She worked hand-in-hand with a founder who was a lightning rod for controversy—OK, for stepping in it. She grew a chaotic company (Vanity Fair called it a “pirate ship”) housed over a dentist’s office outside of Boston that published giveaway papers into a juggernaut with more than 5 billion monthly video views and 225 million followers valued at 550 million dollars. Erika Ayers Badan calls herself a “token CEO”, the rare female employee in the highest rank of a bro-roar sports and new media culture.

She’s also a massive student of work: how to do it, how to be effective at it, how to get noticed, how to crush it, how to figure out what you love and do it as a job. She’s figured it out, after big marketing jobs in large traditional corporations like Microsoft and AOL, for herself; she’s figured it out for friends; she figured it out for the thousands of people who listened to her Barstool podcast, “Token CEO” every week. And in this book, she’s figuring it out for everybody else.

With the verve and motivation of books like YOU ARE A BADASS and the smart, specific ideas of titles like ATOMIC HABITS, NOBODY CARES ABOUT YOUR CAREER is a real playbook. It’s about how work really works and how you can get work to work for you. It’s about thank you notes and thankless tasks, the energy in meetings and energy vampires, how to pick a boss and how to get a boss to pick you. It’s about being all in (but not bringing your whole self to work—some of you is better left at home) and becoming valuable to your workplace. It’s about participating—with your brain, your skills, your experience, and your willingness to pitch in and offer yourself up for something you may not even know how to do yet. It’s about making your own luck at work.

NOBODY CARES ABOUT YOUR CAREER is for first-time job seekers who think no company will ever want them, people stuck in second or third jobs who don’t know how to move on to the next thing, people who have the job they thought was their brass ring but who discovered it’s not all that.

Details

• Author: Erika Ayers Badan
• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
• Print Type: Paperback
• Page Count: 336
• ISBN-13: 9781250320605

Make Believe is bestselling children's author Mac Barnett's rallying cry for art and imagination, and a celebration of the power of storytelling in all our lives. It's an incisive, intimate, and timely invitation to approach children's literature not only as an art form worthy of deep study and criticism, but as a portal into the lives of the children. And at a time when we are faced with a national literacy crisis, he champions the profound joys of literature and the importance of reading for pleasure.

What if children are a great audience for art? What if they are in fact better equipped to engage deeply with stories than adults? What if humans' ability to appreciate art is, if not innate, awakened early in childhood? Well, then we'd better do our best to make some good kids' books. Written with humor and academic rigor, Make Believe reads like a letter from your smartest and funniest friend.

Details

• Author: Mac Barnett
• Publisher: Little Brown and Company
• Print Type: Hardcover
• Page Count: 112
• ISBN-13: 9780316601122

Bring some literary love to your crafting corner with this amazing assortment of book-themed projects! For readers of every genre, these wonderfully simple projects provide endless opportunities to create one-of-a-kind crafts that you’ll love for a lifetime. With 40 tutorials to choose from and easy-to-follow instructions, these creations are designed to make your beloved book collection even better.

Make the Majestic Dragon Wings bookmark to save the page in your new fantasy novel. Give your favorite book’s cover a gorgeous new look with a Field of Wildflowers or the Abstract Sunset. Arrange a Book Bouquet for a fellow bookworm in your life. Organize your stacks of books in a cool new way with the Vinyl Record Bookends.

Whether you are looking for thoughtful gift ideas or a fun new way to craft, these unique projects truly have something for everyone.

Details

• Author: Kanlin Butler
• Publisher: Page Street Publishing
• Print Type: Paperback
• Page Count: 192
• ISBN-13: 9798890034083

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A sharp, funny grammar guide they’ll actually want to read, from Random House’s longtime copy chief and one of Twitter’s leading language gurus

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY O: The Oprah Magazine • Paste • Shelf Awareness

“Essential (and delightful!)”—People

We all write, all the time: books, blogs, emails. Lots and lots of emails. And we all want to write better. Benjamin Dreyer is here to help.

As Random House’s copy chief, Dreyer has upheld the standards of the legendary publisher for more than two decades. He is beloved by authors and editors alike—not to mention his followers on social media—for deconstructing the English language with playful erudition. Now he distills everything he has learned from the myriad books he has copyedited and overseen into a useful guide not just for writers but for everyone who wants to put their best prose foot forward.

