When Alex Cooper was 15 years old, life was pretty ordinary in her sleepy suburban town and nice Mormon family. But something was gnawing at her that made her feel different. These feelings exploded when she met Yvette, a girl who made her feel alive in a new way, and with whom she would quickly fall in love. She was driven from her home in Southern California to Utah, where, against her will, her parents handed her over to fellow Mormons who promised to save Alex from her homosexuality in an unlicensed “residential treatment program." SAVING ALEX is a courageous memoir that tells Alex’s story in the hopes that it will bring awareness and justice to this important issue.

In 2007, John Elder Robison wrote the international bestseller LOOK ME IN THE EYE, a memoir about growing up with Asperger’s syndrome. Amid the blaze of publicity that followed, he received a unique invitation: Would John like to take part in a study led by one of the world’s foremost neuroscientists, who would use an experimental new brain therapy known as TMS, or transcranial magnetic stimulation, in an effort to understand and then address the issues at the heart of autism? SWITCHED ON is the extraordinary story of what happened next.

Before downtown Manhattan was scrubbed clean, gentrified, and overrun with designer boutiques and trendy eateries and bars, it was the center of a burgeoning art scene. Running from the shipwreck of her glamorous and unstable childhood with a volatile mother, Wendy Lawless landed in the center of it all. She navigated this demi-monde of jaded punk rockers, desperate actors, pulsing parties and unexpected run-ins with her own past as she made every mistake of youth, looked for love in all the wrong places, and eventually learned how to grow up on her own.

Adam Cohen tells the story of one of the darkest moments in the American legal tradition: the Supreme Court’s decision to champion eugenic sterilization for the greater good of the country. In 1927, when the nation was caught up in eugenic fervor, the justices allowed Virginia to sterilize Carrie Buck, a perfectly normal young woman, for being an “imbecile.” Exposing this tremendous injustice --- which led to the sterilization of 70,000 Americans --- IMBECILES overturns cherished myths and reappraises heroic figures in its relentless pursuit of the truth.

On April 20, 1999, Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold walked into Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado. Over the course of minutes, they would kill 12 students and a teacher and wound 24 others before taking their own lives. For the last 16 years, Sue Klebold, Dylan’s mother, has lived with the indescribable grief and shame of that day. In A MOTHER’S RECKONING, she chronicles with unflinching honesty her journey as a mother trying to come to terms with the incomprehensible.

When Andrew Offutt died, his son, Chris, inherited a desk, a rifle and 1,800 pounds of porn. Andrew had been considered the “king of 20th century smut,” a career that began as a strategy to pay for his son’s orthodontic needs and soon took on a life of its own, peaking during the ’70s when the commercial popularity of the erotic novel was at its height. Over one long summer in his hometown, helping his mother move out of the house, Chris began to examine his deceased father’s possessions and realized he finally had an opportunity to come to grips with the mercurial man he always feared but never understood.

No writer has succeeded in capturing the medical and human drama of illness as honestly and as eloquently as Oliver Sacks. During the last few months of his life, he wrote a set of essays in which he movingly explored his feelings about completing a life and coming to terms with his own death. “It is the fate of every human being,” Sacks writes, “to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.” Together, these four essays form an ode to the uniqueness of each human being and to gratitude for the gift of life.

The author of five previous volumes of selected writings, including the international bestseller ARGUABLY, Christopher Hitchens left at his death nearly 250,000 words of essays not yet published in book form. AND YET… assembles a selection that ranges from the literary to the political and is, by turns, a banquet of entertaining and instructive delights, including essays on Orwell, Lermontov, Chesterton, Fleming, Naipaul, Rushdie, Pamuk and Dickens, among others, as well as his laugh-out-loud self-mocking “makeover.”

It began in 1692 when a minister's daughter began to scream and convulse. It ended less than a year later, but not before 19 men and women had been hanged and an elderly man crushed to death. The panic spread quickly, involving the most educated men and prominent politicians in the colony. Neighbors accused neighbors, parents and children each other. Aside from suffrage, the Salem Witch Trials represent the only moment when women played the central role in American history. In curious ways, the trials would shape the future republic.

1944 witnessed a series of titanic events: FDR at the pinnacle of his wartime leadership as well as his reelection, the planning of Operation Overlord with Churchill and Stalin, the unprecedented D-Day invasion, the liberation of Paris and the horrific Battle of the Bulge, and the tumultuous conferences that finally shaped the coming peace. But on the way, millions of more lives were still at stake as President Roosevelt was exposed to mounting evidence of the most grotesque crime in history: the Final Solution.