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A bighearted memoir of fidelity and forgiveness, A Beginner’s Guide to Faults draws on the language of geology to explore fault lines in a long marriage—deep fractures formed by unmet needs, quiet betrayals, and the human longing for connection and freedom.

After twenty-five years of marriage, Denice is blindsided when her husband reveals his romance with a Las Vegas stripper. This latest move in their tit-for-tat game of infidelity is too much for her. She files for divorce and heads to South Dakota, where she hopes to fulfill her wildest fantasies. Instead, plagued by guilt about her own faults, she wrecks each new relationship, convinced that she is unforgivable.

Through fleeting romances and soul-deep self-reflection, Denice rebuilds a life and a family on her own terms. A Beginner’s Guide to Faults is a memoir of transformation—one that shows how love can change without ever being lost.

A bighearted memoir of fidelity and forgiveness, A Beginner’s Guide to Faults draws on the language of geology to explore fault lines in a long marriage—deep fractures formed by unmet needs, quiet betrayals, and the human longing for connection and freedom.

After twenty-five years of marriage, Denice is blindsided when her husband reveals his romance with a Las Vegas stripper. This latest move in their tit-for-tat game of infidelity is too much for her. She files for divorce and heads to South Dakota, where she hopes to fulfill her wildest fantasies. Instead, plagued by guilt about her own faults, she wrecks each new relationship, convinced that she is unforgivable.

Through fleeting romances and soul-deep self-reflection, Denice rebuilds a life and a family on her own terms. A Beginner’s Guide to Faults is a memoir of transformation—one that shows how love can change without ever being lost.

An intensely moving and revelatory memoir of enduring and emerging from exceptional grief

To grieve after a profound loss is perfectly natural and healthy. To be debilitated by grief for more than a decade, as Andrea Gilats was, is something else. In her candid, deeply moving, and ultimately helpful memoir of breaking free of death’s relentless grip on her life, Gilats tells her story of living with prolonged, or “complicated,” grief and offers insight, hope, and guidance to others who suffer as she did. 

Thomas Dayton, Andrea Gilats’s husband of twenty years, died at 52 after a five-month battle with cancer. In After Effects Gilats describes the desolation that followed and the slow and torturous twenty-year journey that brought her back to life. In the two years immediately following his death, Gilats wrote Tom daily letters, desperately trying to maintain the twenty-year conversation of their marriage. Excerpts from these letters reveal the depth of her despair but also the glimmer of an awakening as they also trace a different, more typical course of the grief experienced by one of Gilats's colleagues, also widowed. Gilats’s struggle to rescue herself takes her through the temptation of suicide, the threat of deadly illness, the overwhelming challenges of work, and the rigor of learning and eventually teaching yoga, to a moment of reckoning and, finally, reconciliation to a life without her beloved partner. Her story is informed by the lessons she learned about complicated grief as a disorder that, while intensely personal, can be defined, grappled with, and overcome.

Though complicated grief affects as many as one in seven of those stricken by the loss of a close loved one, it is little known outside professional circles. After Effects points toward a path of recuperation and provides solace along the way—a service and a comfort that is all the more timely and necessary in our pandemic-ravaged world of loss and isolation.

Some children thrive where others do not. Why? Are there personal behaviors and institutional supports that make a difference in helping young people chart a course for their futures? Agency answers with a loud and clear “yes!”

This book describes the FREE framework, four pillars that can uplift every young person as they make the passage into adulthood: Family, Religion, Education, and Entrepreneurship.

With this framework in place, children are empowered to develop agency, which Ian V. Rowe defines as the force of one’s free will, guided by moral discernment. 

Rowe champions a game plan for creating new agents of agency and shows them the path that will set them FREE. Revised and expanded, this updated edition includes a new introduction and supplementary material, including a study guide for educators, sample lesson plans, and a student self-assessment.

A feminist poetry collection re-examining the figure of the crone and upending the patriarchal expectations she embodies.

In Alchemist or Arsonist, her second full-length collection, Beth Gordon supercharges the term crone, demonstrating in image-rich poems the magical strength of older women. The Crone is frank about the realities of aging—including plucking chin hairs—yet she also surprises, warning the reader: “The tiger has always been there. . . . She is right in front of you.” Taking afternoon shots of mescal and waiting in line for Mexican street corn, she contemplates Captcha pictures, AI, and tattoos.

