In THE BOOK OF LOVE, Roger Rosenblatt explores love in all its moods and variations --- romantic love, courtship, battle, mystery, marriage, heartbreak, fury, confusion, melancholy, delirium, ecstasy; love of family, of friends; love of home, of country, of work, of writing, of solitude, of art; love of nature; love of life itself. Rosenblatt is on a quest to illuminate this elusive and essential emotion, to define this thing called love.

Drawing upon a mountain of original research --- interviews with family and friends, court transcripts, unpublished journals and screenplay drafts --- Scott Saul traces Richard Pryor’s rough journey to the heights of fame: from his heartbreaking childhood, his trials in the Army and his apprentice days in Greenwich Village, to his soul-searching interlude in Berkeley and his ascent in the “New Hollywood” of the 1970s.

No sportscaster has covered more major sporting events than Al Michaels. He is the only play-by-play commentator to have covered all four major sports championships: the Super Bowl, World Series, NBA Finals and the Stanley Cup Final. He has also witnessed firsthand some of the most memorable events in modern sports, and in this highly personal and revealing account, brings them vividly to life.

The modern history of the NFL can’t be told without Bill Parcells as a central character. During his decades-long tenure in the NFL, he coached some of the game’s greatest players, turned failing franchises into contenders, and mentored a new generation of its brightest coaches all on the way to his enshrinement in the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 2013. Now, with remarkable candor, Coach Parcells opens up about his life and extraordinary career.

We in America have certain ideas of what it means to be poor. Linda Tirado takes all of these preconceived notions and smashes them to bits, articulating not only what it is to be working poor in America, but what poverty is truly like --- on all levels. She discusses how she went from lower-middle class, to sometimes middle class, to poor and everything in between, and in doing so reveals why “poor people don’t always behave the way middle-class America thinks they should.”

In this piercing collection of short fiction, Justin Taylor captures the lives of men and women unmoored from their pasts and uncertain of their futures. A man writes his girlfriend a Dear John letter, gets in his car and just drives. A widowed insomniac is roused from malaise when an alligator appears in her backyard. A group of college friends try to stay close after graduation, but are drawn away from --- and back toward --- each other by the choices they make.

Amid the tremors of political revolution, Jung Yoon, a highly literate, twenty-something woman, recounts her tragic personal history. When Yoon receives a distressing phone call from her ex-boyfriend after eight years of separation, memories of a tumultuous youth begin to resurface. She revisits the death of her beloved mother, the strong bond with her now-dying former college professor, the excitement of her first love, and the friendships forged out of a shared sense of isolation and grief.

Rita Zoey Chin survives her harrowing childhood to become a prize-winning writer and the wife of a promising surgeon. But when she is suddenly besieged by terrifying panic attacks, her past trauma threatens her hard-won happiness. Within weeks, she is incapacitated with fear --- literally afraid of her own shadow. Realizing that she is facing a life of psychological imprisonment, Rita undertakes a journey to find help through a variety of treatments.

When most people think of Michael Jordan, they think of the beautiful shots, his body totally in sync with the ball, hitting nothing but net. But for all his greatness, there's also a dark side to Jordan: a ruthless competitor, a gambler. Drawing on personal relationships with Jordan's coaches; countless interviews with friends, teammates, family members, and Jordan himself; and a career in the trenches covering Jordan in college and the pros, Roland Lazenby provides the first truly definitive study of Jordan.