"With her mega-bestseller Quiet, Susan Cain urged our society to cultivate space for the undervalued, indispensable introverts among us, thereby revealing an untapped power hidden in plain sight. Now, she employs the same mix of research, storytelling, and memoir to explore why we experience sorrow and longing, and the surprising lessons these states of mind teach us about creativity, compassion, leadership, spirituality, mortality and love. Bittersweetness...

"Ace" delves into the lives of those who identify using the little-known sexual orientation of asexuality and shows what all of us can learn-about desire, identity, culture, and relationships-when we use an asexual lens to see the world"--

"Beautifully spare and deeply strange, Dandelions--exploring love and madness--is Kawabata's final novel, left incomplete when he committed suicide in April, 1972. The book concerns Ineko's mother and Kuno, the young man who loves Ineko and wants to marry her. The two have left Ineko at the Ikuta Mental Hospital, which she has entered for treatment of a condition that might be called "seizures of body blindness." Although her vision as a whole is...

Wanting is a groundbreaking exploration of why we want what we want, and a toolkit for freeing ourselves from chasing unfulfilling desires. As an undergraduate studying philosophy at Stanford, Peter Thiel met French polymath René Girard and was introduced to his theory of "mimetic desire"-the idea that most human wanting comes from imitating what other people desire, rather than from an innate sense of need. Inducted into the Académie Française...

"This inspiring and moving exploration of the twelve fundamental psychological needs we all share goes behind the closed doors of therapy to guide us in navigating our deepest longings"--

Eleven-year-old Iraqi, Mooz, yearns to taste the bananas that have been made unavailable by warfare.

In the wake of a drama teacher's decision to direct "Lysistrata" for the high school play, the women in the town begin to sexually reject their husbands and boyfriends in ways that force both men and women to reevaluate their views on relationships and sexuality.

"Women are in a bind. In the name of consent and empowerment, they must proclaim their desires clearly and confidently. Yet sex researchers suggest that women's desire is often slow to emerge. And men are keen to insist that they know what women--and their bodies--want. Meanwhile, sexual violence abounds. How can women, in this environment, possibly know what they want? And why do we expect them to? Katherine Angel challenges our assumptions about...