I Like Me Anyway

I Like Me Anyway: Embracing Imperfection, Connection, and Christ is a must read for any woman who has ever felt uncertain of her own worth, path or importance. This engaging, relatable book will fill you with confidence and purpose in your own unique story and give you the motivation and tools to become the woman you were always meant to be.

A darkly funny, compulsively readable debut novel about two young flight attendants coming of age at 35,000 feet When twenty-three-year-old Emily Cavenaugh's marriage to her abusive high school sweetheart ends, she trades in her dull smalltown life for an all-access pass to see the world as a flight attendant. Hoping for a new start, she moves to San Francisco to bunk with six other new flight attendants. Among them is KC Valentine, a free spirit who encourages Emily to shed her mousy ways and start collecting experiences as exciting as her passport stamps. Emily soon follows KC's advice a little too well, falling in love with an older, married co-worker named Tien, a father to two young girls. But as Emily and Tien become more deeply entangled, KC grows distraught. Neither her friends nor co-workers know the real reason she became a flight attendant: to find her father who abandoned her as a child. As Emily and KC fly from Vegas to Boston, San Francisco to London, Chicago to Delhi, each searching for love and acceptance, they're torn between passion and moral conviction, freedom and belonging. An assured debut from a former flight attendant, Love Me Anyway deftly captures the complexities of love, friendship, and family, the excitement and loneliness that come from living everywhere and nowhere, and the surprising detours life can take when you set out to discover the world.

Following his widely acclaimed Project X and Love and Hydrogen—“Here is the effect of these two books,” wrote the Chicago Tribune: “A reader finishes them buzzing with awe”—Jim Shepard now gives us his first entirely new collection in more than a decade. Like You’d Understand, Anyway reaches from Chernobyl to Bridgeport, with a host of narrators only Shepard could bring to pitch-perfect life. Among them: a middle-aged Aeschylus taking his place at Marathon, still vying for parental approval. A maddeningly indefatigable Victorian explorer hauling his expedition, whaleboat and all, through the Great Australian Desert in midsummer. The first woman in space and her cosmonaut lover, caught in the star-crossed orbits of their joint mission. Two Texas high school football players at the top of their food chain, soliciting their fathers’ attention by leveling everything before them on the field. And the rational and compassionate chief executioner of Paris, whose occupation, during the height of the Terror, eats away at all he holds dear. Brimming with irony, compassion, and withering humor, these eleven stories are at once eerily pertinent and dazzlingly exotic, and they showcase the work of a protean, prodigiously gifted writer at the height of his form. Reading Jim Shepard, according to Michael Chabon, “is like encountering our national literature in microcosm.”

Valerie Rose is an ordinary, middle-aged, middle-class, working woman whose willingness to share her own oppositional view on faith, religion, the world's filth, and building a relationship with God in the midst of it all is real, raw, inspiring, and encourages others to do the same. She is a daughter, sister, cousin, aunt, wife, mother, stepmother, nana, and friend whose passion is to inspire others to turn their frowns upside down and embrace God's love through all life's trials and tribulations. Using her own personal struggles in building a relationship with God, Valerie shows how recognizing God's love for her in the midst of anger, agony, awkwardness, abandonment, alcoholism, and abuse helped her to replace hatred with healing. She overcame abuse and abandonment, fears, hurts, and other hang-ups to go on teaching and encouraging others to learn and grow. Valerie offers life-transforming insights not only about how to overcome hatred, hurts, hang-ups, and painful circumstances many identify with, but also how to heal, grow, and embrace God's love from those experiences and then help others to do the same. Her personal stories will inspire you to see your own hatred, hurts, and hang-ups that have built barriers around your heart and will help you to begin seeking healing, grace, and love; to recognize God loves all of you and He is there for you.

“Anne Lamott is my Oprah.” —Chicago Tribune The New York Times bestseller from the author of Dusk, Night, Dawn, Almost Everything and Bird by Bird, a powerful exploration of mercy and how we can embrace it. "Mercy is radical kindness," Anne Lamott writes in her enthralling and heartening book, Hallelujah Anyway. It's the permission you give others—and yourself—to forgive a debt, to absolve the unabsolvable, to let go of the judgment and pain that make life so difficult. In Hallelujah Anyway: Rediscovering Mercy Lamott ventures to explore where to find meaning in life. We should begin, she suggests, by "facing a great big mess, especially the great big mess of ourselves." It's up to each of us to recognize the presence and importance of mercy everywhere—"within us and outside us, all around us"—and to use it to forge a deeper understanding of ourselves and more honest connections with each other. While that can be difficult to do, Lamott argues that it's crucial, as "kindness towards others, beginning with myself, buys us a shot at a warm and generous heart, the greatest prize of all." Full of Lamott’s trademark honesty, humor and forthrightness, Hallelujah Anyway is profound and caring, funny and wise—a hopeful book of hands-on spirituality.

There may be no more powerful desire in the human heart than to be loved. And not just loved, but loved anyway. In spite of what we've done or left undone, in spite of the ways we have failed or floundered. We long for an unconditional, lavish love that we know intrinsically we don't deserve. If you are tired, sad, yet always longing, bestselling author Jared C. Wilson has incredible news for you: that kind of love actually exists, and it is actually something you can experience--whether or not you're in a romantic relationship. In his signature reflective, conversational, and often humorous style, Wilson unpacks 1 Corinthians 13 to show us what real love looks like. Through engaging stories and touching anecdotes, he paints a picture of an extravagant God who not only puts the desire for love into our very souls but fulfills those desires in striking, life-changing ways.

My name is Amber Reynolds. There are three things you should know about me: 1. I’m in a coma. 2. My husband doesn’t love me anymore. 3. Sometimes I lie. Amber wakes up in a hospital. She can’t move. She can’t speak. She can’t open her eyes. She can hear everyone around her, but they have no idea. Amber doesn’t remember what happened, but she has a suspicion her husband had something to do with it. Alternating between her paralyzed present, the week before her accident, and a series of childhood diaries from twenty years ago, this brilliant psychological thriller asks: Is something really a lie if you believe it's the truth?

Reinventing yourself takes humor, heart, and a TON of footnotes! Max is a good kid—but you wouldn’t know that if you met him at the boring family camp his parents dragged him to over the summer. There, for a few exciting weeks, Max reinvents himself as “Mad Max” and gains a bad-boy reputation for being daring, cool, and fearless. But when Max returns home, he finds it’s easier to be fearless with strangers than it is among friends, and he is not particularly proud of the way his behavior over the summer hurt people. Can he find a way to merge his adventurous alter ego with his true identity as a good guy? Peppered with humorous handwritten footnotes and doodles throughout, Anyway* perfectly captures the viewpoint of a young teen doing his best to find his place in the world—and an ideal balance between wise guy and wimp.