To those who are expecting books this month, our latest shipment arrived last week. If you have not yet received a call or message from us, please drop by the store.

Back in stock are the following favorites:
300
100 Words Every High School Graduate Should Know
100 Words to Make You Sound Smart
1000 Places to See
Lonely Planet the Travel Book : A Journey Throught Every Country in the World
Ology books including: Dragonology, Egyptology, Pirateology, Wizardology and the latest one, Mythology
PostSecret : Extraordinary Confessions from Ordinary Lives
Secret Lives of Men And Women : A PostSecret Book
The Dangerous Book for Boys
The Secret
The Time Traveler’s Wife
The World is Flat

New to the store are:

Lyrics by Sting

• Collected lyrics written by Sting, along with his commentary

• Who should read it: Fans of Sting and his music.

Austenland by Shannon Hale

• Jane Hayes is a seemingly normal young New Yorker, but she has a secret. Her obsession with Mr. Darcy, as played by Colin Firth in the BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice, is ruining her love life: no real man can compare. But when a wealthy relative bequeaths her a trip to an English resort catering to Austen-crazed women, Jane’s fantasies of meeting the perfect Regency-era gentleman suddenly become realer than she ever could have imagined. Decked out in empire-waist gowns, Jane struggles to master Regency etiquette and flirts with gardeners and gentlemen—or maybe even, she suspects, with the actors who are playing them. It’s all a game, Jane knows. And yet the longer she stays, the more her insecurities seem to fall away, and the more she wonders: Is she about to kick the Austen obsession for good, or could all her dreams actually culminate in a Mr. Darcy of her own?

• Who should read it: Millions of Austen fans.

Lottery by Patricia Wood

• This is Patricia Wood’s bestselling first novel. Perry’s IQ is only 76, but he’s not stupid. His grandmother taught him everything he needs to know to survive: She taught him to write things down so he won’t forget them. She taught him to play the lottery every week. And, most important, she taught him whom to trust. When Gram dies, Perry is left orphaned and bereft at the age of thirty-one. Then his weekly Washington State Lottery ticket wins him 12 million dollars, and he finds he has more family than he knows what to do with. Peopled with characters both wicked and heroic who leap off the pages, Lottery is a deeply satisfying, gorgeously rendered novel about trust, loyalty, and what distinguishes us as capable.

• Who should read it: This book will appear to readers of Forrest Gump.

Math Doesn’t Suck : How to Survive Middle School Math Without Losing Your Mind or Breaking a Nail by Danica Mckellar

• From a well-known actress (Danica Mckellar played Winnie Cooper in the popular TV show The Wonder Years) and math genius—a groundbreaking guide to mathematics for middle school girls, their parents, and educators. It is in middle school when math scores begin to drop—especially for girls—in large part due to the relentless social conditioning that tells girls they “can’t do” math, and that math is “uncool.” Young girls today need strong female role models to embrace the idea that it’s okay to be smart—in fact, it’s sexy to be smart!

• It’s Danica McKellar’s mission to be this role model, and demonstrate on a large scale that math doesn’t suck. In this fun and accessible guide, McKellar—dubbed a “math superstar” by The New York Times—gives girls and their parents the tools they need to master the math concepts that confuse middle-schoolers most, including fractions, percentages, pre-algebra, and more. The book features hip, real-world examples, step-by-step instruction, and engaging stories of Danica’s own childhood struggles in math (and stardom). In addition, borrowing from the style of today’s teen magazines, it even includes a Math Horoscope section, Math Personality Quizzes, and Real-Life Testimonials—ultimately revealing why math is easier and cooler than readers think.

Spook Country by William Gibson

• Read this online review

StrengthsFinder 2.0: A New and Upgraded Edition of the Online Test from Gallup’s Now, Discover Your Strengths by Tom Rath

• Just like in the bestselling book, Now, Discover Your Strenths, this book has a unique code for accessing the upgraded StrengthsFinder assessment website for determining what your real strengths are. (A strength is defined as a natural talent or inclination. It is not just a skill that can be learned or practiced.) The book will give you a more customized version of your top five strenths and more ideas and strategies for action.

• Who should read it: This book is especially popular with managers and leaders but is for anyone who wants to know what he really, truly is good at.

This book does not need to be introduced to our regular readers as the first collection of Nick Hornby’s essays has always been a bestseller at the store. This is the follow-up to The Polysyllabic Spree.

