A straightforward tale of kindness and paying it forward in 1980s New York….an uplifting reminder that small gestures matter-Kirkus Reviews.Stopping was never part of the plan...She was a successful ad sales rep in Manhattan. He was a homeless, eleven-year-old panhandler on the street. He asked for spare change; she kept walking. But then something stopped her in her tracks, and she went back. And she continued to go back, again and again. They met up nearly every week for years and built an unexpected, life-changing friendship that has today spanned almost three decades.Whatever made me notice him on that street corner so many years ago is clearly something that cannot be extinguished, no matter how relentless the forces aligned against it. Some may call it spirit. Some may call it heart. It drew me to him, as if we were bound by some invisible, unbreakable thread. And whatever it is, it binds us still.

    This is Tori's opportunity to define herself on her own terms.

    Once her assailant was caught and sentenced, Joanna never spoke of the trauma again, until 21 years later when her daughter was about to go to college. She resolved then to tell her children about her own rape so they could learn and protect themselves, and she began to realize that the man who assaulted her was one of the formative people in her life.Setting out to uncover the story of her attacker, Connors embarked on a journey to find out who he was, where he came from, who his friends were and what his life was like. What she discovered stretches beyond one violent man’s story and back into her own, interweaving a narrative about strength and survival with one about rape culture and violence in America.

    When the online storytelling magazine SMITH asked readers to submit six-word memoirs, they proved a whole, real life can be told this way, too. The results are fascinating, hilarious, shocking, and moving. From small sagas of bittersweet romance ("Found true love, married someone else") to proud achievements and stinging regrets ("After Harvard, had baby with crackhead"), these terse true tales relate the diversity of human experience in tasty bite-size pieces. The original edition of Not Quite What I Was Planning spent six weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, and thanks to massive media attention—from NPR to the The New Yorker—the six-word memoir concept spread to classrooms, dinner tables, churches, synagogues, and tens of thousands of blogs. This deluxe edition has been revised and expanded to include more than sixty never-before-seen memoirs. From authors Elizabeth Gilbert, Richard Ford, and Joyce Carol Oates to celebrities Stephen Colbert, Mario Batali, and Joan Rivers to ordinary folks around the world, everyone has a six-word story to tell.

     A few days before Noble Norfleet's eighteenth birthday, his family suffers a violent catastrophe. The sole survivor, Noble throws himself into a reckless affair with his Spanish teacher, whose husband is fighting in Vietnam. When Noble graduates, he enlists as well and, while serving as an army medic, experiences a mysterious vision that seems tied to uncanny events in his recent past. Not until thirty years later -- after a life short on friends and troubled by a compulsion to worship women's bodies -- is Noble challenged to rethink the decades-old mystery of his family tragedy. Faced with an ominous choice, Noble finally comes to accept an enormous duty he's long tried to ignore. Soon, perhaps for the first time, his future seems hopeful.

    In the same moment, his dreams of settling down with his pregnant girlfriend are dashed when she is moved off to Texas by her parents. Left alone in small town Oklahoma, he embarks on a deranged, cross-country quest for a family of his own.STILL LIFE WITH BRASS POLE is Craig Machen’s funny, debauched and heartfelt memoir about young love and coming of age in the titillation business. And how a roaring White Knight Complex, an eccentric comedy club owner, and a trio of unpredictable striptease artists conspire to help him achieve his aims.

    When Papa Pilgrim appeared in the Alaska frontier outpost of McCarthy with his wife and fifteen children in tow, his new neighbors had little idea of the trouble to come. The Pilgrim Family presented themselves as a shining example of the homespun Christian ideal, with their proud piety and beautiful old-timey music, but their true story ran dark and deep. Within weeks, Papa had bulldozed a road through the mountains to the new family home at an abandoned copper mine, sparking a tense confrontation with the National Park Service and forcing his ghost town neighbors to take sides in an ever-more volatile battle over where a citizen’s rights end and the government’s power begins. In Pilgrim’s Wilderness, veteran Alaska journalist Tom Kizzia unfolds the remarkable, at times harrowing, story of a charismatic spinner of American myths who was not what he seemed, the townspeople caught in his thrall, and the family he brought to the brink of ruin. As Kizzia discovered, Papa Pilgrim was in fact the son of a rich Texas family with ties to Hoover’s FBI and strange, oblique connections to the Kennedy assassination and the movie stars of Easy Rider. And as his fight with the government in Alaska grew more intense, the turmoil in his brood made it increasingly difficult to tell whether his children were messianic followers or hostages in desperate need of rescue. In this powerful piece of Americana, written with uncommon grace and high drama, Kizzia uses his unparalleled access to capture an era-defining clash between environmentalists and pioneers ignited by a mesmerizing sociopath who held a town and a family captive

    In two years, this ring of card savants earned more than three million dollars. Filled with tense action and incredibly close calls, this is a real-life adventure that could have stepped straight out of a Hollywood film.

