture, power and pliancy. Katherine Angel reflects on the history of her own feelings, on her encounters and beliefs, and shows how our lives can be shaped by sexuality and feminism; by the words we use, and the stories we tell. The result is a book letting light into places that are often dark and constrained - a searching, erotic work that shifts in meaning and resonance even as it is read.

Beginning in the summer of 2004, Scott Nadelson’s life fell apart. His fiancée left him a month before their planned wedding for another woman who made her living performing as a drag king. He moved into a drafty attic. His car’s brakes went out. He learned that his cat was dying. Over the next two years, he’d struggle, with equivocal and sometimes humiliating results, to get back on his feet, in the process re-examining his past to understand his present circumstances. The Next Scott Nadelson: A Life in Progress is a literary self-portrait that revolves around the dissolution of a relationship but encompasses the long process of a young man’s halting self-discovery. Exploring episodes from the life of its author/narrator marked by failure, suffering, and hope, as well as literary and cultural influence, the book weighs the things that make us want to give up against the things that keep us going. Though many of the pieces are comic and self-deprecating—some self-lacerating—they are above all meditations on the nature of the self and the way it can be constructed through memory, desire, and the imagination. Together they form a larger narrative, a search for fulfillment and identity in a life often governed by fear. With humor and unflinching honesty, Scott Nadelson scrutinizes his life to discover who he is and finds just how elusive such a discovery can be. To read the resulting book is to join him on a personal journey that is thoughtful, surprising, occasionally hilarious, and unapologetically human.

**Winner of Reader's Favorite Book Award** **Winner of Book Excellence Award** **Winner of the Body Mind Spirit Book Award** For seekers of truth, Al Zaabi is a wise and intrepid guide through the wilderness of the self. In plainspoken and heartfelt language, she shine light on the spiritual path and reveals the beauty and necessity of surrender, which has for too long been misunderstanding in the west. -Krista Bremer, author of A Tender Struggle Do you ever wish you could switch off the chatter in your mind? This is what brings many of us to self-help, the fears and worries that go along with being human. It is the reason many of us investigate spirituality: emotions and the thoughts beneath them. Indeed, many approaches to religion and spirituality will tell you that the mind causes your suffering and teach you to quiet your inner voice. The Art of Surrender stands out among self-help books because it offers a completely new approach to spirituality, health, and healing. You do not have to silence your thoughts. Your brain and mind are a gift; they have a spiritual purpose, which is to seek the truth and establish genuine spirituality. Drawing on her Muslim heritage and her wise and careful exploration of spirituality without religion yet informed by it, Eiman Al Zaabi guides you in the delightful art of spiritual inquiry, investigating ideas for yourself and incorporating only those truths that resonate deeply. Whether you are taking the first steps on your spiritual journey or have long traveled such a path, The Art of Surrender will transform your relationship with yourself, the Divine, and the world around you. You’ll learn the deepest needs of your soul and discover how to meet them. You’ll be guided through the four stages of the spiritual journey: finding Source, knowing Source, aligning with Source, and surrendering to Source. With this approach to self-help, anxiety melts away as you develop a spirituality of gratitude and trust. When you read this book, you’ll discover the ultimate state of fulfillment and joy: surrender.

The act of reproduction, and its variants, never change much, but our ideas about the meaning of sex are in constant flux. Switch a decade, cross a border, or traverse class lines and the harmless pleasures of one group become the gravest crimes in another. Combining meticulous research and lively storytelling, The Boundaries of Desire traces the fast–moving bloodsport of sex law over the past century, and challenges our most cherished notions about family, power, gender, and identity. Starting when courts censored birth control information as pornography and let men rape their wives, and continuing through the "sexual revolution" and into the present day (when rape, gay rights, sex trafficking, and sex on the internet saturate the news), Berkowitz shows how the law has remained out of synch with the convulsive changes in sexual morality. By focusing on the stories of real people, Berkowitz adds a compelling human element to what might otherwise be faceless legal battles. The law is made by people, after all, and nothing sparks intolerance – on the left and right –– more than sex. Ultimately, Berkowitz shows the emptiness of sanctimonious condemnation, and argues that sexual questions are too subtle and volatile for simple, catch–all solutions.

A "New York Times" Notable Book, "The Debt to Pleasure" is a wickedly funny ode to food as the novel's snobbish narrator instructs readers in his philosophy on everything from the erotics of dislike to the psychology of the menu.

In the vein of bestselling memoirs about mental illness like Andrew Solomon's Noonday Demon, Sarah Hepola's Blackout, and Daniel Smith's Monkey Mind comes a gorgeously immersive, immediately relatable, and brilliantly funny memoir about living life on the razor's edge of panic. The world never made any sense to Amanda Stern--how could she trust time to keep flowing, the sun to rise, gravity to hold her feet to the ground, or even her own body to work the way it was supposed to? Deep down, she knows that there's something horribly wrong with her, some defect that her siblings and friends don't have to cope with. Growing up in the 1970s and 80s in New York, Amanda experiences the magic and madness of life through the filter of unrelenting panic. Plagued with fear that her friends and family will be taken from her if she's not watching-that her mother will die, or forget she has children and just move away-Amanda treats every parting as her last. Shuttled between a barefoot bohemian life with her mother in Greenwich Village, and a sanitized, stricter world of affluence uptown with her father, Amanda has little she can depend on. And when Etan Patz disappears down the block from their MacDougal Street home, she can't help but believe that all her worst fears are about to come true. Tenderly delivered and expertly structured, Amanda Stern's memoir is a document of the transformation of New York City and a deep, personal, and comedic account of the trials and errors of seeing life through a very unusual lens.