HOURGLASS is an inquiry into how marriage is transformed by time --- abraded, strengthened, shaped in miraculous and sometimes terrifying ways by accident and experience. With courage and relentless honesty, Dani Shapiro opens the door to her house, her marriage and her heart, and invites us to witness her own marital reckoning --- a reckoning in which she confronts both the life she dreamed of and the life she made, and struggles to reconcile the girl she was with the woman she has become.

Joan Didion has always kept notebooks --- of overheard dialogue, interviews, drafts of essays, copies of articles. SOUTH AND WEST gives us two extended excerpts from notebooks she kept in the 1970s. “Notes on the South” traces a road trip that she and her husband, John Gregory Dunne, took through Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. Her acute observations about the small towns they pass through, her interviews with local figures, and their preoccupation with race, class and heritage suggest a South largely unchanged today. “California Notes” began as an assignment from Rolling Stone on the Patty Hearst trial. Though Didion never wrote the piece, the time she spent watching the trial in San Francisco triggered thoughts about the West and her own upbringing in Sacramento.

In a little dive in a small Israeli city, Dov Greenstein, a comedian a bit past his prime, is doing a night of standup. In the audience is a district court justice, Avishai Lazar, whom Dov knew as a boy, along with a few others who remember Dov as the awkward, scrawny kid who walked on his hands to confound the neighborhood bullies. Gradually, teetering between hilarity and hysteria, Dov's patter becomes a kind of memoir, taking us back into the terrors of his childhood. Finally, recalling his week at a military camp for youth --- where Lazar witnessed what became the central event of Dov's childhood --- Dov describes the indescribable while Lazar wrestles with his own part in the comedian's story of loss and survival.

In THE WORLD TO COME, Jim Shepard traverses both borders and centuries. Seamlessly inhabiting a multitude of disparate men and women, he gives voice to visionaries, pioneers and secret misfits --- from 19th-century explorers departing on one of the Arctic’s most nightmarish expeditions to 20th-century American military wives maintaining hope at home. Shepard’s characters confront everything from the emotional pitfalls of everyday life to colossal catastrophes, battling natural forces, the hazards of new technology, and their own implacable shortcomings.

George Washington’s Farewell Address was a prophetic letter from a “parting friend” to his fellow citizens about the forces he feared could destroy our democracy: hyper-partisanship, excessive debt and foreign wars. Once celebrated as civic scripture, more widely reprinted than the Declaration of Independence, the Farewell Address is now almost forgotten. However, its message remains starkly relevant. In WASHINGTON’S FAREWELL, John Avlon offers a stunning portrait of our first president and his battle to save America from self-destruction.

In January 2014, Henning Mankell received a diagnosis of lung cancer. QUICKSAND is a response to this shattering news --- but it is not a memoir of destruction. Instead, it is a testament to a life fully lived, a tribute to the extraordinary but fleeting human journey that delivers both boundless opportunity and crucial responsibility. In a series of intimate vignettes, Mankell ranges over rich and varied reflections. Along the way, he ponders the meaning of a good life, and the critically important ways we can shape the future of humanity if we are fortunate enough to have the choice.

For Will Schwalbe, reading is a way to entertain himself but also to make sense of the world, and to find the answers to life’s questions big and small. In each chapter, he discusses a particular book and how it relates to concerns we all share. These books span centuries and genres --- from STUART LITTLE to THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN, from DAVID COPPERFIELD to WONDER, from GIOVANNI’S ROOM to REBECCA, and from 1984 to GIFTS FROM THE SEA. Throughout, Schwalbe tells stories from his life and focuses on the way certain books can help us honor those we've loved and lost, and also figure out how to live each day more fully.

Forty years ago, Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky wrote a series of breathtakingly original studies undoing our assumptions about the decision-making process. Their papers showed the ways in which the human mind erred, systematically, when forced to make judgments in uncertain situations. Their work created the field of behavioral economics, revolutionized Big Data studies, advanced evidence-based medicine, led to a new approach to government regulation, and made much of Michael Lewis’ own work possible. THE UNDOING PROJECT is about a compelling collaboration between two men who have the dimensions of great literary figures.

Jerusalem, 1959. Shmuel Ash, a biblical scholar, is adrift in his young life when he finds work as a caregiver for a brilliant but cantankerous old man named Gershom Wald. There is, however, a third, mysterious presence in his new home. Atalia Abarbanel, the daughter of a deceased Zionist leader, a beautiful woman in her 40s, entrances young Shmuel even as she keeps him at a distance. Piece by piece, the old Jerusalem stone house, haunted by tragic history and now home to the three misfits and their intricate relationship, reveals its secrets.

“Mister Monkey” --- a screwball children’s musical about a playfully larcenous pet chimpanzee --- is the kind of family favorite that survives far past its prime. Margot, who plays the chimp’s lawyer, knows the production is dreadful and bemoans the failure of her acting career. She’s settled into the drudgery of playing a humiliating part --- until the day she receives a mysterious letter from an anonymous admirer…and later, in the middle of a performance, has a shocking encounter with Adam, the 12-year-old who plays the title role.