Donna Postel

" In the 1950s, Confidential magazine, America's first celebrity scandal magazine, revealed Hollywood stars' secrets, misdeeds, and transgressions in gritty, unvarnished detail. Deploying a vast network of tipsters to root out scandalous facts about the stars, including sexual affairs, drug use, and sexual orientation, publisher Robert Harrison destroyed celebrities' carefully constructed images and built a media empire. Confidential became the bestselling...

"We are out of touch. Many people fear that we are trapped inside our screens, becoming less in tune with our bodies and losing our connection to the physical world. But the sense of touch has been undervalued since long before the days of digital isolation. Because of deeply rooted beliefs that favor the cerebral over the corporeal, touch is maligned as dirty or sentimental, in contrast with supposedly more elevated modes of perceiving the world....

When she finally gets a breakout case involving a teenage Iraqi refugee, public defender Julia Geary throws herself into the case until she starts receiving vicious threats against her family and her client is left in a coma, pitting her against the town's most powerful forces.

Sharing nothing in common except their red hair, three women from drastically different backgrounds receive chilling letters in the mail from a killer who makes them fear for their lives until they find one another and use the clues he has left behind to work together and protect one another.

America has been at war since 2001, and a sizeable percentage of the soldiers deployed have been women. Soldier Girls follows the lives of three of them over twelve years, on their paths to the military, overseas to combat, back home, then overseas again for two of them. We watch as they become friends, interact, and separate. We see the effects on their lives and their families. Deeply reported and powerfully moving, their story is truly groundbreaking....

A chronicle of the modern struggle for gay, lesbian and transgender rights draws on interviews with politicians, military figures, legal activists and members of the LGBT community to document the cause's struggles since the 1950s.

"As immigrants and others are engulfed by dominant societies, the connection to their ancestral tongues is routinely severed. Julie Sedivy takes on the science and politics of language loss, offering lessons for the renewal and preservation of heritage languages, alongside her own moving story of language loss and accompanying personal crisis"--

Violet Baumgartner has opened her annual holiday letter the same way for the past three decades. And this year she's going to throw her husband, Ed, a truly perfect retirement party, one worthy of memorializing in her upcoming letter. But the event becomes a disaster when, in front of two hundred guests, Violet learns her daughter Cerise has been keeping a shocking secret from her, shattering Violet's carefully constructed world.