Learn how to create mobile and full-stack web applications in JavaScript by getting a deeper insight into Meteor About This Book This step-by-step tutorial will show you how to build fast, complex web applications Over 65 hands-on recipes help you build and deploy elegant web applications Optimize your web application for production use Who This Book Is For If you are a web developer who is familiar with Meteor and has basic knowledge of web development, and you now want to explore new paradigms of single-page, real-time applications, this course is perfectly suited for you. What You Will Learn Secure your site with Meteor best practices Create reactive templates that update themselves when data changes Add routing to a single-page application and make it appear like a real website Make your own Meteor packages and see how to make them public Rapidly build robust, responsive user interfaces Publish your own reusable custom packages Optimize your site for load speed with advanced publishers and subscribers Master the intricacies of front-end development using Jeet, Bootstrap, CSS animations, and more Leverage the aggregation framework to produce results with big data Optimize your site for search engine visibility In Detail Meteor is best JavaScript development platform and is packed with collections of libraries and packages bound together in a tidy way to take care of everything from development to production, making your web development easier. This course follows a learning path divided into three modules. Each module is a mini course in its own right, taking your knowledge to a new level as you progress. The first module takes you from the installation of Meteor to building a fully working web blog (including back end) to create and edit posts. Your path will begin with the basic concepts and folder structure of a Meteor project, learning how Meteor templates work to test packages, and seeing the application itself. The second module is a cookbook that starts with simple recipes designed for quick reference, and culminating advanced recipes that walk you through building and deploying a complete application. The cookbook covers all the major areas of Meteor development, including lesser-known and undocumented features too. With all the important concepts covered in the previous modules, the third module will get you equipped with simple solutions to boost your development skills. You’ll learn about mapping of real-world data and optimizing it, how to optimize and secure web applications and how to deploy and maintain it without breaking its features. Throughout the module, you will put your skills into practice and build an online shop from scratch. This Learning Path combines some of the best that Packt has to offer in one complete, curated package. It includes content from the following Packt products: Building Single-page Web Apps with Meteor, Fabian Vogelsteller Meteor Cookbook, Isaac Strack Meteor Design Patterns, Marcelo Reyna Style and approach This practical handbook has a step-by-step approach to help you improve your developer skills and efficiently built web applications using Meteor.

Start pulling the strings of your IT infrastructure effectively with Puppet – learn how to configure, customize and manage your systems more intelligently in an enterprise deployment. About This Book ? Step-by-step instructions to jump start your Puppet deployment and automate your IT configurations ? Design, implement, and deploy Puppet in your infrastructure and tackle everyday IT infrastructure challenges ? Gain expert understanding of Puppet's latest and most advanced features Who This Book Is For If you're an experienced IT professional and a new Puppet user, this course will provide you with all you need to know to go from installation to advanced automation. What You Will Learn ? Write and employ individual Puppet manifests ? Understand how Puppet implements system abstraction ? Use Puppet to manage network, cloud, and virtualization devices ? Manage and test the Puppet code workflow ? Tweak, hack, and adapt the Puppet extension points ? Use exported resources to orchestrate change between machines ? Debug a puppetserver using Java techniques In Detail Puppet is a configuration management tool that allows you to automate all your IT configurations, giving you control. It was written for and by system administrators to manage large numbers of systems efficiently and prevent configuration drifts. Puppet gives you control of what you do to each node, when you do it, and how you do it.This Learning Path will take you from the basics of Puppet to extending it and then mastering it. We will start off with a primer on Puppet, its installation and get a sneak peek under its hood. We will then move on to designing and deploying your Puppet architecture, learning best practices for writing reusable and maintainable code, and executing, testing, and deploying Puppet across your systems. Finally, we will deal with problems of scale and exceptions in your code, automate workflows, and support multiple developers working simultaneously.This course is based on the following books: 1. Puppet 4 Essentials - Second Edition 2. Extending Puppet - Second Edition 3. Mastering Puppet - Second Edition Style and approach This learning path follows a practical approach, starting from the basic commands to advanced aspects. Through a series of examples you will learn the most important skills essential to manage your IT infrastructure effectively.