Housekeeping Vs. the Dirt
by Nick Hornby

Description:
In this latest collection of essays following The Polysyllabic Spree, critic and author Nick Hornby continues the feverish survey of his swollen bookshelves, offering a funny, intelligent, and unblinkered account of the stuff he’s been reading. Ranging from the middlebrow to the highbrow (with unrepenting dips into the lowbrow), Hornby’s dispatches from his nightstand table serve as useful guides to contemporary letters, with revelations on contemporary culture, the intellectual scene, and English football, in equal measure.

Those who have read Malcolm Gladwell’s Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking would already have been introduced to psychologist Dr. Paul Ekman. Dr. Ekman developed the Facial Action Coding System which catalogued every possible human facial expression. He was such an expert on facial expressions that he could easily tell just by looking at faces if a person was lying, if a marriage was going to last, if someone’s joy was sincere. Blink readers fascinated by this uncanny skill will be glad to know that we have two of Dr. Ekman’s books at the store.

Emotions Revealed: Recognizing Faces and Feelings to Improve Communication and Emotional Life
by Paul Ekman

Telling Lies: Clues to Deceit in the Marketplace, Politics, and Marriage
by Paul Ekman

Here is a link to an interesting interview/conversation with Dr. Ekman.

Below is an excerpt from the preface of Emotions Revealed.

My goal in writing Emotions Revealed was to help people improve four essential skills, and thus I have included suggestions and exercises in the book that I hope you will find both helpful and provocative.

Those four skills are:

First, becoming more consciously aware of when you are becoming emotional, even before you speak or act. This is the hardest skill to acquire. Developing this skill allows you to have some choice about when you are emotional.

Second, choosing how you behave when you are emotional, so you achieve your goals without damaging other people. The purpose of emotional episodes is to help us quickly achieve our objectives, whether to draw people to comfort us, scare off a perpetrator, or some other of thousands of goals. The best emotional episodes do no harm to and cause no problems for those with whom we are engaged. This is not an easy skill to develop, but with practice it can become part of your life.

Third, becoming more sensitive to how others are feeling. Since emotions are at the core of every important relationship we have, we must be sensitive to how others are feeling.

Fourth, carefully using the information you acquire about how others are feeling. Sometimes that means asking the person about the emotion you have spotted, acknowledging how he or she is feeling, or re-calibrating your own reactions in light of what you have recognized. Your response will depend on who the other person is and the history of your relationship with that person. How this varies within a family, in the workplace, and in friendship is explained in the book.

Fragile Things
by Neil Gaiman

Description:
A mysterious circus terrifies an audience for one extraordinary performance before disappearing into the night, taking one of the spectators along with it . . .

In a novella set two years after the events of American Gods, Shadow pays a visit to an ancient Scottish mansion, and finds himself trapped in a game of murder and monsters . . .

In a Hugo Award-winning short story set in a strangely altered Victorian England, the great detective Sherlock Holmes must solve a most unsettling royal murder . . .

Two teenage boys crash a party and meet the girls of their dreams—and nightmares . . .

In a Locus Award-winning tale, the members of an excusive epicurean club lament that they’ve eaten everything that can be eaten, with the exception of a legendary, rare, and exceedingly dangerous Egyptian bird . . .

Such marvelous creations and more—including a short story set in the world of The Matrix, and others set in the worlds of gothic fiction and children’s fiction—can be found in this extraordinary collection, which showcases Gaiman’s storytelling brilliance as well as his terrifyingly entertaining dark sense of humor. By turns delightful, disturbing, and diverting, Fragile Things is a gift of literary enchantment from one of the most unique writers of our time.

About the Author:
Neil Gaiman is the critically acclaimed and award-winning creator of the Sandman series of graphic novels, author of the novels Anansi Boys, American Gods, Coraline, Stardust, and Neverwhere, the short-fiction collection Smoke and Mirrors, and the bestselling children’s books The Day I Swapped My Dad for Two Goldfish and The Wolves in the Walls (both illustrated by Dave McKean). Originally from England, Gaiman now lives in the United States.

Excerpt:

Chapter One - A Study in Emerald

I. The New Friend

Fresh from Their Stupendous European Tour, where they performed before several of the crowned heads of Europe, garnering their plaudits and praise with magnificent dramatic performances, combining both comedy and tragedy, the Strand Players wish to make it known that they shall be appearing at the Royal Court Theatre, Drury Lane, for a limited engagement in April, at which they will present My Look Alike Brother Tom!, The Littlest Violet Seller and The Great Old Ones Come (this last an Historical Epic of Pageantry and Delight); each an entire play in one act! Tickets are available now from the Box Office.

