This Is Me Since Yesterday

Alexandra Leggat, the author of Moondogging and numerous book and music reviews, puts on the page the remarkable texts that she is renowned for performing at spoken word events all over Toronto.

The shock of divorce removed Cristina from her comfort zone to a place required for her rediscovery. She got in touch with an essence long forgotten in order to reacquaint herself with love, validate her feelings and emotions, dream again, find courage, and welcome the unfolding grandness of those dreams. Cristinas renewed strength allowed her to face and banish fears, resentments, and old premises that had become useless. It permitted her to embrace a liberating and rewarding journey full of surprises. She grew enough to set aside disappointments, upsets, and emotional pain from people who were only obstacles to her new, purpose-directed life. Within these pages you will find the story of many people. Perhaps it is your own or that of someone you know. Courageous people like Cristina have used the leftovers of a broken marriage to construct a new life, adapting previous experiences, hidden virtues, and the love of so many as raw materials for a new and fulfilling path uniquely designed by each of them. So, grant yourself permission and join the characters herein on their astounding journeys.

From the #1 New York Times bestselling creative team of Jamie Lee Curtis and Laura Cornell comes a timely picture book about immigration. Raising important identity issues like “Where did we come from?” and “Who are we?” This Is Me is as delightful as it is important, sure to stimulate dinner table conversation. In This Is Me a teacher tells her class about her great-grandmother’s dislocating journey from home to a new country with nothing but a small suitcase to bring along. And she asks: What would you pack? What are the things you love best? What says “This is me!” With its lively, rhyming language and endearing illustrations, it’s a book to read again and again, imagining the lives of the different characters, finding new details in the art, thinking about what it would be like to move someplace completely different.

“A deeply moving account of amnesia that . . . reminds us how we are all always trying to find a version of ourselves that we can live with.” —Los Angeles Times On October 17, 2002, David MacLean “woke up” on a train platform in India with no idea who he was or why he was there. No money. No passport. No identity. Taken to a mental hospital by the police, MacLean then started to hallucinate so severely he had to be tied down. He could remember song lyrics, but not his family, his friends, or the woman he was told he loved. The illness, it turned out, was the result of a commonly prescribed antimalarial medication he had been taking. Upon his return to the United States, he struggled to piece together the fragments of his former life. In this “mesmerizing, unsettling memoir about the ever-echoing nature of identity—written in vivid, blooming detail,” he tells the harrowing, absurd, and unforgettable story of his journey back to himself (Gillian Flynn, author of Gone Girl). “[MacLean] is an exceedingly entertaining psychotic. . . . [A] raw, honest and beautiful memoir.” —The New York Times “If bad things are going to happen, we are lucky when they happen to someone with the wit, humanity and sweetness—to say nothing of an eye for detail and a gift for pacing—that MacLean brings to this wrenching tale. . . . Readers who flip open the book will find MacLean, preserved between pages, goofy and serious, lost and found.” —Chicago Tribune “[MacLean] writes eloquently about the bizarre and disturbing experience of having his sense of self erased and then reconstructed from scratch.” —The New Yorker

All I Have Is Me is a fictional novel that tells the story of how the Logan family grieves and suffers after their lives are broken and shattered by the loss of their teenaged daughter in an automobile accident. The parents blame the death on their younger daughter, Theresa, who is driving the car. The story is told from Theresa’s viewpoint. Life as Theresa has known it changes forever in a matter of seconds. With the death of her older sister, there is no longer any warmth, happiness, or love in the family’s life. Theresa is heavily burdened watching her parents’ endless grief. She becomes tired of being the recipient of the accusatory looks of disappointment and hurt from her parents. She feels that no one cares if she lives or dies. After a failed suicide attempt, Theresa decides to do her best to stay out of her parents’ way and bide her time until she can graduate from high school and leave home. Upon high school graduation, she joins the army because she has nowhere else to go. The army provides all her basic needs for survival. The army becomes her life for twenty years. Theresa learns to exist and function without allowing herself to get emotionally involved in life. After retirement from the military, Theresa feels a need to put down roots. She stumbles upon an old dilapidated farm cottage in a small community. She feels a connection to the empty cottage that no one cares for or loves. Theresa finds that as she repairs the flaws and cracks in the old cottage and brings it back to life, she is also repairing the flaws and cracks in her own life. She renews her faith in God. By accepting love from others, the story tells how Theresa is able to find joy and beauty in living as she allows herself to love, forgive herself, and learn to live again.

A mother vanished. A father presumed guilty. There is no proof. There are no witnesses. For the children, there is only doubt. From the bestselling author of Defending Jacob. . . . “Gripping . . . a masterly piece of writing.”—The New York Times “A wonderful, well-written novel that crackles with suspense.”—Stephen King A BOOKREPORTER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR One afternoon in November 1975, ten-year-old Miranda Larkin comes home from school to find her house eerily quiet. Her mother is missing. Nothing else is out of place. There is no sign of struggle. Her mom’s pocketbook remains in the front hall, in its usual spot. So begins a mystery that will span a lifetime. What happened to Jane Larkin? Investigators suspect Jane’s husband. A criminal defense attorney, Dan Larkin would surely be an expert in outfoxing the police. But no evidence is found linking him to a crime, and the case fades from the public’s memory, a simmering, unresolved riddle. Jane’s three children—Alex, Jeff, and Miranda—are left to be raised by the man who may have murdered their mother. Two decades later, the remains of Jane Larkin are found. The investigation is awakened. The children, now grown, are forced to choose sides. With their father or against him? Guilty or innocent? And what happens if they are wrong? A tale about family—family secrets and vengeance, but also family love—All That Is Mine I Carry With Me masterfully grapples with a primal question: When does loyalty reach its limit?

The time-bending parallel tale to the national bestseller Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict In Laurie Viera Rigler's first novel, Confessions of a Jane Austen Addict, twenty-­first-century Austen fan Courtney Stone found herself in Regency England occupying the body of one Jane Mansfield, with comic and romantic consequences. Now, in Rude Awakenings of a Jane Austen Addict, Jane Mansfield awakens in the urban madness of twenty-first-century L.A.—in Courtney's body. With no knowledge of Courtney's life, let alone her world—with its horseless carriages and shiny glass box in which tiny figures act out her favorite book, Pride and Prejudice—Jane is over her head. Especially when she falls for a handsome young gentleman. Can a girl from Regency England make sense of a world in which kissing and flirting and even the sexual act raise no matrimonial expectations?

Sartre explains the theory of existential psychoanalysis in this treatise on human reality.