Declared “a writer to watch” (Publishers Weekly, starred review), New York Times bestselling author María Dueñas pours heart and soul into this story of a woman who discovers the power of second chances. A talented college professor in Madrid, Blanca Perea seems to have it all. But her world is suddenly shattered when her husband of twenty years leaves her for another woman. Questioning the life she once had and whether she truly knows herself, Blanca resolves to change her surroundings. She accepts what looks like a boring research grant in California involving an exiled Spanish writer who died decades ago. Anxious to leave her own troubled life behind, she is gradually drawn into his haunted world, with its poignant loves and unfulfilled ambitions. But in delving into the past, Blanca finds herself simultaneously awakened to the present by Daniel Carter, a charismatic professor with crucial knowledge about the dead writer that he has never before revealed. Amid this web of passion, conflict, and hidden feelings, including her own, Blanca advances like an avid detective, refusing to quit, and ultimately discovers startling answers that resonate deeply in her own life. Evocative, lyrical, and humorous, The Heart Has Its Reasons is a journey of the soul from the pangs of the past to the vibrant present. It is a story about the thrill of creating one’s life anew.

The secret history of our most vital organ: the human heart. The Man Who Touched His Own Heart tells the raucous, gory, mesmerizing story of the heart, from the first "explorers" who dug up cadavers and plumbed their hearts' chambers, through the first heart surgeries -- which had to be completed in three minutes before death arrived -- to heart transplants and the latest medical efforts to prolong our hearts' lives, almost defying nature in the process. Thought of as the seat of our soul, then as a mysteriously animated object, the heart is still more a mystery than it is understood. Why do most animals only get one billion beats? (And how did modern humans get to over two billion, effectively letting us live out two lives?) Why are sufferers of gingivitis more likely to have heart attacks? Why do we often undergo expensive procedures when cheaper ones are just as effective? What do Da Vinci, Mary Shelley, and contemporary Egyptian archaeologists have in common? And what does it really feel like to touch your own heart, or to have someone else's beating inside your chest? Rob Dunn's fascinating history of our hearts brings us deep inside the science, history, and stories of the four chambers we depend on most.

An instant New York Times bestseller • A New York Times Notable Book of 2022 • Named a Best Book of 2022 by People, TIME Magazine, The Washington Post, USA Today, NPR, Los Angeles Times, and Oprah Daily, and more • A Reese's Book Club Pick • New York Times Paperback Row Selection From the #1 bestselling author of Little Fires Everywhere, comes the inspiring new novel about a mother’s unshakeable love. “It’s impossible not to be moved.” —Stephen King, The New York Times Book Review “Riveting, tender, and timely.” —People, Book of the Week “Thought-provoking, heart-wrenching . . . I was so invested in the future of this mother and son, and I can’t wait to hear what you think of this deeply suspenseful story!” —Reese Witherspoon (Reese’s Book Club Pick) Twelve-year-old Bird Gardner lives a quiet existence with his loving father, a former linguist who now shelves books in a university library. His mother Margaret, a Chinese American poet, left without a trace when he was nine years old. He doesn’t know what happened to her—only that her books have been banned—and he resents that she cared more about her work than about him. Then one day, Bird receives a mysterious letter containing only a cryptic drawing, and soon he is pulled into a quest to find her. His journey will take him back to the many folktales she poured into his head as a child, through the ranks of an underground network of heroic librarians, and finally to New York City, where he will finally learn the truth about what happened to his mother, and what the future holds for them both. Our Missing Hearts is an old story made new, of the ways supposedly civilized communities can ignore the most searing injustice. It’s about the lessons and legacies we pass on to our children, and the power of art to create change.

Somewhere on this earth tonight, somewhere, I believe, not very far from me, there is a person whose heart I've touched. A person whose heart I've held in my hand. . . . So begins A Man After His Own Heart, an extraordinary narrative by acclaimed author, essayist, and poet Charles Siebert on that most elusive of topics--the human heart. On a rainy December night one recent winter, Siebert was given the rare opportunity to accompany a team of surgeons both in the harvesting of a human heart from the body of a young woman who'd recently died of a brain aneurysm, and in the subsequent delivery and implantation of that heart into the hollowed-out chest of a waiting recipient. Beginning with his harrowing week-long wait for the harvest call to come and culminating with the moment in which one of the implant surgeons suddenly, inexplicably, places the author's hand on the wildly beating reanimated heart, Siebert manages to weave a seamless series of ruminations and reflections about his own obsession with the heart and his often-estranged father's fatal heart disease; about history's ongoing fascination with this most central and vital organ; and about modern science's latest startling discoveries concerning both the heart's biological origins and its long-intuited role in the play of our emotions. The resulting mix is nothing less than a radically new, definitive biography of life's most pondered and poeticized protagonist. This story is a journey into the literal and figurative heart of our being, revealing the previously unexplored ways in which the matter of modern science and timeless metaphor meet.

Despite sustained scholarly interest in the politics of modernism, astonishingly little attention has been paid to its relationship to Conservatism. Yet modernist writing was imbricated with Tory rhetoric and ideology from when it emerged in the Edwardian era. By investigating the many intersections between Anglophone modernism and Tory politics, Conservative Modernists offers new ways to read major figures such as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, T. E. Hulme, and Ford Madox Ford. It also highlights the contribution to modernism of lesser-known writers, including Edward Storer, J. M. Kennedy, and A. M. Ludovici. These are the figures to whom it most frequently returns, but, cutting through disciplinary delineations, the book simultaneously reveals the inputs to modernism of a broad range of political writers, philosophers, art historians, and crowd psychologists: from Pascal, Burke, and Disraeli, to Nietzsche, Le Bon, Wallas, Worringer, Ribot, Bergson, and Scheler.

This book is a study of Blaise Pascal's defence of Christian belief in the Pensées. Michael Moriarty aims to expound--and in places to criticize--what he argues is a coherent and original apologetic strategy. Setting out the basic philosophical and theological presuppositions of Pascal's project, the present volume draws the distinction between convictions attained by reason and those inspired by God-given faith. It also presents Pascal's view of the contradictions within human nature, between the 'wretchedness' (our inability to live the life of reason, to attain secure and durable happiness) and the 'greatness' (the power of thought, manifested in the very awareness of our wretchedness). His mind-body dualism and his mechanistic conception of non-human animals are discussed. Pascal invokes the biblical story of the Fall and the doctrine of original sin as the only credible explanation of these contradictions. His analysis of human occupations as powered by the twin desire to escape from painful thoughts and to gratify one's vanity is subjected to critical examination, as is his conception of the self and self-love. Pascal argues that just as Christianity propounds the only explanation for the human condition, so it offers the only kind of happiness that would satisfy our deepest longings. He thus reasons that we have an interest in investigating its truth-claims as rooted in the Bible and in history. The closing chapters of this book discuss Pascal's view of Christian morality and the famous 'wager' argument for opting in favour of Christian belief.