The thirteen interlaced stories in this crisp, engaging, and often spooky debut all orbit the wealthy, fictional town of Old Cranbury, Connecticut. You’ll meet a husband who bribes a surgeon to let him touch his wife’s brain during an operation and a mother-to-be whose husband follows the advice of his spirit animal. There are echoes here of John Cheever, Tom Perrotta, and Flannery O’Connor, coupled with Acampora’s considerable talent for constructing glimpses into her characters’ hidden lives that both unnerve and linger.
For those who’ve had a taste of meditation, this is a gentle, user-friendly introduction to the many strands of Buddhism. Nichtern is a teacher in the Shambhala tradition who founded the Interdependence Project, a secular Buddhist center in New York City. With an engaging voice that mixes Nichtern’s own stories with discussions of Buddhist teachings and current research on meditation, he delves into questions of emptiness and enlightenment, karma and self-awareness.
“Moore’s Law” is Gordon Moore’s often-repeated observation that microchips will regularly double in capacity while they descend in price, an insight that has held true. But Moore, who with a partner founded what eventually became Intel, is also an inventor and entrepreneur whose career helped shape much of the modern digital world. This exhaustive biography covers his childhood in California, his early years as a chemist, and his part in the eventual blossoming of Silicon Valley.
ALUMNI NONFICTION
A Gateless Garden edited by Liza Bakewell ’91 PhD, ’93 AM, photographs by Kerry Michaels (Maine Women Write).
Scientists at War: The Ethics of Cold War Weapons Research by Sarah Bridger ’00 (Harvard University Press).
Death Rules: How Death Shapes Life on Earth, and What It Means For Us by Will Cairns ’71 (Vivid Publishing).
South Side Girls: Growing Up in the Great Migration by Marcia Chatelain ’03 AM, ’08 PhD (Duke University Press).
A Passion for Paris: Romanticism and Romance in the City of Light by David Downie ’84 AM (St. Martin's Press).
Bruno: Conversations with a Brazilian Drug Dealer by Robert Gay ’88 PhD (Duke University Press).
Planning Democracy: Agrarian Intellectuals and the Intended New Deal by Jess Gilbert ’75 MAT (Yale University Press).
Remnants: A Memoir of Spirit, Activism, and Mothering by Rosemarie Freeney Harding with Rachel Harding ’86 ’90 MFA (Duke University Press).
The Beautiful Country: Tourism and the Impossible State of Destination Italy by Stephanie Sylvester Hom ’97 (University of Toronto Press).
Race on the Move: Brazilian Migrants and the Global Reconstruction of Race by Tiffany Joseph ’04 (Stanford University Press).
Battle Lines: A Graphic History of the Civil War by Ari Kelman ’93 AM, ’98 PhD and Jonathan Fetter-Vorm (Hill and Wang).
The Upward Spiral: Using Neuroscience to Reverse the Course of Depression, One Small Change at a Time by Alex Korb ’02 (New Harbinger Publications).
The Road Home: A Contemporary Exploration of the Buddhist Path by Ethan Nichtern ’00 (Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
I Am Because You Are: How the Spirit of Ubuntu Inspired an Unlikely Friendship and Transformed a Community by Jacob Lief with Andrea Thompson Peed ’01 (Rodale Books).
Standards Matter: The Why and What of Common Core State Standards in Reading and Writing by Katherine Scheidler ’67 MAT (NewSouth Books).
Thinking on the Page: A College Student’s Guide to Effective Writing by Gwen Hyman and Martha Schulman ’88 MAT (Writer’s Digest Books).
Finding Robert: What the Doctors Never Told Us About Autism Spectrum Disorder and the Hard Lessons We Learned by Catherine and Robert Stevens ’83 (Square One).
Beach House Happy: The Joy of Living By the Water by Antonia Van Der Meer ’79, foreword by Jonathan Adler ’88 (Oxmoor House).
The Mindful Teen: Powerful Skills to Help You Handle Stress One Moment at a Time by Dzung Vo ’98 (Instant Help Solution Series).
ALUMNI FICTION
The Wonder Garden by Lauren Acampora ’97 (Grove Press).
Miracles and Conundrums of the Secondary Planets: Stories by Jacob Appel ’96 ’96 AM (Black Lawrence Press).
Four Faces of Truth by Harriette Rinaldi ’68 (Fireship Press).
ALUMNI FICTION (SINGLE SHORT STORY)
On Record by William McCormick ’92 (Saturday Evening Post).
The Tunnels by Stephen Tillman ’65 ’70 PhD (Mysterical-E).
ALUMNI POETRY
Ozone Journal by Peter Balakian ’80 PhD (University of Chicago Press).
Culling: New & Selected Nature Poems by George Held ’58 (Poets Wear Prada).
FACULTY NONFICTION
Women and Death in Film, Television, and News: Dead But Not Gone by Joanne Clarke Dillman ’84 (Palgrave Macmillan).
