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From acclaimed, best-selling author Mary Roach comes the complete collection of her “My Planet” articles published in . The quirky, brilliant author takes a magnifying glass to everyday life, exposing moments of hilarity in the mundane.

Best-selling author Mary Roach was a hit columnist in the Reader’s Digest magazine, and this book features the articles she wrote in that time. Insightful and hilarious, Mary explores the ins and outs of the modern world: marriage, friends, family, food, technology, customer service, dental floss, and ants—she leaves no element of the American experience unchecked for its inherent paradoxes, pleasures, and foibles.

Ed has crud vision, and I don’t. I don’t notice filth. Ed sees it everywhere. I am reasonably convinced that Ed can actually see bacteria…. He confessed he didn’t like me using his bathrobe because I’d wear it while sitting on the toilet.

“It’s not like it goes in the water,” I protested, though if you counted the sash as part of the robe, this wasn’t strictly true.

The Internet is a boon for hypochondriacs like me. Right now, for instance, I’m feeling a shooting pain on the side of my neck. A Web search produces five matches, the first three for a condition called Arnold-Chiari Malformation.

While my husband, Ed, reads over my shoulder, I recite symptoms from the list. “‘General clumsiness’ and ‘general imbalance,’” I say, as though announcing arrivals at the Marine Corps Ball. “‘Difficulty driving,’ ‘lack of taste,’ ‘difficulty feeling feet on ground.’”

“Those aren’t symptoms,” says Ed. “Those are your character flaws.”

My husband recently made me try on a bikini. A bikini is not so much a garment as a cloth-based reminder that your parts have been migrating all these years. My waist, I realized that day in the dressing room, has completely disappeared beneath my rib cage, which now rests directly on my hips. I’m exhibiting continental drift in reverse.

So Ed and I were eating a lot of vegetables. Vegetables on pasta, vegetables on rice. This was extremely healthy, until you got to the part where Ed and I are found in the kitchen at 10 p.m., feeding on Froot Loops and tubes of cookie dough.

An award-winning writer travels the eastern front of Europe, where the push/pull between old empires and new possibilities has never been more evident. Paolo Rumiz traces the path that has twice cut Europe in two—first by the Iron Curtain and then by the artificial scaffolding of the EU—moving through vibrant cities and abandoned villages, some places still gloomy under the ghost of these imposing borders, some that have sought to erase all memory of it and jump with both feet into the West (if only the West would have them).

In , he is a sublime and lively guide through these unfamiliar landscapes, piecing together an atlas that has been erased by modern states, delighting in the discovery of communities that were once engulfed by geopolitics then all but forgotten, until now.The farther south he goes, the more he feels he is traveling not along some abandoned Eastern frontier, but right in the middle of things: Mitteleuropa wasn’t to be found in Viennese cafés but much farther east, beyond even Budapest and Warsaw. As in Ukraine, these remain places in flux, where the political and cultural values of the East and West have stared each other down for centuries.

Rumiz gives a human face not just to what the Cold War left behind but to the ancient ties of empire and ethnicity that are still at the root of modern politics in flash-point areas such as this.

Paolo Rumiz has been a correspondent for Italy’s since 1986, focusing on the Balkans and Eastern Europe. He was a frontline correspondent during the wars in the former Yugoslavia, Bosnia/Herzegovina, and Afghanistan, and has won many prizes for his journalism and nonfiction.

Cairo, 1984. A blisteringly hot summer. A young girl in a sprawling family house. Her days pass quietly: listening to a mother’s phone conversations, looking at the Nile from a bedroom window, watching the three state-sanctioned TV stations with the volume off, daydreaming about other lives. Underlying this claustrophobic routine is mystery and loss. Relatives mutter darkly about the newly-appointed President Mubarak. Everyone talks with melancholy about the past. People disappear overnight. Her own father has left, too — why, or to where, no one will say.