As authoritative as it is amusing, Dreyer’s English offers lessons on punctuation, from the underloved semicolon to the enigmatic en dash; the rules and nonrules of grammar, including why it’s OK to begin a sentence with “And” or “But” and to confidently split an infinitive; and why it’s best to avoid the doldrums of the Wan Intensifiers and Throat Clearers, including “very,” “rather,” “of course,” and the dreaded “actually.” Dreyer will let you know whether “alright” is all right (sometimes) and even help you brush up on your spelling—though, as he notes, “The problem with mnemonic devices is that I can never remember them.”

And yes: “Only godless savages eschew the series comma.”

Chockful of advice, insider wisdom, and fun facts, this book will prove to be invaluable to everyone who wants to shore up their writing skills, mandatory for people who spend their time editing and shaping other people’s prose, and—perhaps best of all—an utter treat for anyone who simply revels in language.

Details:

• Author: Benjamin Dreyer
• Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks; Reprint
• Page Count: 320 pages
• Print type: Paperback
• ISBN: 978-0812985719

Sentence diagramming might sound like something from a fussy grammar assignment, but you'll find no red pens here. Instead, this book is a visual celebration of the relationships between words. This witty collection features dozens of unforgettable one-liners, from blockbuster films and famous speeches to Shakespearean zingers, classic novels, and philosophical musings.

Each diagram turns a familiar sentence into a little work of visual art by mapping out the nouns, verbs, and clauses to reveal unexpected symmetry and glorious grammatical chaos. Some quotes, like Melville's "Call me Ishmael," land like a javelin. Others spiral upward like a tower of tinker toys held together with linguistic duct tape. If you love the inner workings of language, you'll find joy (and a few laughs) in seeing well-known lines stripped down and displayed across the page in all their syntactic glory.

Details

• Author: Man Martin
• Publisher: Running Press Adult
• Print Type: Hardcover
• Page Count: 160
• ISBN-13: 9798894142081

Improve your artistic fitness—no sweating required! Join Hannah M. Pickerill for a watercolor crash course to bolster your skills and build a diverse portfolio. By completing one comprehensive lesson a day, you’ll radically improve your watercolor skills in one month while painting over 30 landscapes, animal portraits, single-subject studies and abstract Zentangles® alike.

Divided in two parts, this guide first makes painting essentials fun, with interactive lessons and exercises on every- thing from color theory and composition to mark-making and glazing. Once you’ve warmed up, Hannah takes your work to the next level in Part 2, with chapters on applied techniques, advanced subjects and experimental applications, like using watercolor graphite pencils or painting with your palette knife.

Whether you’re looking for improvement in a flash or are more focused on the journey, these lessons are written to help you succeed and surpass your watercolor goals. Perfect for beginners looking to learn the basics or intermediate watercolorists looking to refine their techniques and banish artist’s block, Hannah’s accessible art boot camp is a fun way to invigorate your painting practice.

Details

• Author: Hannah M. Pickerill
• Publisher: Page Street Publishing
• Print Type: Paperback
• Page Count: 240
• ISBN-13: 9798890034212

Jo Walton and Ada Palmer are two of the most innovative and insightful writers to emerge in the SF and fantasy genres in this century. As writers of fiction they’ve each won multiple awards. As commenters on SF and fantasy in print and in visual media, they’ve both sparked new conversations that expanded our imaginations and understanding of how SF and fantasy work, and what more it could be doing.

Now, in Trace Elements, Walton and Palmer have come together to write a book-length and supremely entertaining look at modern science fiction and fantasy, at how our genre is written and how it is read, that will join nonfiction works like Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Language of the Night, Samuel R. Delany’s The Jewel-Hinged Jaw, and Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud on the short shelf of titles essential to all readers of our genre.

Subjects covered include the nature of genre itself, the history of SF publishing, the implicit contract between author and reader, the ways SF and fantasy disguise themselves as one another, what SF&F can learn from outside influences ranging from Shakespeare to Diderot to anime, the role of complicity in reading, the need to expand our “sphere of empathy”, and finally the need for optimism, the importance of rejecting “purity” culture, and the fact that the human story for centuries to come will be composed of hard work.

Details

• Author: Jo Walton and Ada Palmer
• Publisher: Tor Books
• Print Type: Hardcover
• Page Count: 368
• ISBN-13: 9781250372604