Learn to use some of the most exciting and powerful tools to deliver world-class quality software with continuous delivery and DevOps About This Book Get to know the background of DevOps so you understand the collaboration between different aspects of an IT organization and a software developer Deploy top-quality software and ensure software maintenance and release management with this practical guide This course covers some of the most exciting technology available to DevOps engineers, and demonstrates multiple techniques for using them Real-world and realistic examples are provided to help you as you go about the implementation and adoption of continuous delivery and DevOps Who This Book Is For This course is for developers who want to understand how the infrastructure that builds today's enterprises works, and how to painlessly and regularly ship quality software. What You Will Learn Set up and familiarize yourself with all the tools you need to be efficient with DevOps Design an application that is suitable for continuous deployment systems with DevOps in mind Test the code using automated regression testing with Jenkins Selenium Managing the lifecycle of hosts, from creation to ongoing management using Puppet Razor Find out how to manage, use, and work with Code in the Git version management system See what traps, pitfalls, and hurdles to look out for as you implement continuous delivery and DevOps In Detail Harness the power of DevOps to boost your skill set and make your IT organization perform better. If you’re keen to employ DevOps techniques to better your software development, this course contains all you need to overcome the day-to-day complications of managing complex infrastructures the DevOps way. Start with your first module – Practical DevOps - that encompasses the entire flow from code from testing to production. Get a solid ground-level knowledge of how to monitor code for any anomalies, perform code testing, and make sure the code is running smoothly through a series of real-world exercise, and develop practical skills by creating a sample enterprise Java application. In the second module, run through a series of tailored mini-tutorials designed to give you a complete understanding of every DevOps automation technique. Create real change in the way you deliver your projects by utilizing some of the most commendable software available today. Go from your first steps of managing code in Git to configuration management in Puppet, monitoring using Sensu, and more. In the final module, get to grips with the continuous delivery techniques that will help you reduce the time and effort that goes into the delivery and support of software. This Learning Path combines some of the best that Packt has to offer in one complete, curated package. It includes content from the following Packt products: Practical DevOps by Joakim Verona DevOps Automation Cookbook by Michael Duffy Continuous Delivery and DevOps : A Quickstart Guide - Second Edition by Paul Swartout Style and approach This course is an easy to follow project based guide for all those with a keen interest in deploying world-class software using some of the most effective and remarkable technologies available.

Build real-world, production-ready solutions by harnessing the powerful features of Go About This Book An easy-to-follow guide that provides everything a developer needs to know to build end-to-end web applications in Go Write interesting and clever, but simple code, and learn skills and techniques that are directly transferable to your own projects A practical approach to utilize application scaffolding to design highly scalable programs that are deeply rooted in go routines and channels Who This Book Is For This book is intended for developers who are new to Go, but have previous experience of building web applications and APIs. What You Will Learn Build a fully featured REST API to enable client-side single page apps Utilize TLS to build reliable and secure sites Learn to apply the nuances of the Go language to implement a wide range of start-up quality projects Create websites and data services capable of massive scale using Go's net/http package, exploring RESTful patterns as well as low-latency WebSocket APIs Interact with a variety of remote web services to consume capabilities ranging from authentication and authorization to a fully functioning thesaurus Explore the core syntaxes and language features that enable concurrency in Go Understand when and where to use concurrency to keep data consistent and applications non-blocking, responsive, and reliable Utilize advanced concurrency patterns and best practices to stay low-level without compromising the simplicity of Go itself In Detail Go is an open source programming language that makes it easy to build simple, reliable, and efficient software. It is a statically typed language with syntax loosely derived from that of C, adding garbage collection, type safety, some dynamic-typing capabilities, additional built-in types such as variable-length arrays and key-value maps, and a large standard library. This course starts with a walkthrough of the topics most critical to anyone building a new web application. Whether it’s keeping your application secure, connecting to your database, enabling token-based authentication, or utilizing logic-less templates, this course has you covered. Scale, performance, and high availability lie at the heart of the projects, and the lessons learned throughout this course will arm you with everything you need to build world-class solutions. It will also take you through the history of concurrency, how Go utilizes it, how Go differs from other languages, and the features and structures of Go's concurrency core. It will make you feel comfortable designing a safe, data-consistent, and high-performance concurrent application in Go. This course is an invaluable resource to help you understand Go's powerful features to build simple, reliable, secure, and efficient web applications. Style and approach This course is a step-by-step guide, which starts off with the basics of go programming to build web applications and will gradually move on to cover intermediate and advanced topics. You will be going through this smooth transition by building interesting projects along with the authors, discussing significant options, and decisions at each stage, while keeping the programs lean, uncluttered, and as simple as possible.