    Her brave, witty memoir gives readers a rare, honest glimpse into the hidden world of lasers and razors. It begins in childhood, when Altman discovers that hair sometimes grows in unexpected places -- and that it's best to remove it immediately, or risk ridicule from 8th-grade girls. It continues into early adulthood, when romantically-inclined men make offhand remarks about her fine coating of fur. From there it's a hilarious, heartfelt journey from Barcelona to Bangkok in search of a cure, an explanation, and the perfect pair of tweezers.After graduating from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Mara Altman worked as a staff writer for The Village Voice until 2007. In 2009, HarperCollins published Altman's first book, Thanks For Coming: A Young Woman's Quest for an Orgasm, which was optioned as a comedy series by HBO. She has also written for New York Magazine and The New York Times.Cover design by Adil Dara Kim. Cover photograph by Christopher Lane.

    With humor and quiet wisdom, and with a lens firmly trained on what helped her tolerate and rebound from so much sorrow, she offers answers to questions we all confront in the face of loss, and reminds us that grief is not only about endings—it’s about new beginnings.

    Cascading with rich, well-developed characters, this true story will capture your soul and imagination as the author reveals how a group of kind-hearted, sincere people are led to embrace this controversial lifestyle in their pursuit of the highest degree of glory. Laced with surprising brush-strokes of humor, this heart-rending saga will take its readers on a journey that outsiders whisper of and shudder about. It answers the question that a polygamist's wife is asked countless times: How can you tolerate sharing your husband?In North America today there are over thirty thousand polygamists. They lead secret lives in their attempt to hide from society and U.S. laws. Their women are taught that obedience, unquestioning acceptance of polygamy, and giving birth to huge families of children to follow in their parent's footsteps will assure them a celestial crown. Few search out truth for themselves, but trustingly follow their prophet. Susan's book deals with this head-in-the-sand ignorance. She too, was one of these women.

    Taking Dennis Hopper's words, "That's what it's all about man" to heart, they abandoned their comfortable upper middle class life and gave Illeana a childhood filled with hippies, goats, free spirits, and free love. Illeana writes, "Since it was all out of my control, I began to think of my life as a movie, with a Dennis Hopper-like father at the center of it."I Blame Dennis Hopper is a testament to the power of art and the tenacity of passion. It is a rollicking, funny, at times tender exploration of the way movies can change our lives. With crackling humor and a full heart, Douglas describes how a good Liza Minnelli impression helped her land her first gig and how Rudy Valley taught her the meaning of being a show biz trouper. From her first experience being on set with her grandfather and mentor-two-time Academy Award-winning actor Melvyn Douglas-to the moment she was discovered by Martin Scorsese for her blood-curdling scream and cast in her first film, to starring in movies alongside Robert DeNiro, Nicole Kidman, and Ethan Hawke, to becoming an award winning writer, director and producer in her own right, I Blame Dennis Hopper is an irresistible love letter to movies and filmmaking. Writing from the perspective of the ultimate show business fan, Douglas packs each page with hilarious anecdotes, bizarre coincidences, and fateful meetings that seem, well, right out of a plot of a movie.I Blame Dennis Hopper is the story of one woman's experience in show business, but it is also a genuine reminder of why we all love the movies: for the glitz, the glamor, the sweat, passion, humor, and escape they offer us all.

    She has no allies, no liberty as a Muslim woman and no access to an embassy. As the war on terror rages around her, Latifa is at war with her culture and customs. Imprisoned, abused and violated, her efforts to escape Iraq fail and her impending forced marriage could end in her death by the ancient custom of honor killing. She has to get out. When the US military occupies Kurdistan, she has a chance to break free.

    Or so everyone believes. Peter Sagal, a mild-mannered, Harvard-educated NPR host--the man who put the second "L" in "vanilla"--decided to find out if it's true. From strip clubs to gambling halls to swingers clubs to porn sets--and then back to the strip clubs, but only because he left his glasses there--Sagal explores exactly what the sinful folk do, how much they pay for the privilege, and exactly how they got those funny red marks. He hosts a dinner for three of the smartest porn stars in the world, asks the floor manager at the oldest casino in Vegas how to beat the house, and indulges in molecular cuisine at the finest restaurant in the country. Meet liars and rich people who don't think consumption is a disease, encounter the most spectacular view ever seen from a urinal, and say hello to Nina Hartley, the only porn star who can discuss Nietzsche while strangers smack her butt. With a sharp wit, a remarkable eye for detail, and the carefree insouciance that can only come from not having any idea what he's getting into, Sagal proves to be the perfect guide to sinful behavior. What happens in Vegas--and in less glamorous places--is all laid out in these pages, a modern version of Dante's Inferno, except with more jokes.

    Over the next decade he built fifty-five schools—especially for girls—that offer a balanced education in one of the most isolated and dangerous regions on earth. As it chronicles Mortenson’s quest, which has brought him into conflict with both enraged Islamists and uncomprehending Americans, Three Cups of Tea combines adventure with a celebration of the humanitarian spirit.