Nate is not your average sixth grader. Somehow he's always in the wrong place at the wrong time. He makes getting detention from every one of his teachers in the same day seem like an achievement. Nate has one day to prove that he is above the rest.

"Squeezed" weaves together intimate reporting with sharp and lively critique to show how the high cost of parenthood and our increasingly unstable job market have imploded the middle-class American Dream for many families, and offers surprising solutions for how we might change things. Families today are squeezed on every side--from high childcare costs and harsh employment policies to workplaces without paid family leave or even dependable and regular...

"Mark Firth is a home builder in Howland, Massachusetts in the early 2000s who, after being swindled by a finanical advisor, feels opportunity passing him by. In the paranoid days after 9/11, a New York money manager, Philip Hadi, moves his family to Howland and hires Mark to turn his his house into a "secure location." When Howland's first selectman passes away suddenly, Hadi runs for office, and begins subtly transforming the town in his image."--...

"Drawing on confidential sources in Mossad, Israel's equivalent to our CIA, Bob and Evyatar, reporters for The Jerusalem Post, tell the remarkable story behind the most stunning development in the Middle East in recent years: the Abraham Accords that normalized relations between Israel and the UAE, Bahrain, Morocco, and Sudan. They show how Israel used sabotage, assassination, cyberwar -- and diplomacy -- to forge a new Middle East, uniting Israel...

Recent immigrants from China and desperate for work and money, ten-year-old Mia Tang's parents take a job managing a rundown motel in Southern California, even though the owner, Mr. Yao is a nasty skinflint who exploits them; while her mother (who was an engineer in China) does the cleaning, Mia works the front desk and tries to cope with demanding customers and other recent immigrants--not to mention being only one of two Chinese in her fifth grade...

When her happy middle-class life in Afghanistan is shattered by the rise of the Taliban and her husband's murder by fundamentalists, former schoolteacher Fereiba embarks on a high-risk effort to escape to England with her three children.

"[These essays] reflect a lively, unselfconscious, rigorous, erudite, and earnestly open mind that's busy refining its view of life, literature, and a great deal in between." —Los Angeles Times
Split into five sections—Reading, Being, Seeing, Feeling, and Remembering—Changing My Mind finds Zadie Smith casting an acute eye over material both personal and cultural. This engaging collection of essays, some...

"Mack McAllister has a $600 million dollar idea. His mindfulness app, TakeOff, is already the hottest thing in tech and he's about to launch a new and improved version that promises to bring investors running and may turn his brainchild into a $1 billion dollar business--in startup parlance, an elusive unicorn. Katya Pasternack is hungry for a scoop that will drive traffic. An ambitious young journalist at a gossipy tech blog, Katya knows that she...

"Tracy Flick is back and, once again, the iconic protagonist of Tom Perrotta's Election--and Reese Witherspoon's character from the classic movie adaptation--is determined to take high school politics by storm.Tracy Flick is a hardworking assistant principal at a public high school in suburban New Jersey. Still ambitious but feeling a little stuck and underappreciated in midlife, Tracy gets a jolt of good news when the longtime principal, Jack Weede,...

"Sakura Kinomoto's about to start middle school, and everything's coming up cherry blossoms. Not only has she managed to recapture the scattered Clow Cards and make them her own Sakura Cards, but her sweetheart Syaoran Li has moved from Hong Kong to Tokyo and is going to be attending her school! But her joy is interrupted by a troubling dream in which the cards turn transparent, and when Sakura awakens to discover her dream has become reality, it's...