It is the immensity, I believe. The hugeness of things below. The darkness of dreams.

But I am woolgathering. Forgive me. I am not a literary man.

I had been in need of lodgings. That was how I met him. I wanted someone to share the cost of rooms with me. We were introduced by a mutual acquaintance, in the chemical laboratories of St. Bart’s. “You have been in Afghanistan, I perceive,” that was what he said to me, and my mouth fell open and my eyes opened very wide.

“Astonishing,” I said.

“Not really,” said the stranger in the white lab coat, who was to become my friend. “From the way you hold your arm, I see you have been wounded, and in a particular way. You have a deep tan. You also have a military bearing, and there are few enough places in the Empire that a military man can be both tanned and, given the nature of the injury to your shoulder and the traditions of the Afghan cave folk, tortured.”

Put like that, of course, it was absurdly simple. But then, it always was. I had been tanned nut brown. And I had indeed, as he had observed, been tortured.

The gods and men of Afghanistan were savages, unwilling to be ruled from Whitehall or from Berlin or even from Moscow, and unprepared to see reason. I had been sent into those hills, attached to the—th Regiment. As long as the fighting remained in the hills and mountains, we fought on an equal footing. When the skirmishes descended into the caves and the darkness then we found ourselves, as it were, out of our depth and in over our heads.

I shall not forget the mirrored surface of the underground lake, nor the thing that emerged from the lake, its eyes opening and closing, and the singing whispers that accompanied it as it rose, wreathing their way about it like the buzzing of flies bigger than worlds.

That I survived was a miracle, but survive I did, and I returned to England with my nerves in shreds and tatters. The place that leech like mouth had touched me was tattooed forever, frog white, into the skin of my now withered shoulder. I had once been a crack shot. Now I had nothing, save a fear of the world beneath the world akin to panic, which meant that I would gladly pay sixpence of my army pension for a Hansom cab rather than a penny to travel underground.

Still, the fogs and darknesses of London comforted me, took me in. I had lost my first lodgings because I screamed in the night. I had been in Afghanistan; I was there no longer.

“I scream in the night,” I told him.

“I have been told that I snore,” he said. “Also I keep irregular hours, and I often use the mantelpiece for target practice. I will need the sitting room to meet clients. I am selfish, private, and easily bored. Will this be a problem?”

I smiled, and I shook my head, and extended my hand. We shook on it.

The rooms he had found for us, in Baker Street, were more than adequate for two bachelors. I bore in mind all my friend had said about his desire for privacy, and I forbore from asking what it was he did for a living. Still, there was much to pique my curiosity. Visitors would arrive at all hours, and when they did I would leave the sitting room and repair to my bedroom, pondering what they could have in common with my friend: the pale woman with one eye bone white, the small man who looked like a commercial traveler, the portly dandy in his velvet jacket, and the rest. Some were frequent visitors, many others came only once, spoke to him, and left, looking troubled or looking satisfied.

He was a mystery to me.

We were partaking of one of our landlady’s magnificent breakfasts one morning, when my friend rang the bell to summon that good lady. “There will be a gentleman joining us, in about four minutes,” he said. “We will need another place at table.”

“Very good,” she said, “I’ll put more sausages under the grill.”

My friend returned to perusing his morning paper. I waited for an explanation with growing impatience. Finally, I could stand it no longer. “I don’t understand. How could you know that in four minutes we would be receiving a visitor? There was no telegram, no message of any kind.”

He smiled, thinly. “You did not hear the clatter of a brougham several minutes ago? It slowed as it passed us—obviously as the driver identified our door, then it sped up and went past, up into the Marylebone Road. There is a crush of carriages and taxicabs letting off passengers at the railway station and at the waxworks, and it is in that crush that anyone wishing to alight without being observed will go. The walk from there to here is but four minutes.. . .”

He glanced at his pocket watch, and as he did so I heard a tread on the stairs outside.

“Come in, Lestrade,” he called. “The door is ajar, and your sausages are just coming out from under the grill.”

The foregoing is excerpted from Fragile Things by Neil Gaiman. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced without written permission from HarperCollins Publishers, 10 East 53rd Street, New York, NY 10022

Special Topics in Calamity Physics
by Marisha Pessl

Description:
Special Topics in Calamity Physics is a darkly hilarious coming-of-age novel and a richly plotted suspense tale told through the distinctive voice of its heroine, Blue van Meer. After a childhood moving from one academic outpost to another with her father (a man prone to aphorisms and meteoric affairs), Blue is clever, deadpan, and possessed of a vast lexicon of literary, political, philosophical, and scientific knowledge—and is quite the cineaste to boot. In her final year of high school at the elite (and unusual) St. Gallway School in Stockton, North Carolina, Blue falls in with a charismatic group of friends and their captivating teacher, Hannah Schneider. But when the drowning of one of Hannah’s friends and the shocking death of Hannah herself lead to a confluence of mysteries, Blue is left to make sense of it all with only her gimlet-eyed instincts and cultural references to guide—or misguide—her.

