From her beginnings as a wunderkind producer of pirated stage productions for six-year-olds, through her spirited adventures watching self-satisfying monkeys, throwing up on Chinese food deliverymen, and stalking Leo DiCaprio, here are the goofy highs and horrifying lows of life as Kelly Oxford.

    To protect himself and those he loved from street violence, Andre learned to use his fists so well that he was even scared of himself. He was on a fast track to getting killed - or killing someone else. He signed on as a boxer. Nearby, his father, an eminent author, taught on a college campus and took the kids out on Sundays. The clash of worlds couldn't have been more stark - or more difficult for a son to communicate to a father. Only by becoming a writer himself could Andre begin to bridge the abyss and save himself. His memoir is a riveting, visceral, profound meditation on physical violence and the failures and triumphs of love.

    Since then he’s covered more than a million miles as a mover, packing, loading, hauling people’s belongings all over America. In The Long Haul, Murphy recounts with wit, candor, and charm the America he has seen change over the decades and the poignant, funny, and often haunting stories of the people he encounters on the job.

    How she faces her joy, grief, anxiety, impending motherhood, and conflicted truce with the world results in a moving meditation on the nature, rapture, and perils of crying―from the history of tear-catching gadgets (including the woman who designed a gun that shoots tears) to the science behind animal tears (including moths who drink them) to the fraught role of white women's tears in racist violence.Told in short, poetic snippets, The Crying Book delights and surprises, as well as rigorously examines how mental illness can affect a family across generations and how crying can express women’s agency―or lack of agency―in everyday life. Christle’s gift is the freshness of her voice and honesty of her approach, both of which create an intimacy with readers as she explores a human behavior broadly experienced but rarely questioned. A beautiful tribute to the power of crying, and to working through despair to tears of joy.

    A lanky kid from Plano, Texas, is raised by a feisty, single parent who sacrifices for her son, who becomes one of our country's greatest athletes. Given that background, it is understandable why Armstrong was able to channel his boundless energy toward athletic endeavors. By his senior year in high school, he was already a professional triathlete and was training with the U.S. Olympic cycling developmental team. In 1993, Armstrong secured a position in the ranks of world-class cyclists by winning the World Championship and a Tour de France stage, but in 1996, he was diagnosed with testicular cancer. Armstrong entered an unknown battlefield and challenged it as if climbing through the Alps: aggressive yet tactical. He beat the cancer and proceeded to stun all the pundits by winning the 1999 Tour de France. In this memoir, Armstrong covers his early years swiftly with a blunt matter-of-factness, but the main focus is on his battle with cancer. Readers will respond to the inspirational recovery story, and they will appreciate the behind-the-scenes cycling information. After he won the Tour, his mother was quoted as saying that her son's whole life has been a fight against the odds; we see here that she was not exaggerating. Brenda Barrera

    Three days later, Leiris wrote an open letter addressed directly to his wife's killers, which he posted on Facebook. He refused to be cowed or to let his seventeen-month-old son's life be defined by Helene's murder. He refused to let the killers have their way: "For as long as he lives, this little boy will insult you with his happiness and freedom." Instantly, that short Facebook post caught fire, and was reported on by newspapers and television stations all over the world. In his determination to honor the memory of his wife, he became an international hero to everyone searching desperately for a way to deal with the horror of the Paris attacks and the grim shadow cast today by the threat of terrorism. Now Leiris tells the full story of his grief and struggle. You Will Not Have My Hate is a remarkable, heartbreaking, and, indeed, beautiful memoir of how he and his baby son, Melvil, endured in the days and weeks after Helene's murder. With absolute emotional courage and openness, he somehow finds a way to answer that impossible question: how can I go on? He visits Helene's body at the morgue, has to tell Melvil that Mommy will not be coming home, and buries the woman he had planned to spend the rest of his life with. Leiris's grief is terrible, but his love for his family is indomitable. This is the rare and unforgettable testimony of a survivor, and a universal message of hope and resilience. Leiris confronts an incomprehensible pain with a humbling generosity and grandeur of spirit. He is a guiding star for us all in these perilous times. His message--hate will be vanquished by love--is eternal"--

    But when I was seven, the odds felt insurmountable.As a young girl, Terri Cheney's life looked perfect. Her family lived in a lovely house in a tranquil Los Angeles suburb where the geraniums never once failed to bloom. She was pretty and smart, an academic superstar and popular cheerleader whose father doted on her. But starting with her first suicide attempt at age seven, it was clear that her inner world was anything but perfect. "There's something wrong with her," her mother would whisper, her voice quivering on the edge of despair. And indeed there was, although no one had a name for it yet. Hostage to her roller-coaster moods, Terri veered from easy A-pluses to total paralysis, from bouts of obsessive hypersexuality to episodes of alcoholic abandon that nearly cost her her life. Throughout Terri's chaotic early years, nothing was certain from day to day except this: whatever was so deeply wrong with her must be kept a secret. Thirty years later, Terri wrote Manic, a harrowing memoir that revealed her adult struggle with bipolar disorder. It became an instant "New York Times" bestseller and received passionate critical acclaim. But it didn't tell the whole story. The mystery of Terri's childhood remained untouched-- too troubling, too painful to fathom. The Dark Side of Innocence explores those tumultuous formative years, finally shattering Terri's well-guarded secret." With vivid intensity, it blends a pitch-perfect childlike voice with keen adult observation. The Dark Side of Innocence provides a heart-rending, groundbreaking insider's look into the fascinating and frightening world of childhood bipolar disorder, an illness that affects a staggering one million children. This poignant and compelling story of Terri's journey from disaster and despair to hope and survival will serve as an informative and eye-opening tale for those who would trust a flawless facade.

     Nineteen-year-old Paula Scott leaves California when the almonds are in bloom for college in Reno, Nevada where cocaine, casinos, and her first honest-to-goodness boyfriend will break her farmgirl heart, but her story doesn’t end in the desert with a broken heart. When life knocks us down, we get back up, we try again, we marry and maybe divorce, but in the midst of our down and dirty, raw and real, painfully ordinary lives, sometimes the extraordinary breaks through, and we see God. Because God sees us.