Writer and music historian Marc Myers brings to life five decades of music in ANATOMY OF A SONG, based on the popular ongoing Wall Street Journal column, through oral histories of 45 transformative songs woven from interviews with the artists who created them. Taking readers inside the making of a hit, the book includes Led Zeppelin’s “Whole Lotta Love,” Janis Joplin’s “Mercedes Benz,” Rod Stewart’s “Maggie May” and Cyndi Lauper’s “Time After Time.” Keith Richards, Mick Jagger, Jimmy Page, Smokey Robinson, Grace Slick, Mavis Staples, Steven Tyler, the Clash, Merle Haggard, Bonnie Raitt, Debbie Harry and many other leading artists reveal the inspirations, struggles and techniques behind their influential works.

For decades, Tippi Hedren’s luminous beauty radiated from the silver screen, enchanting moviegoers and cementing her position among Hollywood’s elite. For too long Hedren’s story has been told by others through whispered gossip and tabloid headlines. Now, Hedren sets the record straight, recalling how a young and virtuous Lutheran girl from small-town Minnesota became a worldwide legend --- as one of the most famous Hitchcock girls, as an unwavering animal activist, and as the matriarch of a powerful Hollywood dynasty that includes her movie star daughter Melanie Griffith, and rising star Dakota Johnson, her granddaughter.

Shelby Richmond is an ordinary girl until one night an extraordinary tragedy changes her fate. Her best friend’s future is destroyed in an accident, while Shelby walks away with the burden of guilt. What happens when a life is turned inside out? When love is something so distant it may as well be a star in the sky? A fan of Chinese food, dogs, bookstores, and men she should stay away from, Shelby has to fight her way back to her own future. In New York City she finds a circle of lost and found souls --- including an angel who’s been watching over her ever since that fateful icy night.

It is 1994, and in the desert near Tillman, Arizona, a grand experiment involving the future of humanity is underway. As climate change threatens the earth, eight scientists dubbed the "Terranauts" have been selected to live under glass in E2, a prototype of a possible off-earth colony. Closely monitored by an all-seeing Mission Control, this New Eden is the brainchild of ecovisionary Jeremiah Reed, for whom the project is both an adventure in scientific discovery and a momentous publicity stunt. His young, strapping Terranauts must impress watchful visitors and a skeptical media curious to see if E2’s environment will somehow be compromised, forcing the Ecosphere’s seal to be broken --- and ending the mission in failure.

Jennifer Weiner is many things: a bestselling author, a Twitter phenomenon, and an “unlikely feminist enforcer” (The New Yorker). She’s also a mom, a daughter and a sister, a former rower and current clumsy yogini, a wife, a friend, and a reality-TV devotee. In her first essay collection, she takes the raw stuff of her life and spins it into a collection of tales of modern-day womanhood. Born in Louisiana, raised in Connecticut, educated at Princeton, Jennifer spent years feeling like an outsider before finding her people in newsrooms, and her voice as a novelist, activist and New York Times columnist.

Eleanor knows she's a mess. But today, she will tackle the little things. She will shower and get dressed. She will have her poetry and yoga lessons after dropping off her son, Timby. She won't swear. She will initiate sex with her husband, Joe. But before she can put her modest plan into action, life happens. Today, it turns out, is the day Timby has decided to fake sick to weasel his way into his mother's company. It's also the day Joe has chosen to tell his office, but not Eleanor, that he's on vacation. Just when it seems like things can't go more awry, an encounter with a former colleague produces a graphic memoir, the dramatic tale of which threatens to reveal a buried family secret.

Sixteen-year-old Lucy Gold is about to run away with a much older man to live off the grid in rural Pennsylvania, a rash act that will have vicious repercussions for both her and her older sister, Charlotte. As Lucy’s default parent for most of their lives, Charlotte has seen her youth marked by the burden of responsibility, but never more so than when Lucy’s dream of a rural paradise turns into a nightmare.

One Sunday morning before church, when Welles Crowther was a young boy, his father gave him a red handkerchief for his back pocket. Welles kept it with him that day, and just about every day to come. When the Twin Towers fell, Welles’ parents had no idea what happened to their son, who had taken a Wall Street job there. Eight months after the attacks, his mother read a news account from several survivors who said they and others had been led to safety by a stranger, carrying a woman on his back, down nearly 20 flights of stairs. They didn’t know his name, but despite the smoke and panic, one of them remembered a single detail clearly: the man was wearing a red bandanna.

In 1944, twin sisters Pearl and Stasha Zagorski arrive in Auschwitz and become part of the experimental population of twins known as Mengele's Zoo. That winter, at a concert orchestrated by Mengele, Pearl disappears and Stasha is left in the Zoo alone, clinging to hope that her twin remains alive. After the Red Army liberates the camp, Stasha and her companion, Feliks --- who has also lost his twin to Mengele's Zoo --- travel through a devastated Poland, undeterred by injury, starvation or the chaos around them. As the young survivors discover what has become of the world, they must try to imagine a future within it.

In 2029, the United States is engaged in a bloodless world war that will wipe out the savings of millions of American families. Overnight, on the international currency exchange, the “almighty dollar” plummets in value, to be replaced by a new global currency, the “bancor.” In retaliation, the president declares that America will default on its loans. What little remains to savers is rapidly eaten away by runaway inflation. The Mandibles have been counting on a sizable fortune filtering down when their 97-year-old patriarch dies. Once the inheritance turns to ash, each family member must contend with disappointment, but also the challenge of sheer survival.