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  Managing Expectations - A Memoir...

  Minnie Driver

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  A charming, poignant, and mesmerizing memoir in essays from beloved actor and natural-born storyteller Minnie Driver, chronicling the way life works out even when it doesn’t. 
  In this intimate, beautifully crafted collection, Driver writes and narrates with disarming charm and candor about her bohemian upbringing between England and Barbados; her post-university travails and triumphs—from being the only student in her acting school not taken on by an agent to being discovered at a rave in a muddy field in the English countryside; shooting to fame in one of the most influential films of the 1990s and being nominated for an Academy Award; and finding the true light of her life, her son. She chronicles her unconventional career path, including the time she gave up on acting to sell jeans in Uruguay, her journey as a single parent, and the heartbreaking loss of her mother.  
  Like Lena Dunham in Not That Kind of Girl, Gabrielle Union in We’re Going to Need More Wine and Patti Smith in Just Kids, Driver writes with razor-sharp humor and grace as she explores navigating the depths of failure, fighting for success, discovering the unmatched wonder and challenge of motherhood, and wading through immeasurable grief. Effortlessly charming, deeply funny, personal, and honest, Managing Expectations reminds us of the way life works out—even when it doesn’t. 
  Also included at the end of this audiobook is a conversation between Minnie Driver her friend Emma Forrest.

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  The Upgrade - A Cautionary Tale...

  Paul Carr

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  “An uproarious and brilliant story of friendship, alcoholism and itinerancy, penned by an adorably self-obsessed attention-seeker.”—Wired UK   Bored, broke and struggling to survive in one of the most expensive cities on earth, Paul Carr comes to the surprising realization that it would actually be cheaper to live in a luxury hotel in Manhattan than in his tiny one-bedroom apartment. Inspired by that possibility, he decides to sell most of his possessions, abandon his old life and spend a year living entirely without commitments, as a modern-day nomad.   Thanks to Paul’s ability to talk his way into increasingly ridiculous situations, what begins as a one-year experiment soon becomes a permanent lifestyle—a life lived in luxury hotels and mountain-top villas. A life of fast cars, Hollywood actresses and Icelandic rock stars. Of 6,000-mile booty calls, of partying with 800 female hairdressers dressed only in bedsheets, and of nearly dying at the hands of Spanish drug dealers. And, most bizarrely of all, a life that still costs less than his surviving on cold pizza in his old apartment.   Yet, as word of Paul’s exploits starts to spread—first online, then through a national newspaper column and eventually a book deal—he finds himself forced constantly to up the stakes in order to keep things interesting. With his behavior spiraling to dangerous—and sometimes criminal—levels, he is forced to ask the question: is there such a thing as too much freedom? “There’s no denying that he’s an idiotic, irresponsible chancer—qualities that make him an unpredictable travel companion, but put his story-telling skills in first class.”—Daily Record

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  A Political Companion to...

  Neil Roberts

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  “A splendid opportunity to rethink Douglass’s political thought . . . relevant today given the discourse of white nationalism in the United States.” —Choice 
   
  Frederick Douglass was a writer and public speaker whose impact on America has been long studied by historians and literary critics. Yet as political theorists have focused on the legacies of such notables as W.E.B. Du Bois and Booker T. Washington, Douglass’s profound influence on Afro-modern and American political thought has often been undervalued. 
   
  In an effort to fill this gap in the scholarship on Douglass, editor Neil Roberts and an exciting group of established and rising scholars examine the author’s autobiographies, essays, speeches, and novella. Together, they illuminate his genius for analyzing and articulating core American ideals such as independence, liberation, individualism, and freedom, particularly in the context of slavery. The contributors explore Douglass’s understanding of the self-made American and the way in which he expanded the notion of individual potential by arguing that citizens had a responsibility to improve not only their own situations but also those of their communities. 
   
  A Political Companion to Frederick Douglass also considers the idea of agency, investigating Douglass’s passionate insistence that every person in a democracy, even a slave, possesses an innate ability to act. Various essays illuminate Douglass’s complex racial politics, deconstructing what seems at first to be his surprising aversion to racial pride, and others explore and critique concepts of masculinity, gender, and judgment in his oeuvre. The volume concludes with a discussion of Douglass’s contributions to pre- and post-Civil War jurisprudence. 
   
  “Rich insights from scholarship both old and new. A fine collection.” —Political Theory

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  Coping With Alzheimer's

  PBS NewsHour

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  After being diagnosed with Alzheimer's, professional artist Mary Wyant slowly lost her ability to paint and the ability to take care of herself. Ray Suarez examines the story of Mary and her daughter Rebecca, who is now her mother's legal guardian and primary caretaker, and the daily struggles of long-term care.

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  The Man Who Went into the West -...

  Byron Rogers

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  The award-winning life story of Wales national poet and vicar R.S. Thomas is “a biography touched by genius.” (Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday) 
   
  R.S. Thomas is widely considered as one of the twentieth-century’s greatest English language poets. His bitter yet beautiful collections on Wales, its landscape, people and identity, reflect a life of political and spiritual asceticism. Indeed, Thomas is a man who banned vacuum cleaners from his house on grounds of noise, whose first act on moving into an ancient cottage was to rip out the central heating, and whose attempts to seek out more authentically Welsh parishes only brought him more into contact with loud English holidaymakers. 
   
  To Thomas’s many admirers this will be a surprising, sometimes shocking, but at last humanising portrait of someone who wrote truly metaphysical poetry. 
   
  “A masterpiece.” —Daily Express 
   
  “A striking, vivid and tender reading of the man . . . Excellent.” —Observer 
   
  “Riotiously funny.” —Rowan Williams, Sunday Times 
   
  “It is precisely Byron Rogers’ darkly comic sense of the ridiculous that melts the frost from the head of R.S. Thomas and humanizes a remote and bleakly beautiful writer.” —The Times 
   
  “A chatty, disorderly but extremely good [biography] . . . A wonderfully comprehensive picture of the man.” —Daily Telegraph 
   
  “As revealing an account of a severely private person that anyone could hope to achieve.” —Alan Brownjohn, Times Literary Supplement 
   
  “Engagingly high-spirited and daring.” —Andrew Motion, Guardian Book of the Week 
   
  “Charming and deftly written. . . . A very funny book.” —Literary Review 
   
  “As readable and rounded a life of the man as could be written.” —Tablet 
   
  Winner of the James Tait Black prize for biography

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  The Truth in Jesus

  George MacDonald

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  This collection of sermons and theological essays by the beloved Victorian author explore the nature of God’s truth and how it is revealed to us.   The Victorian author, poet, and theologian George MacDonald inspired some of the greatest writers of the early 20th century, including C.S. Lewis, who said MacDonald’s books were pivotal in leading him toward Christianity. But while MacDonald’s fiction remains popular—with such notable classics as Robert Falconer and At the Back of the North Wind—his theological nonfiction is often challenging for modern readers.   Now MacDonald scholar and biographer Michael Phillips addresses this difficulty with this expertly edited edition of MacDonald’s sermons and essays about God’s truth. Each selection is accompanied by Phillips’s illuminating commentary, providing readers with an essential road map into the expansive world of George MacDonald’s theological writings.

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