A Year Between Friends

An exploration of 365 days of shared experiences between two friends on opposite sides of the country, inspired by their blog, 3191 Miles Apart. Maria Alexandra Vettese and Stephanie Congdon Barnes share a love of art and design, handmade pleasures, and a well-lived domestic life. Almost a decade ago, they began their first year-long project together, posting a photo from each of their mornings on their blog, 3191 Miles Apart, named for the distance between their homes in Portland, Maine, and Portland, Oregon. 3191 Miles Apart quickly acquired a worldwide following of readers drawn in by the delicate intimacy of their shared experiences. A Year Between Friends celebrates their most recent project together—a visual representation of 2015, month-by-month, side-by-side, but miles apart. In addition to 400 photographs recording their daily inspirations and creative undertakings and a foreword from New York Times bestselling author Molly Wizenberg, this unique collaboration expands on their prior work with over 25 handmade crafts and seasonal recipes, notes on simple living, and personal stories that follow the tide of a year filled with new life, change, and loss. It is an intimate joint portrait revealed through photographic snippets—mending a sweater, making a mobile from a cherished collection, creating fabric dyes from natural materials, baking scones—that defies distance through the celebration of shared moments of calmness, warmth, and family. Both aspirational and down-to-earth, A Year Between Friends is an inspiring visual love letter to friendship and creativity, a timeless reminder to appreciate life one day at a time, to slow down, to cherish simplicity, and to make the extra effort to do things with care and with the people we love.

Longtime friends Helen Levine and Oonagh Berry decided they missed the tradition of "real" letters. The obvious solution for them was to initiate a correspondence project. Their goal? To write each other a longhand letter every two weeks for a year, and see what, if anything, they were missing in their usual friendship rituals of lunches, visits and telephone chats. The result is a wealth of insights yielded from over 150 years of combined life experience. Week in and week out, Helen and Oonagh weave together tales of family, work, politics, motherhood, aging and creativity. Reading Between Friends is like sharing a warm pot of tea with two frank, articulate and experienced companions.

A Year of Mornings collects 236 images--always taken before 10 am without discussion between the two women--from this uniquely 21st century artistic collaboration. The intimacy of these photographs--discarded clothing, a view of a snowy day from the window, a tablecloth--combined with their striking similarities in color and composition defies the reality of their long-distance collaboration. While clearly kindred spirits, the two women have met in person only once. Their friendship is maintained solely online, sustained by a shared love for moments of serenity, solitude, and peacefulness. The annotated photographs in A Year of Mornings radiate an aura of sweetness and light--the promise of a new day.

Winner of the National Jewish Book Award: A “gorgeous, rueful collection of eight linked stories” capturing the collective dreams of Israel in the 1950s (Chicago Tribune). These eight interconnected stories, set in the fictitious Kibbutz Yekhat, draw masterful profiles of idealistic men and women enduring personal hardships in the shadow of one of the greatest collective dreams of the twentieth century. A devoted father who fails to challenge his daughter’s lover, an old friend, a man his own age; an elderly gardener who carries on his shoulders the sorrows of the world; a woman writing perversely poignant letters to her husband’s mistress. Each of these stories is a luminous human and literary study; together they offer an eloquent portrait of an idea, and of a charged and fascinating epoch. Award-winning writer Amos Oz, who spent three decades living on a kibbutz, is at home and at his best in this “lucid and heartbreaking” award-winning collection (The Guardian). “Oz lifts the veil on kibbutz existence without palaver. His pinpoint descriptions are pared to perfection . . . His people twitch with life.” —The Scotsman “A collection of stories . . . that boasts the sense, scope and unity of a novel . . . Breathtaking.” —Irish Examiner “A complex and melancholic vision of people struggling to transcend their individuality for the sake of mundanely idealist goals.” —The Times Literary Supplement

Provides instructions for forty handmade craft projects which can be shared with a close friend or a group of friends.

A year's worth of photographs, recipes, letters, and crafts explores the friendship between two women who live on opposite sides of the United States.

Jillian Lawton and Lesley Adamski. Two girls from very different backgrounds. Jillian is the only child of wealthy parents, while Lesley's from a working-class family. They become best friends in the turbulent '60s, but their circumstances, their choices—and their mistakes—take them in virtually opposite directions. Lesley stays in their Washington State hometown. She gets pregnant and marries young, living a life defined by the demands of small children, not enough money—never enough money—and an unfaithful husband. Jill lives those years in a completely different way: on a college campus shaken by the Vietnam War, and then as an idealistic young lawyer in New York City. But they always remain friends. Through the years and across the miles, through marriage, children, divorce and widowhood, Jill and Lesley confide everything to each other—every grief and every joy. Because the quality of a friendship is the quality of a life.

Best friends Jesse Tyler Ferguson, star of Modern Family, and recipe developer Julie Tanous pay homage to their hometowns as they whip up modern California food with Southern and Southwestern spins in their debut cookbook. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST COOKBOOKS OF THE YEAR BY TIME OUT Modern Family star Jesse Tyler Ferguson and chef Julie Tanous love to cook together. They love it so much that they founded a blog, and now put all their favorite recipes into a cookbook for you to dig into with the people you love. In Food Between Friends, they cook up delightful food, spiced with fun stories pulled right from their platonic marriage. Drawing inspiration from the regional foods of the South and Southwest they grew up with, Jesse and Julie put smart twists on childhood favorites, such as Hatch Green Chile Mac and Cheese, Grilled Chicken with Alabama White BBQ Sauce, and Little Grits Soufflés. So come join Jesse and Julie in the kitchen. This book feels just like cooking with a friend—because that’s exactly what it is.