Adult

In a world that often feels disconnected and transactional, there's nothing more radically hospitable than welcoming people into your space, your table and your life. In this accessible, inviting book on hosting and entertaining, author, CEO and internet big sister Chelsea Fagan guides readers on creating moments worth staying in for. From designing the right space, to crafting a menu that won’t keep you in the kitchen all night, to revitalizing the lost art of cultivating grown-up communities, HAVING PEOPLE OVER will make you the perfect host at every budget.

By the spring of 1954, Sid Caesar was the most influential, highly paid and enigmatic comedian in America. Every week, 20 million people tuned their TVs to "Your Show of Shows" and witnessed his virtuosity in sketches and film spoofs, pantomime and soliloquy. To Caesar’s mostly urban audience, his comedy was an era-defining leap forward from the days of vaudeville. To his rivals, Caesar was the man to beat. To his fellow American Jews, his show’s success meant something more: a post-Holocaust symbol of security and a source of great pride. But behind all that Caesar represented was the real Sid. Introverted and volatile, ill at ease in his own skin, he could terrorize his collaborators but reserved his harshest critiques for himself. In WHEN CAESAR WAS KING, veteran journalist David Margolick conjures this complex man as never before.

Growing up in Depression-era Texas, Mary Kathlyn Wagner is a dutiful daughter and diligent student with ambition aplenty and no place to use it. Married at 16, she is a grandmother at 34. When she is not cooking or taking care of the kids, she peddles cleaning products to other housewives. In 1963, she sets up her own company, selling second chance and self-invention for the price of a skin care showcase. Soon millions know her as the little lady in the big wig who gives away pink Cadillacs. From its unpromising start in a 500-square-foot Dallas storefront, Mary Kay Inc. grows into a global phenomenon. Based on 15 years of research, SELLING OPPORTUNITY gives us a page-turning rags-to-riches story set against the background of direct selling in all its overstated, over-the-top glory.

All great music is a threat. What left is there to say about The Rolling Stones? A hell of a lot, it turns out. Bob Spitz has brought his indefatigable energy and five decades of experiences in the fields and hollows of rock 'n’ roll to bear on his five-year journey to reexamine one of popular music’s greatest stories. There are myriad revisions to the conventional narrative that underscore just how in control of that narrative the band has been up to now. But, as with the Beatles and Led Zeppelin, Spitz’s greatest gift is for the big picture. He knows where the magic is, and why it is. He is as clear-eyed a connoisseur of the show business, the spectacle and the collateral damage of this whirlwind as anyone alive. But the ultimate goal is to connect with a creative force whose power shows no signs of fading, over 60 years on. 

When the American Fantasy cruise ship sets sail for a four-day themed voyage, aboard are all five members of a famous ’90s-era boy band and 3,000 screaming women who have worshipped them since childhood. Feeling slightly out of place amid this crowd is Annie --- newly divorced, turning 50 with an empty nest, and here on a lark to appease her sister. Yet when the lights come up and the idols of her youth begin to sing, something is unlocked. Between the slushy alcoholic drinks, the familiar music, and the throngs of middle-aged women acting like lovesick teenagers, Annie finally reconnects to a long-submerged part of herself. By the time she meets one of the band members --- not just a celebrity but someone in need of a friend --- she has accessed a new sense of possibility.

Grace has loved Jackson since she was 15. Spending every summer together exploring his grandfather’s chateau and the tumbling rivers of the gorgeous Ardèche region of France, they were best friends. Until he married someone else. Three years later, a newly single Jackson re-enters Grace’s life with an irresistible offer: her dream job in the very town where their story began. As memories from those idyllic summers flood back, Grace encounters another old friend, Étienne, who proposes a plan to make Jackson jealous. Their scheme begins to work just as Grace finds herself questioning if the sparks between them might not be so pretend after all. But games can be dangerous, and Étienne is harboring a secret that could shatter Grace’s heart.

A Stoic philosopher and divorcée, Adora Hazzard lives a contented life on New York City’s Upper West Side. Having discovered that the secret to happiness is to desire only what you have, she’s applied this insight to blissful effect: relishing her teenage daughter, the freedom of being solo, and her job as a moral tutor for the twin boys of an old-money family. She’s even assembled a “coven” --- like-minded women who live on the same floor in the legendary Ansonia --- and is making active efforts to grow its membership. Adora’s carefully curated life is humming along brilliantly until a chance meeting with a handsome stranger. Soon, her ordered world is upended by black-market art deals, secret rendezvous and international intrigue…and her past lands like a bomb in her present.

A former high-ranking Russian intelligence officer who defected to the U.S. after providing critical information about Russian spies in U.S. government service, Leonard Summers and his wife and son have spent the past year holed up in a CIA facility near Washington. After the CIA makes a deal with the U.S. Marshal Service’s Witness Protection Program (WPP), Leonard’s family is transported to Minneapolis. The plan is to hide them in a wooded Minneapolis suburb that resembles their former home and dacha near Moscow. The Summers are received at their destination by Lucas Davenport and fellow marshal Shelly White. Unbeknownst to them, the WPP group has been tracked by a Russian hit team. As shots are fired and enemies dodged, Lucas must move quickly to uncover where the leak is coming from before the hit team can strike again.

1968: Frances Adams is loving her new London life, and she’s stepped into a world of glamour thanks to her new friend, Vera Huntington --- a magnetic socialite as mysterious as she is provocative. Present day: When Annie Adams heads to London to visit her famous artist mother, Laura, the last thing she expects to find is a dead body. Least of all for it to be Laura’s new protégée, left in an alley with her heart surgically removed from her chest. Annie is no stranger to murder; after all, she’s solved a few already. And something about this case feels familiar. She’s read about one just like it in the journals of her late great aunt Frances, whose friend Vera was killed in the 1960s in the exact same way. As Annie investigates, threats pile up on Laura’s doorstep, and it soon becomes clear that she’s next.

Beekeeper Jake Stevenson’s fledgling honey farm has been inundated with orders. But he can’t seem to hire anyone, and there’s no way he can handle the approaching harvest all by himself, no matter how adept he’s become at maneuvering among the beehives in his wheelchair. Meanwhile, Flaco López, a young migrant from Mexico, is lost on Mount Hood when he stumbles upon Jake’s beehives in a high alpine meadow. As Flaco takes refuge on Jake’s farm, they begin to form a tentative friendship. And the two soon cross paths with Abigail Plue, a scientist who’s on Mount Hood studying a threatened native bumblebee. Then a local rabble rouser begins to rally support to build a commercial hunting camp that would destroy Mount Hood’s pristine wilderness. Jake, Abigail and Flaco must come together to protect everything they hold dear.