Structured around a syllabus for a Great Works of Literature class and containing ironic visual aids (drawn by the author), Pessl’s debut novel is complex yet compelling, erudite yet accessible. It combines the suspense of Hitchcock, the self-parody of Dave Eggers, and the storytelling gifts of Donna Tartt with a dazzling intelligence and wit entirely Pessl’s own.

About the Author:
Marisha Pessl graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Columbia University.

A book club reading guide is available from the publisher.

Based on the Steven Spielberg animated movie.  Includes 3-D poster and glasses.

Attack of the Monster House in 3-D!
by Lara Bergen

Description:
In order to destroy the Monster House, DJ and his friends need some questions answered. So, they set off to talk to an expert on ghosts, demons, and the paranormal, the wisest pizza-delivery guy on earth, known to all as Skull. The wise Skull tells them that the only way to kill the Monster House is to strike it at the source of life: its heart.

But can the kids strike the beast’s heart and still manage to get out of the house alive? Find out in this spooky 3-D story with 3-D poster and glasses!

Children and adults who like to read Harry Potter, Eragon, Cornelia Funke books…will enjoy this book.

The Water Mirror
by Kai Meyer

Kai Meyer is the author of many highly acclaimed and popular books for adults and young adults in his native Germany. The Water Mirror, which was nominated for the German Book Prize and was on many bestseller lists in Germany, has been translated into fourteen languages. Kai Meyer lives in Germany.

Description:
In Venice, magic is not unusual. Merle is apprenticed to a magic mirror maker, and Serafin — a boy who was once a master thief — works for a weaver of magic cloth. Merle and Serafin are used to the mermaids who live in the canals of the city and to the guards who patrol the streets on living stone lions. Merle herself possesses something magical: a mirror whose surface is water. She can reach her whole arm into it and never get wet.

But Venice is under siege by the Egyptian Empire; its terrifying mummy warriors are waiting to strike. All that protects the Venetians is the Flowing Queen. Nobody knows who or what she is — only that her power flows through the canals and keeps the Egyptians at bay.

When Merle and Serafin overhear a plot to capture the Flowing Queen, they are catapulted into desperate danger. They must do everything they can to rescue the Queen and save the city — even if it means getting help from the Ancient Traitor himself.

Ages: 12 and up
Grades: 7 and up

Awards:
New York Public Library “Books for the Teen Age”
School Library Journal Best Book of the Year

PostSecret is an ongoing community art project where people mail in their secrets anonymously on one side of a homemade postcard.  Read a secret here…

PostSecret: Extraordinary Confessions from Ordinary Lives
by Frank Warren

Description:
For the Postsecret project, which was started in October 2004, Warren asked people to write a secret they had never told anyone on a handmade postcard and mail it to him. This compilation is astonishing in its honesty and creativity.

Graphic Classics

Description:
Timeless works of literature featuring amazing, one-of-a-kind cover illustrations from some of today’s best graphic artists. These Deluxe Editions also feature French flaps, rough fronts and luxurious packaging. Look for more Deluxe Classics with illustrated covers in the months ahead!

The classic Insight Guides series has, for more than 35 years, provided a full account of the world’s leading travel destinations through expert and informative text and stunning photography. Each title combines three books in one: an ideal travel planner, a practical on-the-spot companion, and a superb visual souvenir of a visit. If you want your vacation to be more than a sightseeing trip you can trust Insight Guides because they provide a complete and honest appraisal.

An ever-increasing range of products from Insight Guides also includes: Insight Pocket Guides, Compact Guides, Shopping Guides, Museums and Galleries Guides, Globes and Atlases, Fleximaps and more.

Berlitz — Helping the world communicate since 1878 — is the world’s largest provider of language training and cultural consulting services, with over 460 locations in 63 countries. Their products have helped millions of children and adults speak new languages.

Berlitz language books and audio products have enabled millions of people to study languages effectively at home, and at their own pace. Berlitz have also produced a very successful range of travel guides for well over 100 destinations, as well as specialist travel books such as the renowned Ocean Cruising and Cruise Ships and Business Travel Guide Europe.