SIGH, SEE, START d’Alison Escalante

This unique approach empowers you with a simple parenting technique to gain confidence, remain grounded, and connect positively with your children.

SIGH, SEE, START
How to Be the Parent Your Child Needs in a World That Won’t Stop Pushing
by Dr. Alison Escalante
Princeton Architectural Press, February 2024
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

In this game-changing parenting book, Dr. Escalante outlines her 3-step science-based approach to escaping the ShouldStorm and embracing shouldfree mindful parenting. Going into detail about each step, she clearly explains how to implement this approach in everyday situations where parents may feel overwhelmed and shares real results from parents and children who use the technique:

SIGH: In moments of parental overwhelm, take a breath all the way into your belly. Imagine it’s a sigh of relief. Sighs help you stop and center yourself instead of reacting to the « should » in your head. SEE: Notice what’s going on. See your child. Are they happy? Are they close to tears? Are their fists balled in anger?

START: Then, and only then, start listening, and start thinking about what an appropriate reaction would be. Do they need a hug? Some space? Something else? In the vein of Good Inside, this book offers a simple approach and practical, proven strategies any parent can use. It also explores parenting culture and why it has become more and more intense over recent decades. For anyone who wants a proven toolkit for resisting a parenting culture that shames them when they can’t meet unrealistic expectations, SIGH, SEE, START is your new go-to tool for joyful parenting.

Dr. Alison Escalante is a board-certified pediatrician and an Adjunct Professor of Pediatrics at Rush University. She has been treating children for almost twenty years and has spent the last ten years exploring methods and workable solutions to target parental stress. She is a regular contributor to Psychology Today and Forbes, and her work has also been featured in Inc. and USA Today.

MADE UP BUT STILL TRUE de Donald Sutherland

The long-awaited memoir from renowned actor Donald Sutherland.

MADE UP BUT STILL TRUE
by Donald Sutherland
Crown, November 2024
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

For well over half a century, Donald Sutherland has been recognized as one of the world’s leading movie actors. Working with such directors as Frederico Fellini, Alan J. Pakula, Oliver Stone, Louis Malle, Robert Altman, Bernardo Bertolucci, Robert Redford, Nicolas Roeg and co-starring with the likes of Jane Fonda, Mary Tyler Moore, Clint Eastwood, Julie Christie, Marlon Brando, Keira Knightley, Jennifer Lawrence, Elliot Gould, Michael Caine and John Belushi, Sutherland’s singular career spans the old Hollywood and the cinematic revolution that began in The Sixties.

In this long-awaited memoir he remembers his complicated Canadian boyhood, his acting studies in the UK, his first international triumph in M.A.S.H., his controversial, headline making anti-Vietnam war activism, his life, loves and family and his celebration by the film community as one of its most venerated and revered performers.

Donald McNichol Sutherland CC is a Canadian prolific actor and anti-war activist. His film career spans over six decades, including starring roles in films such as The Dirty Dozen, M*A*S*H, Klute, Fellini’s Casanova, and many others. Sutherland has received numerous accolades including a Primetime Emmy Award, two Golden Globe Awards, a Critics Choice Award, and an Academy Honorary Award. He was made an Officer of the Order of Canada (OC) in 1978, a Commandeur of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2012 and received the Companion of the Order of Canada (CC) in 2019.

DINOSAURS AT THE DINNER PARTY d’Edward Dolnick

From the bestselling author of The Clockwork Universe and The Writing of the Gods, a historical adventure story about the eccentric Victorians who discovered dinosaur bones, leading to a whole new understanding of human history.

DINOSAURS AT THE DINNER PARTY
How An Eccentric Group of Victorians Discovered Prehistoric Creatures and Accidentally Upended The World
by Edward Dolnick
Scribner, August 2024
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

In the early 1800s the world was a safe and cozy place. But then a twelve-year-old farm boy in Massachusetts stumbled on a row of fossilized three-toed footprints the size of dinner plates—the first dinosaur tracks ever found. Soon, in England, Victorians unearthed enormous bones—bones that reached as high as a man’s head. Outside of myths and fairy tales, no one had even imagined that creatures like three-toed giants had once lumbered across the land. And if anyone had somehow conjured up such a scene, they would never have imagined that all those animals could have vanished, hundreds of millions years ago. The thought of sudden, arbitrary disappearance from life was unnerving and forced the Victorians to rethink everything they knew about the world.

