Personal essays share the author's adventures after buying a vacation house on the Carolina coast and his reflections on middle age and mortality.

It seems like any other day: You wake up, pour a cup of coffee, and head out. But today when you open your front door, waiting for you is a small wooden box. This box holds your fate inside: the answer to the exact number of years you will live. From suburban doorsteps to desert tents, every person on every continent receives the same box. In an instant, the world is thrust into a collective frenzy. Where did these boxes come from? What do they mean?...

"For years as an award-winning war reporter, Sebastian Junger traveled to many front lines and frequently put his life at risk. And yet the closest he ever came to death was the summer of 2020 while spending a quiet afternoon at the New England home he shared with his wife and two young children. Crippled by abdominal pain, Junger was rushed to the hospital by ambulance. Once there, he began slipping away. As blackness encroached, he was visited by...

Rom Sebastian discovered a secret and consumed an ancient potion of blood to bring himself back to life. Nine years later, surviving against impossible odds, he has gathered a secret faction of followers who have also taken the blood--the first Mortals in a world that is dead. But the Order has raised an elite army to hunt and crush the living, and no one knows the path to survival.

George Hall is an unobtrusive man. A little distant, perhaps, a little cautious, not quite at ease with the emotional demands of fatherhood or of manly bonhomie. “The secret of contentment, George felt, lay in ignoring many things completely.” Some things in life can’t be ignored, however: his tempestuous daughter Katie’s deeply inappropriate boyfriend Ray, for instance, or the sudden appearance of a red circular rash on his...

The entire world knows Michael J. Fox as Marty McFly, the teenage sidekick of Doc Brown in Back to the Future; as Alex P. Keaton in Family Ties; as Mike Flaherty in Spin City; and through numerous other movie roles and guest appearances on shows such as The Good Wife and Curb Your Enthusiasm. Diagnosed at age 29, Michael is equally engaged in Parkinson’s advocacy work, raising global awareness of the disease and helping find a cure through The Michael...

"From the author of the bestselling memoir Wild Game comes a riveting novel about Cape Cod, complicated families, and long-buried secrets--for fans of the New York Times bestsellers The Paper Palace and Ask Again, Yes. Ken and Abby Gardner lost their mother when they were small and they have been haunted by her absence ever since. Their father, Adam, a brilliant oceanographer, raised them mostly on his own in his remote home on Cape Cod, where the...

"The rate of infant mortality in the United States declined by 74 percent between 1960 and 2000, but the degree of decline has slowed in the past decade. Experts believe that eliminating racial/ethnic disparities in birth outcomes is key to the continued reduction in the overall rate of infant mortality in the United States. Blacks, American Indian/ Alaska Natives, and Puerto Ricans, in descending order, have notably higher rates of infant mortality...