A collection of stories, thoughts, ideas, lists and haikus from the mind of one of our most beloved entertainers, YES PLEASE offers Amy Poehler's thoughts on everything from her "too safe" childhood outside of Boston to her early days in New York City, her ideas about Hollywood and "the biz," the demon that looks back at all of us in the mirror, and her joy at being told she has a "face for wigs."

Rea Carlisle has inherited a house from an uncle she never knew. It doesn’t take her long to clear out the remaining possessions, but to her horror she discovers a leather-bound book, its pages filled with locks of hair and fingernails: a catalog of victims. Rea turns to the only person she can think of: an old boyfriend, police inspector Jack Lennon. He has more than enough problems already, but a gruesome murder brings the dead man’s terrifying journal to the top of the Belfast police’s priority list.

In I STAND CORRECTED, Eden Collinsworth tells the entertaining and insightful story of the year she spent living among the Chinese while writing a book featuring advice on such topics as the non-negotiable issue of personal hygiene, the rules of the handshake, and making sense of foreigners. Scrutinizing the kind of etiquette that has guided her own business career, Collinsworth creates a counterpart that explains Chinese practices and reveals much about our own Western culture.

In THE HUMAN AGE, Diane Ackerman confronts the unprecedented reality that one prodigiously intelligent and meddlesome creature, Homo sapiens, is now the dominant force shaping the future of planet Earth. She takes us on an exhilarating journey through our new reality, introducing us to many of the people and ideas now creating --- perhaps saving --- our future and that of our fellow creatures.

Following a terrible fight with her mother over her boyfriend, 15-year-old Holly Sykes slams the door on her family and her old life. Now, as she wanders deeper into the English countryside, visions and coincidences reorder her reality until they assume the aura of a nightmare brought to life. For Holly has caught the attention of a cabal of dangerous mystics --- and their enemies. But her lost weekend is merely the prelude to a shocking disappearance that leaves her family irrevocably scarred.

A call about a possible break-in at the local cemetery seems like a false alarm until it's discovered that a mausoleum's stunning Tiffany panels have been replaced by forgeries. Soon the case escalates into murder. Detective Lieutenant Peter Decker and his partner, Tyler McAdams, are drawn deep into a web of nasty secrets, cold-case crimes, international intrigue, and ruthless people who kill for sport.

One winter morning, a group of workers discover the headless, flayed body of a horse, hanging suspended from the edge of a frozen cliff. There’s something disturbing about this crime that Commandant Martin Servaz can’t ignore. Then DNA from one of the most notorious inmates of an asylum, a highly intelligent former prosecutor accused of killing and raping several women, is found on the horse carcass. And a few days later, the first human murder takes place. A dark story of madness and revenge seems to be unfolding.

In Mary Gordon’s novellas of relationships at home and abroad, both historical and contemporary, we meet the ferocious Simone Weil during her final days as a transplant to New York City; a vulnerable American grad student who escapes to Italy after her first, compromising love affair; the charming Irish liar of the title story, who gets more out of life than most of us; and Thomas Mann, opening the heart of a high school kid in the Midwest.

At a time when Google Maps Street View can take you on a virtual tour of Yosemite’s remotest trails and cell phones double as navigational systems, it’s hard to imagine there’s any uncharted ground left on the planet. In UNRULY PLACES, Alastair Bonnett goes to some of the most unexpected, offbeat places in the world to reinspire our geographical imagination.

Meet Imelda and Augustine, or --- as our young narrator calls his unusual parents --- Em and the Big Hoom. Most of the time, Em smokes endless beedis and sings her way through life. She is the sun around which everyone else orbits. But as enchanting and high-spirited as she can be, when Em’s bipolar disorder seizes her, she becomes monstrous, sometimes with calamitous consequences for herself and others.