Build and run intelligent applications by leveraging key Java machine learning libraries About This Book ? Develop a sound strategy to solve predictive modelling problems using the most popular machine learning Java libraries. ? Explore a broad variety of data processing, machine learning, and natural language processing through diagrams, source code, and real-world applications ? This step-by-step guide will help you solve real-world problems and links neural network theory to their application Who This Book Is For This course is intended for data scientists and Java developers who want to dive into the exciting world of deep learning. It will get you up and running quickly and provide you with the skills you need to successfully create, customize, and deploy machine learning applications in real life. What You Will Learn ? Get a practical deep dive into machine learning and deep learning algorithms ? Explore neural networks using some of the most popular Deep Learning frameworks ? Dive into Deep Belief Nets and Stacked Denoising Autoencoders algorithms ? Apply machine learning to fraud, anomaly, and outlier detection ? Experiment with deep learning concepts, algorithms, and the toolbox for deep learning ? Select and split data sets into training, test, and validation, and explore validation strategies ? Apply the code generated in practical examples, including weather forecasting and pattern recognition In Detail Machine learning applications are everywhere, from self-driving cars, spam detection, document search, and trading strategies, to speech recognitionStarting with an introduction to basic machine learning algorithms, this course takes you further into this vital world of stunning predictive insights and remarkable machine intelligence. This course helps you solve challenging problems in image processing, speech recognition, language modeling. You will discover how to detect anomalies and fraud, and ways to perform activity recognition, image recognition, and text. You will also work with examples such as weather forecasting, disease diagnosis, customer profiling, generalization, extreme machine learning and more. By the end of this course, you will have all the knowledge you need to perform deep learning on your system with varying complexity levels, to apply them to your daily work. The course provides you with highly practical content explaining deep learning with Java, from the following Packt books: 1. Java Deep Learning Essentials 2. Machine Learning in Java 3. Neural Network Programming with Java, Second Edition Style and approach This course aims to create a smooth learning path that will teach you how to effectively use deep learning with Java with other de facto components to get the most out of it. Through this comprehensive course, you’ll learn the basics of predictive modelling and progress to solve real-world problems and links neural network theory to their application

My name is Ree. Some folks know me as The Pioneer Woman. After years of living in Los Angeles, I made a pit stop in my hometown in Oklahoma on the way to a new, exciting life in Chicago. It was during my stay at home that I met Marlboro Man, a mysterious cowboy with steely blue eyes and a muscular, work-honed body. A strict vegetarian, I fell hard and fast, and before I knew it we were married and living on his ranch in the middle of nowhere, taking care of animals, and managing a brood of four young children. I had no idea how I'd wound up there, but I knew it was exactly where I belonged.The Pioneer Woman Cooks is a homespun collection of photography, rural stories, and scrumptious recipes that have defined my experience in the country. I share many of the delicious cowboy-tested recipes I've learned to make during my years as an accidental ranch wife—including Rib-Eye Steak with Whiskey Cream Sauce, Lasagna, Fried Chicken, Patsy's Blackberry Cobbler, and Cinnamon Rolls—not to mention several "cowgirl-friendly" dishes, such as Sherried Tomato Soup, Olive Cheese Bread, and Crème Br?lée. I show my recipes in full color, step-by-step detail, so it's as easy as pie to follow along.You'll also find colorful images of rural life: cows, horses, country kids, and plenty of chaps-wearing cowboys.I hope you get a kick out of this book of mine. I hope it makes you smile. I hope the recipes bring you recognition, accolades, and marriage proposals. And I hope it encourages even the most harried urban cook to slow down, relish the joys of family, nature, and great food, and enjoy life.

