How To Stop Time

A novel about love, loss and living in the moment, from the bestselling author of The Humans The first rule is that you don’t fall in love. There are other rules too, but that is the main one. No falling in love. No staying in love. No daydreaming of love. Because otherwise, of course, you slowly lose your mind . . . Tom Hazard has a dangerous secret. He may look like an ordinary forty-one-year-old, but he was born in 1581. Owing to a rare condition, he’s been alive for centuries. From Shakespeare’s England to Jazz Age Paris to voyaging the Pacific alongside Captain Cook, Tom has seen a lot, and he now craves an ordinary life. Always changing his identity to stay alive, Tom now has the perfect cover—working as a history teacher at a London school. Here, he can teach the kids about wars and witch hunts as if he’d never witnessed them first-hand. He can try to tame the past that is quickly catching up with him. The only thing Tom can’t do is fall in love. How to Stop Time is a wild, bittersweet, time-travelling story about losing and finding yourself, about the certainty of change, about the mistakes humans are doomed to repeat. And about the lifetimes it can take to learn how to live.

First published in 1967, Stop-Time was immediately recognized as a masterpiece of modern American autobiography, a brilliant portrayal of one boy's passage from childhood to adolescence and beyond. Here is Frank Conroy's wry, sad, beautiful tale of life on the road; of odd jobs and lost friendships, brutal schools and first loves; of a father's early death and a son's exhilarating escape into manhood.

In a coolly dispassionate voice, Ann Marlowe has created a mock dictionary in order to dissect her addiction to - and her eventual rejection of - heroin. Each entry, varying from the anecdotal to the analytical, describes the allure and the degradation of the drug, set against the story of her own life. Without glamorizing it, she explores the seduction of the drug and honestly reveals heroin's temporary deep satisfaction, before finally casting the drug aside as a failed, even abusive, lover, a negligent spouse, a one-way ultimately doomed relationship. Her journey through heroin is a cerebral tale grounded in an exploration of emotional life. Throughout, her tone is ironic and searching and her alphabetical voyage provides an insight into the twilight world of drug addiction.

The bestselling, award-winning author of The Midnight Library offers his funniest, most devastating dark comedy yet, a “silly, sad, suspenseful, and soulful” (Philadelphia Inquirer) novel that’s “full of heart” (Entertainment Weekly). When an extra-terrestrial visitor arrives on Earth, his first impressions of the human species are less than positive. Taking the form of Professor Andrew Martin, a prominent mathematician at Cambridge University, the visitor is eager to complete the gruesome task assigned him and hurry home to his own utopian planet, where everyone is omniscient and immortal. He is disgusted by the way humans look, what they eat, their capacity for murder and war, and is equally baffled by the concepts of love and family. But as time goes on, he starts to realize there may be more to this strange species than he had thought. Disguised as Martin, he drinks wine, reads poetry, develops an ear for rock music, and a taste for peanut butter. Slowly, unexpectedly, he forges bonds with Martin’s family. He begins to see hope and beauty in the humans’ imperfection, and begins to question the very mission that brought him there. Praised by The New York Times as a “novelist of great seriousness and talent,” author Matt Haig delivers an unlikely story about human nature and the joy found in the messiness of life on Earth. The Humans is a funny, compulsively readable tale that playfully and movingly explores the ultimate subject—ourselves.

“Whether you’re an individual woman looking for help or a reader looking for the truth about the thousands of women who are battered by the men they live with, Next Time, She’ll Be Dead is the one book you should read.” —Gloria Steinem At least 1 in 4 women will be abused during her lifetime—that is 25% of our mothers, daughters, sisters, partners, and friends. Thousands will be killed. As author Ann Jones observes, despite its devastation battering is regarded not as a serious crime, but instead as an inevitable “problem” blandly labeled “domestic violence.” Stories of household assaults and murders are all over the news, but the blame is usually pinned on the woman who is said to have either provoked the attack or failed to “leave.” In this groundbreaking book, Jones points instead to the many factors in society that promote, trivialize, and perpetuate brutality against women: from popular psychology, academic “expertise,” mass media, and pop culture, to the criminal justice system and the law itself. Delving deep into the history, legality, and personal politics of male violence against wives and girlfriends, Next Time, She’ll Be Dead fearlessly reframes the issue. This critically acclaimed masterwork offers productive ways of thinking and speaking about battering and explains what must be done to stop it.

Includes a "Reading group guide" ([12] p.).

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER “This is the most important book ever written about time management.” —Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Think Again and host of WorkLife What if you stopped trying to do everything, so that you could finally get around to what counts? Nobody needs to be told there isn’t enough time. Whether we’re starting our own business, or trying to write a novel during our lunch break, or staring down a pile of deadlines as we’re planning a vacation, we’re obsessed with our lengthening to-do lists, overfilled inboxes, work-life balance, and ceaseless struggle against distraction. We’re deluged with advice on becoming more productive and efficient and life hacks to optimize our days. Still, we rarely make the connection between our daily struggles with time and the ultimate time management problem: the question of how best to use our ridiculously brief time on the planet, which amounts on average to about four thousand weeks. Drawing on the insights of both ancient and contemporary philosophers, psychologists, and spiritual teachers, Oliver Burkeman delivers an entertaining, humorous, practical, and ultimately profound guide to time and time management. Rejecting the futile modern obsession with “getting everything done,” Four Thousand Weeks introduces readers to tools for constructing a meaningful life by embracing finitude, showing that many of the unhelpful ways we’ve come to think about time aren’t inescapable, unchanging truths, but choices we’ve made as individuals and as a society—and that we can do things differently. Embrace your limits. Change your life. Make your four thousand weeks count.

"A sparkling debut. Landragin’s seductive literary romp shines as a celebration of the act of storytelling." —Publishers Weekly "Romance, mystery, history, and magical invention dance across centuries in an impressive debut novel." —Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review) "Deft writing seduces the reader in a complex tale of pursuit, denial, and retribution moving from past to future. Highly recommended." —Library Journal (Starred Review) Alex Landragin's Crossings is an unforgettable and explosive genre-bending debut—a novel in three parts, designed to be read in two different directions, spanning a hundred and fifty years and seven lifetimes. On the brink of the Nazi occupation of Paris, a German-Jewish bookbinder stumbles across a manuscript called Crossings. It has three narratives, each as unlikely as the next. And the narratives can be read one of two ways: either straight through or according to an alternate chapter sequence. The first story in Crossings is a never-before-seen ghost story by the poet Charles Baudelaire, penned for an illiterate girl. Next is a noir romance about an exiled man, modeled on Walter Benjamin, whose recurring nightmares are cured when he falls in love with a storyteller who draws him into a dangerous intrigue of rare manuscripts, police corruption, and literary societies. Finally, there are the fantastical memoirs of a woman-turned-monarch whose singular life has spanned seven generations. With each new chapter, the stunning connections between these seemingly disparate people grow clearer and more extraordinary. Crossings is an unforgettable adventure full of love, longing and empathy.