'Excellent' The Times 'Offers a fresh take on how to create your own balance, be more productive and feel fulfilled in the high-pressure social media age' Cosmopolitan, 12 BEST NEW BOOKS TO READ 'Serves some serious inspiration for the business-minded' Bustle, TOP DEBUT BOOKS OF 2021 In Working Hard, Hardly Working, entrepreneur Grace Beverley reflects on our new working world - where every hobby can be a hustle and social media is the lens through which we view ourselves and others - and offers a fresh take on how to create your own balance, be more productive and feel fulfilled. Insightful, curious and refreshingly honest, this book will open your eyes to what you want from your life and work - and then help you chart a path to get there.

Dinah Nichols, PR chick for Green World International, knows how to spin a story. She has to, otherwise how else would rescuing loons get the media attention it deserves? But a visit from Higher Management guru Ian Trutch means she'll have to put some spin on the "fabulous work" she and the staff have been doing. Sure, her latest hobby of haranguing a cocky colleague is worthwhile, but it isn't part of GWI's mission statement or anything. So, how to convince the higher-ups she and the others are working hard for their higher purpose? Hmm. Dating Trutch seemed the obvious move, but now she's not so sure he is what he says he is, and the office is turned upside down as acts of local ecoterrorism are suddenly on the rise, and Dinah's famed mother—a bona fide well-known Jacques Cousteau type—makes an unforgettable appearance, putting Dinah's entire career in jeopardy. Will Dinah navigate her eclectic crew to safety, or will they have to swim for it?

Work hard until the job is done! That is the message Isaac hears repeatedly from his teacher, his coach, and his mom. They have to keep reminding him to finish his tasks because Isaac always – always – puts fun first. During math class, Isaac quits an assignment because a robot on a faraway computer monitor is too cool to ignore. At tennis practice, he stops doing drills because he wants to spice things up by whacking tennis balls so hard, they soar over the fence like out-of-the-park homers. When his mom promises a trip to the zoo if he cleans his room, Isaac crams, stuffs, and piles every dirty shirt, game, and candy wrapper into a closet and calls it clean. When the mess spills out, burying his mom, the zoo trip is delayed until he cleans his room the right way. Isaac is so busy looking to have fun, he ignores his responsibilities and all the work he needs to finish. Will it make any difference when a caring teacher introduces him to four simple steps that can help him focus and finish tasks? Or will Isaac keep making more work for himself by putting fun first? Are You Working Hard or Hardly Working? offers a timely message about the importance of having a strong work ethic and maintaining balance between work and play. A special tips page written specifically for parents and teachers offers helpful ideas on how to empower kids to stay focused and on task.

Named a Fall Pick by Boston Globe, ELLE, Library Journal and MyDomain An eerie debut collection featuring missing parents, unrequited love, and other uncomfortable moments A man hangs from the ceiling of an art gallery. A woman spells out messages to her sister using her own hair. Children deemed “bad” are stolen from their homes. In Hardly Children, Laura Adamczyk’s rich and eccentric debut collection, familiar worlds—bars, hotel rooms, cities that could very well be our own—hum with uncanny dread. The characters in Hardly Children are keyed up, on the verge, full of desire. They’re lost, they’re in love with someone they shouldn’t be, they’re denying uncomfortable truths using sex or humor. They are children waking up to the threats of adulthood, and adults living with childlike abandon. With command, caution, and subtle terror, Adamczyk shapes a world where death and the possibility of loss always emerge. Yet the shape of this loss is never fully revealed. Instead, it looms in the periphery of these stories, like an uncomfortable scene viewed out of the corner of one’s eye.

When Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin signed up for Teach for America right after college and found themselves utter failures in the classroom, they vowed to remake themselves into superior educators. They did that—and more. In their early twenties, by sheer force of talent and determination never to take no for an answer, they created a wildly successful fifth-grade experience that would grow into the Knowledge Is Power Program (KIPP), which today includes sixty-six schools in nineteen states and the District of Columbia. KIPP schools incorporate what Feinberg and Levin learned from America's best, most charismatic teachers: lessons need to be lively; school days need to be longer (the KIPP day is nine and a half hours); the completion of homework has to be sacrosanct (KIPP teachers are available by telephone day and night). Chants, songs, and slogans such as "Work hard, be nice" energize the program. Illuminating the ups and downs of the KIPP founders and their students, Mathews gives us something quite rare: a hopeful book about education.

FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR TRANSLATED LITERATURE A dogged, absurd quest through the nightmare of the Syrian civil war Khaled Khalifa’s Death Is Hard Work is the new novel from the greatest chronicler of Syria’s ongoing and catastrophic civil war: a tale of three ordinary people facing down the stuff of nightmares armed with little more than simple determination. Abdel Latif, an old man from the Aleppo region, dies peacefully in a hospital bed in Damascus. His final wish, conveyed to his youngest son, Bolbol, is to be buried in the family plot in their ancestral village of Anabiya. Though Abdel was hardly an ideal father, and though Bolbol is estranged from his siblings, this conscientious son persuades his older brother Hussein and his sister Fatima to accompany him and the body to Anabiya, which is—after all—only a two-hour drive from Damascus. There’s only one problem: Their country is a war zone. With the landscape of their childhood now a labyrinth of competing armies whose actions are at once arbitrary and lethal, the siblings’ decision to set aside their differences and honor their father’s request quickly balloons from a minor commitment into an epic and life-threatening quest. Syria, however, is no longer a place for heroes, and the decisions the family must make along the way—as they find themselves captured and recaptured, interrogated, imprisoned, and bombed—will prove to have enormous consequences for all of them.