An inviting, down-to-earth, full-color baking book filled with 130 recipes for irresistible must-bake favorites, from cakes to cookies to brownies to muffins to breads, from the New York Times bestselling star of Food Network’s hit series Ace of Cakes and owner of Charm City Cakes and Duff’s Cake Mix.Duff Goldman may dazzle fans with his breathtaking cake decorating, but behind the rigged-up gravity-defying cakes and fancy fondant is a true pastry chef who understands the fundamentals of making incredibly delicious baked goods at home.In Duff Bakes, he truly gives home bakers the down-to-earth essentials they need for creating mouthwatering favorites. Inside you’ll find the perfect muffin recipe to eat straight while waiting for your morning bus, an easy pizza dough recipe for a quick weeknight dinner, and cookie recipes for every occasion. Filled with Duff’s engaging earthiness and hilarious personality, Duff Bakes includes chapters on different types of pastry dough, a variety of cookies, brownies, muffins, bread, biscuits, pies, cakes and cake decorating, gluten-free and vegan desserts, and much more.Duff provides 130 recipes for a diverse range of goodies, including nutter butter cookies, white chocolate blondies, apple streusel muffins, cereal bars, bacon jalapeno biscuits, banana bourbon cream pie, zucchini lemon cake, and savory bread pudding. Here are a few classics as well, like a re-make of the childhood favorite, Twinkies. Duff Bakes will help both novices and seasoned bakers master the best, most delicious home baked goods, build on their baking successes, hone their skills, and understand the science behind the fundamentals of baking.

Fall in love with the magic of natural sugars!From honey and pure maple syrup to smoky muscovado, exotic coconut sugar, and more, there's a world of white-sugar alternatives just waiting to add mind-blowing flavor to your home baking. Real Sweet is the first naturally sweet baking book that's more "hip" than "hippie"—chockablock with eighty-plus recipes ranging from family-friendly favorites to dinner-party showstoppers. This irresistible collection includes Breakfast Cookies; Dark, Fudgy Muscovado Brownies; Raw Sugar and Mascarpone Caramels; and Maple Cream, Chocolate, and Walnut Tart—all without a speck of refined white sugar!Cookbook author and blogger Shauna Sever brings her fresh, modern, and charmingly funny style to this natural-sugars primer, along with tricks for converting your favorite white-sugar recipes, making Real Sweet the go-to inspiration source for the exciting range of natural and unrefined sugars and sweeteners on the market today.

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AN NPR BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR “Mr. Wright’s imagined history of the rise and fall of the sugary drink empire is so robust and recognizable that you might feel nostalgic for the taste of a soda you’ve never had.” – Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal NAMED A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK BY Parade • Cosmopolitan • Town & Country • AARP •  InStyle • Garden & Gun • Vol. 1 BrooklynThe story of a family.The story of an empire. The story of a nation.Moving from Mississippi to Paris to New York and back again, a saga of family, ambition, passion, and tragedy that brings to life one unforgettable Southern dynasty—the Forsters, founders of the world’s first major soft-drink company—against the backdrop of more than a century of American cultural history. The child of immigrants, Houghton Forster has always wanted more—from his time as a young boy in Mississippi, working twelve-hour days at his father’s drugstore; to the moment he first laid eyes on his future wife, Annabelle Teague, a true Southern belle of aristocratic lineage; to his invention of the delicious fizzy drink that would transform him from tiller boy into the founder of an empire, the Panola Cola Company, and entice a youthful, enterprising nation entering a hopeful new age.Now the heads of a preeminent American family spoken about in the same breath as the Hearsts and the Rockefellers, Houghton and Annabelle raise their four children with the expectation they’ll one day become world leaders. The burden of greatness falls early on eldest son Montgomery, a handsome and successful politician who has never recovered from the horrors and heartbreak of the Great War. His younger siblings Ramsey and Lance, known as the “infernal twins,” are rivals not only in wit and beauty, but in their utter carelessness with the lives and hearts of others. Their brother Harold, as gentle and caring as the twins can be cruel, is slowed by a mental disability—and later generations seem equally plagued by misfortune, forcing Houghton to seriously consider who should control the company after he’s gone.An irresistible tour de force of original storytelling, American Pop blends fact and fiction, the mundane and the mythical, and utilizes techniques of historical reportage to capture how, in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s words, “families are always rising and falling in America,” and to explore the many ways in which nostalgia can manipulate cultural memory—and the stories we choose to tell about ourselves.