We meet her across three decades, from youth to adulthood: As a six-year old absorbing the world around her, filled with questions she can’t ask; as a college student and aspiring filmmaker pre-occupied with love, language, and the repression that surrounds her; and then later, in the turbulent aftermath of Mubarak’s overthrow, as a writer exploring her own past. Reunited with her father, she wonders about the silences that have marked and shaped her life.

At once a mapping of a city in transformation and a story about the shifting realities and fates of a single Egyptian family, Yasmine El Rashidi’s traces the fine line between survival and complicity, exploring the conscience of a generation raised in silence.

For 11 years, the bestselling author Linda Conrads has mystified fans by never setting foot outside her home. Haunted by the unsolved murder of her younger sister-who she discovered in a pool of blood-and the face of the man she saw fleeing the scene, Linda's hermit existence helps her cope with debilitating anxiety. But the sanctity of her oasis is shattered when she sees her sister's murderer on television. Hobbled by years of isolation, Linda resolves to use the plot of her next novel to lay an irresistible trap for the man. As the plan is set in motion and the past comes rushing back, Linda's memories — and her very sanity — are called into question. Is this man a heartless killer or merely a helpless victim?

1933–1945 m. nacistai pavogė milijonus meno kūrinių ir antikvarinių dirbinių. Pagal tiesioginį Hitlerio įsakymą plėšikauti į Europą buvo siunčiamos specialiai parengtos pajėgos. Muziejai, galerijos ir žydų šeimos buvo geidžiamas grobis. Iškiliausi darbai turėjo būti eksponuojami Hitlerio planuotame įkurti Fiurerio muziejuje, o išsigimusiu laikomas menas (entartete Kunst) sunaikintas arba parduotas už trokštamą užsienio valiutą; Daug meno kūrinių rasta po karo, bet daugiau nei šimtas tūkstančių dingo. Šie kūriniai atrasti tik pastaraisiais dešimtmečiais iškiliausiose pasaulio meno įstaigose, taip pat ir Stokholmo moderniojo meno muziejuje; „Plėšikai“ – prikaustanti istorija apie fanatišką nacistų maniją menui, taip pat apie aštrią teisinę ir moralinę kovą dėl „dingusio“ meno. Knygoje pasakojama apie milijardų vertus meno kūrinius ir palikuonių kovą už teisę į savo praeitį.<

Orgrim Schicksalshammer hat den korrupten Kriegshäuptling Blackhand vernichtet und die Führung über die Horde der Orcs übernommen. Jetzt gilt es, den Rest Azeroths niederuwerfen, damit sein Volk wieder über ein eigenes Reich herrscht.

Anduin Lothar, ehemaliger Champion Sturmwinds, hat die Überreste seiner zerstörten Heimat hinter sich gelassen und ist nun an den Gestaden Lordaerons gelandet. Dort will er, unterstützt von dem edlen König Terenas, eine mächtige Allianz mit den anderen Nationen der Menschen schmieden. Doch selbst das mag nicht ausreichen, den wütenden Ansturm der Horde zu stoppen. Elfen, Zwerge und Trolle werfen sich in den Kampf, als die beiden Heere aufeinanderprallen. Wird die Allianz den Sieg davon tragen oder wird die Horde alles in einen Strom der Dunkelheit reißen?

In Carlos Rojas’s imaginative novel, the Spanish poet Federico García Lorca, murdered by Francoist rebels in August 1936, finds himself in an inferno that somehow resembles Breughel’s Tower of Babel. He sits alone in a small theater in this private hell, viewing scenes from his own life performed over and over and over. Unexpectedly, two doppelgängers appear, one a middle-aged Lorca, the other an irascible octogenarian self, and the poet faces a nightmarish confusion of alternative identities and destinies.

Carlos Rojas uses a fantastic premise — García Lorca in hell — to reexamine the poet’s life and speculate on alternatives to his tragic end. Rojas creates with a surrealist’s eye and a moral philosopher’s mind. He conjures a profoundly original world, and in so doing earns a place among such international peers as Gabriel García Márquez, Philip Roth, J. M. Coetzee, and José Saramago.