The book expands its concerns in several long poems and sequences, encompassing the full range of human experience. “The Secret Fate of All Life,” a series of golden shovels based on quotes from the HBO show True Detective, moves into the surreal to represent language’s failure to describe the death of an infant, and how time can be displaced by grief. Other works explore the transformation that can come from tragedy, the perils of marriage and other relationships, and the complicated conversation older and younger versions of the self would have with each other.

Gordon’s candid, wry, uncompromising voice is both refreshing and bracing, and the poems perform alchemy as they set fire to traditional expectations. With an undercurrent of violence and murder, the book reveals the ultimate consequences of patriarchy. “Alchemist or arsonist: the end is the same,” The Crone tells us. “Something becomes something else.”

A bracing spotlight on the avoidable causes of the COVID-19 Eldercide in the United States.

Twenty percent of the Americans who have died of COVID since 2020 have been older and disabled adults residing in nursing homes—even though they make up fewer than 1 percent of the US population. Something about this catastrophic loss of life in government-monitored facilities has never added up.

Until now. In American Eldercide, activist and scholar Margaret Morganroth Gullette investigates this tragic public health crisis with a passionate voice and razor-sharp attention to detail, showing us that nothing about it was inevitable. By unpacking the decisions that led to discrimination against nursing home residents, revealing how governments, doctors, and media reinforced ageist or ableist biases, and collecting the previously little-heard voices of the residents who survived, Gullette helps us understand the workings of what she persuasively calls an eldercide.

Gullette argues that it was our collective indifference, fueled by the heightened ageism of the COVID-19 era, that prematurely killed this vulnerable population. Compounding that deadly indifference is our own panic about aging and a social bias in favor of youth-based decisions about lifesaving care. The compassion this country failed to muster for the residents of our nursing facilities motivated Gullette to pen an act of remembrance, issuing a call for pro-aging changes in policy and culture that would improve long-term care for everyone.

The first in-depth look at this pioneering "reality TV" documentary.

Before 1973, the Loud family of Santa Barbara, California, lived in the privacy of their own home. With the airing of the documentary An American Family, that "privacy" extended to every American home with a television-and there was no going back to the happy land of Beaver, Donna Reed, and Father Knows Best. This book is the first to offer a close, sustained look at An American Family-the documentary that blurred conventions, stirred passions among viewers and reviewers, revised impressions of family life and definitions of private and public, and began the breakdown of distinctions between reality and spectacle that culminated in cultural phenomena from The Oprah Winfrey Show to Survivor.

One night after midnight social workers brought a baby girl to the author's home, and her life as a foster mother began. A social worker herself, Gerstenzang discovered that raising Cecilia, despite all the personal joys, would be a complex and frustrating process of "co-parenting" with the foster care system in New York City. Foster parents are in great demand, but they are not necessarily treated well. We follow the author through the home visits, the Early Intervention evaluation, the WIC program that (with much bureaucratic hassle) provides free formula and cereal, and the mandatory parenting training sessions. She comments, "When Michael and I became foster parents, we learned how stigmatizing, demoralizing, and just plain inconvenient and time-consuming being part of the 'unentitled' population can be. With the exception of Early Intervention, we often felt that the programs were more concerned with regulating our behavior than with providing services."

Regular meetings with the birth family were also part of the process. Not only were they awkward for all concerned, but each visit involved a commute of several hours. One social worker admitted that she preferred a foster parent who didn't work because that person could more easily comply with the time-consuming regulations. Sarah and her husband Michael also agonize over complying with special regulations about hiring babysitters or traveling ("anytime we left New York State we needed to ask the agency's permission, which in turn had to get the signed consent from the birth mother").

Central to Another Mother is the issue of transracial placement. Sarah remembers, "That first day the contrast between my pale skin and Cecilia's brown skin seemed glaring. Not only did I feel that I had someone else's child, I felt that I had a child from another culture. Would I owe someone an explanation?" (Gerstenzang is recalling the 1972 opposition of the National Association of Black Social Workers.) Her account is full of anecdotes and reflections about race: acceptance and prejudice from others; the feelings of her two children about having a sibling of a different race; and culture keeping, beginning with skin and hair care.