Major Sharpe finds himself a fugitive, hunted by enemy and ally alike. Major Richard Sharpe awaits the opening shots of the army’s campaign with grim expectancy. For victory depends on the increasingly fragile alliance between Britain and Spain – an alliance that must be maintained at any cost. Pierre Ducos, the wily French intelligence officer, sees a chance both to destroy the alliance and to achieve a personal revenge on Richard Sharpe. And when the lovely spy, La Marquesa, takes a hand in the game, Sharpe finds himself enmeshed in a web of political intrigue for which his military expertise has left him fatally unprepared. Soldier, hero, rogue – Sharpe is the man you always want on your side. Born in poverty, he joined the army to escape jail and climbed the ranks by sheer brutal courage. He knows no other family than the regiment of the 95th Rifles whose green jacket he proudly wears.

Eat as much as you want, whenever you want. Welcome to the end of dieting.We're fatter, sicker, and hungrier than ever, and the billion-dollar diet industry—with its trendy weight-loss protocols and eat-this-notthat ratios of fat, carbs, and protein—offers only temporary short-term solutions at the expense of our permanent long-term health. As a result, we're trapped in a cycle of food addiction, toxic hunger, and overeating.In The End of Dieting, Joel Fuhrman, M.D., a board-certified doctor and the New York Times bestselling author of Eat to Live and The End of Diabetes, shows us how to break free from this vicious cycle once and for all. Dr. Fuhrman lays out in full all the dietary and nutritional advice necessary to eat our way to a healthier and happier life. At the center of his revolutionary plan is his trademark health formula: Health = Nutrients/Calories. Foods high in nutrient density, according to Dr. Fuhrman, are more satisfying than foods high in calories. They eliminate our cravings for fat, sweets, and carbs. The more nutrient-dense food we consume, the more our bodies can function as the self-healing machines they're designed to be. Weight drops, diseases reverse course and disappear, and our lives become longer and healthier.The End of Dieting is the book we have been waiting for—a proven, effective, and sustainable approach to eating that lets us prevent and reverse disease, lose weight, and reclaim our right to excellent health.

Is Your Diet Making You Fat?From her Health and Eating Laboratory at the University of Minnesota, Professor Traci Mann researches self-control and dieting. And what she has discovered is groundbreaking: not only do diets not work, they often result in weight gain. We are losing the battle of the bulge because our bodies and brains are not hardwired to resist food—in fact, the very idea of it works against our biological imperative to survive.In Secrets from the Eating Lab, Mann challenges assumptions—including those that make up the foundation of the weight loss industry—about how diets work and why they fail. As Mann explains, most weight loss plans are reliant on the notion of willpower—and willpower is an illusion. Moreover, even when we are able to successfully lose weight, our bodies fight our efforts, seeking to regain the weight we've worked so hard to lose. In the end, we become chronic "yo-yo" dieters, destined to lose and regain the same pounds time and again. The diet industry is well aware of these facts and has tellingly built their business model on the concept of the "repeat customer"; they know we'll be back.The result of more than two decades of research, Secrets from the Eating Lab presents cutting-edge science and offers exciting new insights into the American obesity epidemic and our relationship with food. From redefining "comfort food" to reconsidering healthy food labeling that, ironically, makes us less inclined to make healthy choices, Mann presents an arsenal of simple, common-sense strategies that take advantage of human nature instead of fighting it—helping you to achieve a healthy and sustainable weight.

