The stories in Dawn Raffel's astonishing Further Adventures in the Restless Universe as as sharp and bright as stars.

By investing others with the power to dictate who you are, you rob yourself of an opportunity to truly grow. You shortchange yourself by devaluing the experiences and knowledge you've banked, all those things that have been making you, you.

In Quiet Dell, Phillips mesmerizingly spins together fact and fiction, vividly imagining the circumstances leading to their deaths, and sets a young female reporter on the case to solve it.

Dave Eggers is a prince among men when it comes to writing deeply felt, socially conscious books that meld reportage with fiction. While A Hologram for the King is fiction...it's a strike against the current state of global economic injustice.

While Max appears to greatly admire Wallace as a writer and feel compassion for him as a man, he is never starry-eyed, or pulls his punches. Every Love Story is a Ghost Story is as illuminating, multifaceted, and serious an estimation of David Foster Wallace's life and work as we can hope to find.

Anthony Doerr again takes language beyond mortal limits.

You know what they say - sleep is the mother's drug of choice, but like heroin, only the very rich and the very poor can afford it.

By investing others with the power to dictate who you are, you rob yourself of an opportunity to truly grow.