Personal Essay

For most of his life, Josh Wilker has been on the sidelines. Spending his days in a cubicle in the far reaches of Chicago, and his nights in front of Red Sox games, he has been content to let others take center stage. From childhood onward, he sought comfort from anxiety and depression in the archival pages of sports almanacs and stat sheets: a place where forgotten players lingered and time seemed to stop - a welcome relief from worldly problems.

Sometime, somewhere, the conspiracy of silence around Child Sexual Abuse (CSA) in Indian homes had to be shattered. This path-breaking audiobook attempts to give that sexually abused child a powerful voice. In Bitter Chocolate, journalist and best-selling author Pinki Virani travels across the country to record the testimonies of the police, doctors, child psychologists, mental health professionals, social workers, lawyers, and the traumatized victims themselves. The audiobook opens with an account of the author's own experience.

This collection of contemplative essays unveils layers of awareness in the design of self-identity. Julie Hightman explores how the context and foundation of behaviors, thoughts, and emotions affect the life we create and the perceptions of life experiences. The many paths of life unveil opportunities for alchemical healing and re-alignment to the soul’s initiative for harmony and fulfillment.

Acclaimed historian Stephen Ambrose begins his examination with a glance inward - he starts this book with his brothers, his first and forever friends, and the shared experiences that join them for a lifetime, overcoming distance and misunderstandings.

He next tells of Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had a golden gift for friendship and who shared a perfect trust with his younger brother, Milton, in spite of their apparently unequal stations....

For the September 2016 issue of GQ, Michael Chabon wrote a piece about accompanying his son Abraham Chabon, then 13, to Paris Men's Fashion Week. Possessed with a precocious sense of style, Abe was in his element chatting with designers he idolized and turning a critical eye to the freshest runway looks of the season; Chabon Sr., whose interest in clothing stops at "thrift-shopping for vintage western shirts or Hermès neckties," sat idly by, staving off yawns and fighting the impulse that the whole thing was a massive waste of time.

Curated by journalist and author Angelica Malin, Unattached explores the nuances of being single today through the voices of 30 women, with personal essays from a multitude of game-changing voices, reflecting both the unique challenges of being single (hello, going to a wedding alone) and the glorious benefits of singlehood in a light-hearted way (goodbye, joint bank account). The single positivity movement is here, and this audiobook will turbo-charge the revolution.

Epic is a collection of 101 short stories, essays, and insights to improve your communication skills. What is the engine of communication? Creativity. The creative person sees the bigger picture and uses that vision to create tools, insights, and processes that will benefit others.

The Comeback Kid is a collection of 101 short stories, essays, and insights to build your emotional resilience. We are not defined by our losses, we are defined by how we rise back up despite our losses. Each time we bounce back, each time we become tougher to kill. Turn your setbacks into legendary comebacks.

By 1617, Donne had done it all. After being an MP, lawyer, womaniser, soldier, diplomat, father to twelve children by a secret wife, and the greatest poet of his age, he settled into the priesthood. Shortly thereafter, his wife died, prompting him to write a defence of suicide in God's eyes. She was soon followed by his 18 year old daughter died. Then Donne fell gravely ill. Physicians were called, but none could agree on what to do. It seemed certain that he would die.

In 2014, Lacy Johnson was giving a reading from The Other Side, her “instant classic” (Kirkus Reviews) memoir of kidnapping and rape, when a woman asked her what she would like to happen to her rapist. This collection, a meditative extension of that answer, draws from philosophy, art, literature, mythology, anthropology, film, and other fields, as well as Johnson’s personal experience, to consider how our ideas about justice might be expanded beyond vengeance and retribution to include acts of compassion, patience, mercy, and grace.

Life is never peaceful in Chris Erskine's house, what with the four kids, 300-pound beagle, chronically leaky roof, and long-suffering wife, Posh. And that's exactly the way he likes it, except when he doesn't. Every week in the Los Angeles Times and Chicago Tribune (and now and then in many other papers), Erskine distills, mocks, and makes us laugh at the absurdities of suburban fatherhood. And now, he's gathered the very best of these witty and wise essays - and invited his kids (and maybe even Posh) to annotate them with updated commentary.

Augusta National is golf’s Holy Grail. Navigating the azaleas to play the exclusive course that hosts The Masters is a pipe dream for every golfer. Imagine being afforded the opportunity not only to play the course, but to be able to bring your father along for the ride. To complete the priceless fantasy, Jack Nicklaus - “The Golden Bear” - hosts the round. Through fate, coincidence and good fortune, Joe Wessel managed to find a way to make that happen. In White Fang and The Golden Bear, Wessel recounts that special round, how it came about, and what happened....

We are not defined by our losses, we are defined by how we rose back up despite our losses. Each time we bounce back, each time we become tougher to kill. Turn your setbacks into legendary comebacks. In Comeback Kid, you will learn the differences between short term thinking versus long term thinking, the main trait all creative people have in common, dangers of glorifying someone, unlocking inspiration at will, and much more.

Street Smarts is a collection of 101 short stories, essays, and insights to improve soft skills. The world is constantly changing, and the ability to adapt is more important than ever. It is time to ditch old modes of thinking for new mental models that allow us to thrive in a complex world. In Street Smarts, you will learn public speaking strategies to dominate the stage, content creation frameworks to build a powerful brand, methods on how to deal with loneliness and feel whole, how to unleash an attractive personality and form long-lasting connections, and more.

When our lives are imbalanced at any level of our self, i.e. physically, emotionally, mentally, spiritually, or relationally, we can experience stress, discomfort, unhappiness, and illness. In his audiobook Healing and Dealing: Essays on Becoming Wholed, Peter Cloud Panjoyah offers a road map toward an elusive balance point, outlining possibilities for healing inwardly and outwardly. This audiobook lays out the nuts and bolts of how to heal the emotional denial that has plagued humanity, impacted our health, and created dangerous dramas on the world stage.

In this anthology of creative nonfiction, 28 writers set out to discover what they know, and don't know, about the person they call Mother. Celebrated writers Samia Serageldin and Lee Smith have curated a diverse and insightful collection that challenges stereotypes about mothers and expands our notions of motherhood in the South. The mothers in these essays were shaped, for good and bad, by the economic and political crosswinds of their time.

Built for More is a collection of short stories, essays, and insights to help you improve your soft skills. Learn to think clear and speak even clearer. Each entry is meant to fuel your logic and imagination so you are better equipped to deal with people.

Limit Breaker and Tough Love are collections of stories designed to help you improve your communication skills.

Sound interesting? The author thinks so too! Listen to Concepts and learn about the definition of woke.

Both men and women enjoy thrillers, mystery, and crime. Yet it may still feel not quite respectable, somehow a guilty (sorry!) pleasure. Do these novels so often categorized as genre offer something the literary novel does not? The market is enormous, perhaps the largest in publishing. It is a cliché which may be true that only the Bible – say - outsells Agatha Christie. And then there are films and television, either original or adapted from novels.