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Niccolò Machiavelli famously wrote, "There is nothing more difficult to take in hand, more perilous to conduct, or more uncertain in its success than to take the lead in the introduction of a new order of things." That's what this book is about--innovation far more audacious than a new way to find a restaurant or a smart phone you can wear on your wrist. Harvard professor Amy Edmondson and journalist Susan Salter Reynolds explore how to bring into being systems that transform human experience and make the world more livable and sustainable. This demands "big teaming": intense collaboration across professions and industries that may have completely different mindsets and even be antagonistic...
Vermont, New Year's Eve, 1987. All Jude wants to do is get high. All Teddy wants to do is get out. One of them won't live to see 1988. In the wake of this death, three teenagers will try to find a way of honouring their lost friend. Is clean living the answer? Is parenthood? Or the simplicity of carrying out a last wish?
“By turns funny, tragic, astute, and enlightening, [Dreams of Bread and Fire] is an engrossing coming-of-age tale.” —Library Journal, starred review Half Jewish, half Armenian Ani is desperately in love with a New England boy with a trust fund as big as his appetites, and the farthest thing possible from the Old World accents and superstitions that filled her childhood home. But after leaving for a year in Paris, she receives a letter from him ending their relationship. Embarking on a series of romantic misadventures, Ani soon reconnects with a childhood friend. Elusive and intriguing, Van Ardavanian is preoccupied with the Armenian heritage they share and provides Ani with a new conne...
“Joy is not made to be a crumb,” writes Mary Oliver, and certainly joy abounds in her new book of poetry and prose poems. Swan, her twentieth volume, shows us that, though we may be “made out of the dust of stars,” we are of the world she captures here so vividly. Swan is Oliver’s tribute to “the mortal way” of desiring and living in the world, to which the poet is renowned for having always been “totally loyal.”
She was the most famous woman in the world. She died tragically, too young, in a terrible accident. The world mourned. Monica Ali, the beloved author of Brick Lane, explores the extraordinary question: what if she hadn't died? Lydia lives in a nondescript town somewhere in the American Midwest. She's a nice, normal woman - if strikingly beautiful. She lives a nice, normal life: her friends are normal, her job is normal, her hobbies are normal. Her friends and boyfriend adore her. But her past is shrouded in mystery. Who is Lydia? Where does she come from? And why is her English accent so posh? Lydia is a woman with secrets. Extraordinary secrets. She might even be the most famous woman on th...
“Rarely do memoirs of grief combine anguish, love, and fury with such elegance.” — Entertainment Weekly In 2002, Ann Hood’s five-year-old daughter Grace died suddenly from a virulent form of strep throat. Stunned and devastated, the family searched for comfort in a time when none seemed possible. Hood—an accomplished novelist—was unable to read or write. She could only reflect on her lost daughter—“the way she looked splashing in the bathtub ... the way we sang ‘Eight Days a Week.’” One day, a friend suggested she learn to knit. Knitting soothed her and gave her something to do. Eventually, she began to read and write again. A semblance of normalcy returned, but grief, in ever new and different forms, still held the family. What they could not know was that comfort would come, and in surprising ways. Hood traces her descent into grief and reveals how she found comfort and hope again—a journey to recovery that culminates with a newly adopted daughter.
“Respectful of his subject but never worshipful, Fradkin has given us our first full critical portrait of the man and his protean career..”—Hampton Sides, author of Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West
"In this illuminating collection of prose, Dan Beachy-Quick broaches "a hazy line, a faulty boundary" between our daily world, "where we who have appetites must fill our mouths, we who have thoughts must fill our minds," and another side, "within the world and beyond it, where appetite isn't to be sated, where desire is not to be fulfilled, and where thoughts refuse to lead to knowledge." Touching on the works of Emerson, Thoreau, and Proust, among others, Beachy-Quick explores the problem of duality -- the separation of the mind and body, word and referent, intelligence and mystery -- striving throughout to overcome this false separation, and to celebrate the notion that "wonder is the fact that the world has never ceased to be real." Combining a rich critical intelligence and the lyricism that has made him "one of America's most significant young poets" (Lyn Hejinian), Wonderful Investigations is a wonder unto itself"--Front flap.
In a remote, piney wood in Finland stands a convalescent hospital called Suvanto, a curving concrete example of austere Scandinavian design. It is the 1920s, and the patients, all women, seek relief from ailments real and imagined. On the lower floors are the stoic Finnish women; on the upper floors are foreign women of privilege.
'It is impossible to exaggerate the power of this short, unbearably poignant novel.' Mail on Sunday 'A bold and elegant novel' Helen Dunmore, Guardian 'A haunting story, beautifully told' Viv Groskop, Observer An extraordinary story of love and endurance during the Siege of Leningrad lies at the heart of a magnificent novel about Russia past and present, and the human condition. One night in St Petersburg, two men meet, both adrift in the brash new Russia: Shutov, a writer visiting after years of exile in Paris, and Volsky, an elderly survivor of the Siege of Leningrad and Stalin's purges. His life story - one of extreme suffering, courage and an extraordinary love - he considers unremarkable. To Shutov it is a revelation, the tale of an unsung hero that puts everything into perspective and suggests where true happiness lies.