PBS host, weight-loss expert, and renowned authority on longevity, Dr. John Tickell shares the secret to a long life: moderation. Moderation in everything except love, laughter, and fish (and a few vegetables!).Based on common sense, sound science, and good food, Love, Laugh, and Eat is an easy-to-follow guide that will help put the bounce back in your step and add years to your life. With his characteristic wit and medical expertise, Dr. Tickell lays out his proven Activity, Coping, and Eating (ACE) program, which simultaneously works out your body, your brain, and your mouth—the three keys to a healthy life—through physical activity and stress-management techniques and his revolutionary Four Simple Rules of Nutrition. He also serves up a seven-day detoxification plan and a series of delicious, manageable, and satisfying meal plans that actually work, as well as his eight Fall-Safe Snacks to keep you energized morning, noon, and night.Through Dr. Tickell's Love, Laugh, and Eat program you will:Look better Sleep better Feel better Love betterInspiring and engaging, Love, Laugh, and Eat is the approach to healthy living and longevity you've been waiting for. Healthy living has never been so easy—or so much fun.

“With each new book by Tessa Hadley, I grow more convinced that she’s one of the greatest stylists alive.”—Ron Charles, Washington PostNew York Times Book Review Editors' Choice |A Parnassus First Editions Club Pick | Powell’s Indispensable Book Club Pick | A Washington Post Notable Book | A Slate Best Book of the Year | A Boston Globe Best Book of the Year | A Bookpage Best Book of the YearThe lives of two close-knit couples are irrevocably changed by an untimely death in the latest from Tessa Hadley, the acclaimed novelist and short story master who “recruits admirers with each book” (Hilary Mantel).Alexandr and Christine and Zachary and Lydia have been friends since they first met in their twenties. Thirty years later, Alex and Christine are spending a leisurely summer’s evening at home when they receive a call from a distraught Lydia: she is at the hospital. Zach is dead.In the wake of this profound loss, the three friends find themselves unmoored; all agree that Zach, with his generous, grounded spirit, was the irreplaceable one they couldn’t afford to lose. Inconsolable, Lydia moves in with Alex and Christine. But instead of loss bringing them closer, the three of them find over the following months that it warps their relationships, as old entanglements and grievances rise from the past, and love and sorrow give way to anger and bitterness.Late in the Day explores the complex webs at the center of our most intimate relationships, to expose how, beneath the seemingly dependable arrangements we make for our lives, lie infinite alternate configurations. Ingeniously moving between past and present and through the intricacies of her characters’ thoughts and interactions, Tessa Hadley once again “crystallizes the atmosphere of ordinary life in prose somehow miraculous and natural” (Washington Post).

“As intellectually playful as the best of Thomas Pynchon and as sardonically warm as the best of Kurt Vonnegut, The Heap is both a hilarious send-up of life under late capitalism and a moving exploration of the peculiar loneliness of the early 21st century. A masterful and humane gem of a novel.” —Shaun Hamill, author of A Cosmology of MonstersBlending the piercing humor of Alexandra Kleeman and the jagged satire of Black Mirror, an audacious, eerily prescient debut novel that chronicles the rise and fall of a massive high-rise housing complex, and the lives it affected before - and after - its demise.Standing nearly five hundred stories tall, Los Verticalés once bustled with life and excitement. Now this marvel of modern architecture and nontraditional urban planning has collapsed into a pile of rubble known as the Heap. In exchange for digging gear, a rehabilitated bicycle, and a small living stipend, a vast community of Dig Hands removes debris, trash, and bodies from the building’s mountainous remains, which Orville Anders burrows into the bowels of the Heap to find his brother Bernard, the beloved radio DJ of Los Verticalés, who is alive and miraculously broadcasting somewhere under the massive rubble. For months, Orville has lived in a sea of campers that surrounds the Heap, working tirelessly to free Bernard—the only known survivor of the imploded city—whom he speaks to every evening, calling into his radio show.The brothers’ conversations are a ratings bonanza, and the station’s parent company, Sundial Media, wants to boost its profits by having Orville slyly drop brand names into his nightly talks with Bernard. When Orville refuses, his access to Bernard is suddenly cut off, but strangely, he continues to hear his own voice over the airwaves, casually shilling products as “he” converses with Bernard.What follows is an imaginative and darkly hilarious story of conspiracy, revenge, and the strange life and death of Los Verticalés that both captures the wonderful weirdness of community and the bonds that tie us together.