In DINOSAURS AT THE DINNER PARTY, celebrated storyteller and historian Edward Dolnick leads us through a compelling true adventure as the paleontologists of the first half of the 19th century puzzled their way through the fossil record to create the story of dinosaurs we know today. The tale begins with Mary Anning, a poor, uneducated woman who had a sixth sense for finding fossils buried deep inside cliffs; and moves to a brilliant, eccentric geologist named William Buckland, a kind of Doctor Doolittle on a mission to eat his way through the entire animal kingdom; and then on to Richard Owen, the most respected and the most despised scientist of his generation.

Entertaining, erudite, and featuring an unconventional cast of characters, DINOSAURS AT THE DINNER PARTY tells the story of how the accidental discovery of prehistoric creatures upended humanity’s understanding of the world and their place in it, and how a group of paleontologists worked to bring it back into focus again.

Edward Dolnick is the author of The Writing of the Gods, The Clockwork Universe, The Forger’s Spell, and the Edgar Award–winning The Rescue Artist, among other books. A former chief science writer at The Boston Globe, he has written for The Atlantic, The New York Times Magazine, and many other publications. He lives with his wife near Washington, DC.

BEAUTIFUL HACKS FOR BROKEN HEADS AND CREATIVE HEARTS de Jenny Lawson

A thought-provoking, supportive, and funny creativity journal that fosters creativity.

BEAUTIFUL HACKS FOR BROKEN HEADS AND CREATIVE HEARTS
by Jenny Lawson
Penguin Life, Spring 2025
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

BEAUTIFUL HACKS FOR BROKEN HEADS AND CREATIVE HEARTS is an inspiring self-help book for the rest of us—the ones who haven’t successfully stacked a tower of Atomic Habits or cultivated the 7 traits that would make us highly effective individuals. Now more than ever, readers crave a book that meets them where they are. And where they are just might be still in their pajamas at 2pm, unable to turn on their Zoom video, and feeling worse every time someone recommends yet another book outlining a 10-step plan they can’t muster up the enthusiasm or energy to read, much less conquer.

The question Jenny has heard most over the past decade is, “How?” How did you —struggling with depression, anxiety, ADD, chronic pain—manage to publish four bestsellers and open a successful bookstore (in April 2020, no less). Too often, people assume you must conquer your demons, cure your ills, and leave behind the brokenness completely before you can even begin to create your life’s work and succeed. Nothing could be further from the truth, and BEAUTIFUL HACKS FOR BROKEN HEADS AND CREATIVE HEARTS is the road map for this tribe.

Jenny Lawson has published four New York Times bestsellers, including Let’s Pretend This Never Happened and Furiously Happy. She is the owner and proprietress of Nowhere Bookshop, a beloved independent bookstore and bar in San Antonio, Texas. She’s been writing her popular, award-winning blog (thebloggess.com) for over 15 years and has a very large social media following on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and Threads.

WHISPERS d’Ayla Dade

Four elite students, four deadly secrets and a dangerous game: they can trust no one – but will they get too close to each other for their own good? – Spicy thrills and high-society vibes from this bestselling author.

WHISPERS
Die Wahrheit wird dich zerstören
(Whispers – The Truth Will Destroy You)
by Ayla Dade
Penguin, June 2024

Harvard University: instead of being conscientious, hard-working students, members of the elite fraternity Alpha Phi Omega have wild parties and set each other high-risk dares. Everyone wants to be part of the hype, and film their challenge live for the Whispers app: Noktura. But what starts as a game spins out of control when Willow, Benedict, Deepika and Jacob find Henry’s body during a team challenge at Langdell Hall. They are shocked – but relieved too: all four have a guilty secret that’s somehow linked to Henry.

Meanwhile, mysterious Noktura has her eyes and ears everywhere, and sends them an anonymous message saying that she knows that one of them is Henry’s killer. If they want her to keep quiet about their secrets they’ll have to be good kids and keep playing this pitch-black game. The four students have no other choice. As the challenges get more and more dangerous, they are driven to the brink of madness – and into each other’s arms. Are their all-consuming feelings for each other are real, or just a vile attempt to discover their secrets?

Ayla Dade spends every spare minute she has writing stories. The popular book blogger fills the pages of her New Adult novels with deep emotions and magical settings. Her readers adore her books. Her Winter Dreams series was a phenomenal success, with each instalment spending weeks in the bestseller lists, and the first book in her eagerly anticipated new Blackwell Palace series – which takes readers to the luxurious palace hotel in snowy St Moritz, a place of glamour, intrigue and a firework display of emotions – went straight to no. 3. Her latest novel, « Whispers », not only spices things up, but there’s more at stake – with risky online dares and plenty of intrigue at an elite college, as she takes her readers on a thrilling, pulse-quickening ride.