'Is there some adventure out there that we are not having, some vividness, some wild pleasure, that we are not experiencing in our responsible, productive days? . . . We are bequeathed on earth one very short life, and it might be good, one of these days, to make sure that we are living it.'In this powerful, unified and vital work Katie Roiphe touches on everything from the romantic ambivalence of Jane Austen to the cast of Mad Men whilst delivering a collection of autobiographical pieces that are by turns, deeply moving, self-critical, razor-sharp, entertaining and unapologetic in their defence of 'messy lives'.'Brilliant and unflinching, on everything from divorce to Mad Men to sex to the food we eat. Every sentence is an eye-opener' India Knight

Is there some adventure out there that we are not having, some vividness, some wild pleasure, that we are not experiencing in our responsible, productive days? ... We are bequeathed on earth one very short life, and it might be good, one of these days, to make sure that we are living it.' As steely eyed in examining her own life as she is in skewering our cultural pitfalls, Roiphe gives us autobiographical pieces that are by turns, deeply moving, self-critical, razor-sharp, entertaining and unapologetic in their defence of 'messy lives'. In Praise of Messy Lives is powerfully unified, vital work from one of our most astute and essayists writing today.

Katie Roiphe, culture writer and author of The Morning After, shares a “beautifully written” (The New York Times Book Review) “astute memoir [that] reverberates with rich prose, crisp pacing, and self-compassion” (Publishers Weekly) and an essential discussion of how strong women experience their power. Told in a series of notebook entries, Roiphe weaves her often fraught personal experiences with divorce, single motherhood, and relationships with insights into the lives and loves of famous writers such as Sylvia Plath and Simone de Beauvoir. She dissects the way she and other ordinary, powerful women have subjugated their own power time and time again, and she probes brilliantly at the tricky, uncomfortable question of why. “Although Ms. Roiphe seems to be exposing her vulnerabilities here, she is actually, once again, demonstrating her unique brand of fearlessness” (The Wall Street Journal). The Power Notebooks is Roiphe’s most vital, thought-provoking, and emotionally intimate work yet.

"In this category-defying book, Katie Roiphe takes an unexpected and liberating approach to the most unavoidable of subjects: death. She examines the final days of five great writers and artists--Susan Sontag, Sigmund Freud, John Updike, Dylan Thomas, and Maurice Sendak." --

Presents information on female rule-breakers, including Josephine Baker, Jane Goodall, Margaret Cho, and Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Young readers will join Zara, a clever, responsible, and sometimes anxious seven-year-old girl, in learning a fun and simple breathing exercise to help them mindfully manage their big messy emotions and find peace and calm in any situation. Like a lot of kids her age, Zara sometimes struggles with managing her emotions when confronted with stressful situations. Written by a mother-of-five and celebrated meditation guide Rebekah Borucki, Zara's Big Messy Day will help your child deal with everyday stress in simple but impactful way. Guided by Zara’s mother, both Zara and the reader will learn a kid-friendly breathing technique—a short visualization meditation—that will help them find peace and calm in any moment. And the best part: they'll learn to do it on their own after reading the book just one time! Zara’s Big Messy Day is used by teachers, guidance counselors, and social workers in elementary school cirriculum nationwide to teach students mindfulness and self-regulation. Get free gifts: You'll also get free access to downloadable coloring pages, an exclusive guided meditation for kids, and more! Just use the website link found inside the book to download your exclusive gifts. Praise for Zara's Big Messy Day: “Zara beautifully offers mindfulness for kids and adults alike.” — Rachel Ricketts, activist and author of Do Better “Friends, I cannot recommend these books enough. Get Zara for you, your kids, your nieces, your nephews... They’re just so beatitful!” — Jennifer Pastiloff, author of the National Bestseller, On Being Human

The urge to tidiness seems to be rooted deep in the human psyche. Many of us feel threatened by anything that is vague, unplanned, scattered around or hard to describe. We find comfort in having a script to rely on, a system to follow, in being able to categorise and file away. We all benefit from tidy organisation - up to a point. A large library needs a reference system. Global trade needs the shipping container. Scientific collaboration needs measurement units. But the forces of tidiness have marched too far. Corporate middle managers and government bureaucrats have long tended to insist that everything must have a label, a number and a logical place in a logical system. Now that they are armed with computers and serial numbers, there is little to hold this tidy-mindedness in check. It's even spilling into our personal lives, as we corral our children into sanitised play areas or entrust our quest for love to the soulless algorithms of dating websites. Order is imposed when chaos would be more productive. Or if not chaos, then . . . messiness. The trouble with tidiness is that, in excess, it becomes rigid, fragile and sterile. In Messy, Tim Harford reveals how qualities we value more than ever - responsiveness, resilience and creativity - simply cannot be disentangled from the messy soil that produces them. This, then, is a book about the benefits of being messy: messy in our private lives; messy in the office, with piles of paper on the desk and unread spreadsheets; messy in the recording studio, the laboratory or in preparing for an important presentation; and messy in our approach to business, politics and economics, leaving things vague, diverse and uncomfortably made-up-on-the-spot. It's time to rediscover the benefits of a little mess.