一本幽默诙谐的现代社会寓言小说集，记录了普通人平凡却又跌宕起伏的生活。 From the?author of the “sophisticated and erudite”?Peculiar Ground?(Boston Globe),?comes a collection of classic, witty fables, elegantly updated for our modern times.It's in the nature of myth to be infinitely adaptable.Each of these startlingly original stories is set in modern Britain. Their characters include a people-trafficking gang-master and a prostitute, a migrant worker and a cocksure estate agent, an elderly musician doubly befuddled by dementia and the death of his wife, a pest-controller suspected of paedophilia and a librarian so well-behaved that her parents wonder anxiously whether she’ll ever find love.They’re ordinary people, preoccupied, as we all are now, by the deficiencies of the health service, by criminal gangs and homelessness, by the pitfalls of dating in the age of #metoo. All of their stories, though, are inspired by ones drawn from Graeco-Roman myth, from the Bible or from folk-lore.The ancients invented myths to express what they didn’t understand. These witty fables, elegantly written and full of sharp-eyed observation of modern life, are also visionary explorations of potent mysteries and strange passions, charged with the hallucinatory beauty and horror of their originals.

“Reading Scratched gave me the feeling of standing very close to a blazing fire. It is that brilliant, that intense, and one of the finest explorations I know of what it means to be a woman and an artist.”—Sigrid Nunez, author of The Friend and Winner of the National Book Award for FictionIn a bold and brilliant memoir that reinvents the form, the acclaimed author of the novel Museum Pieces and the collection Mendocino Fire explores the ferocious desire for perfection which has shaped her writing life as well as her rich, dramatic, and constantly surprising personal life.Scratched is an intimate account of the uses a child, and the adult she becomes, will find for perfectionism and the role it will play in every part of her life. Elizabeth Tallent’s story begins in a hospital in mid-1950s suburban Washington, D.C., when her mother refuses to hold her newborn daughter, shocking behavior that baffles the nurses. Imagining her own mother’s perfectionist ideal at this critical moment, Elizabeth moves back and forth in time, juxtaposing moments in the past with the present in this innovative and spellbinding narrative.Elizabeth traces her journey from her early years in which she perceived herself as “the child whose flaws let disaster into an otherwise perfect family,” to her adulthood, when perfectionism came to affect everything. In the decade between 27 and 37, she publishes five literary books with Knopf and her short stories appear in The New Yorker. But this extraordinary start to her career is followed by twenty-two years of silence. She wrote, or rather published, nothing at all. Why? Scratched is the remarkable response to that question.Elizabeth’s early publications secure her a coveted teaching job at Stanford University. As she toggles between Palo Alto and the Mendocino coast where she lives, raises her son Gabriel, and pursues an important psychoanalysis, Elizabeth grapples with the perfectionism that has always been home to her. Eventually, she finds love and acceptance in the most unlikely place, and finally accepts an “as is” relationship with herself and others. Her final triumph is the writing of this memoir, filled with wit, humor, and heart, and unlike any other you will read. Scratched is a brave book that repeatedly searches for the emotional truth beneath the conventional surface of existence.

Never before has the so-called mainstream media shown such naked political bias as in the 2012 presidential election. In 2012 Barack Obama was narrowly reelected, with naked support from a liberal media desperate to hide his failures, trumpet his accomplishments, and discredit his GOP rivals. Bachmann, Perry, Cain, Gingrich, Santorum: one by one the media took them apart using hidden-camera exposés, innuendo from anonymous accusers, repetition of harmful sound bites, and irrelevant—even untrue—storytelling. As soon as Mitt Romney emerged as the Republican Party's nominee, the liberal media went to work in earnest. They repeated Obama's campaign caricatures that Romney terrified his family dog, enjoyed firing people, and was nothing more than a willing tool of wealthy radical-right extremists. The Washington Post published a 5,400-word "exposé" on the allegation that in 1965 he may have pinned down a boy and cut his hair. Those same Post readers were then treated to 5,500 words on Barack Obama's lifelong love of basketball. Unquestionably, 2012 was the year when the liberal news media did all in their power to steal the presidential election—and they arguably succeeded. Media Research Center Founder and President Brent Bozell and MRC Director of Media Analysis Tim Graham provide the dramatic and conclusive evidence to prove this point—and show conservatives how to put an end to the leftist media agenda threatening democracy itself.

The Ultimate Guide to Mastering Your Mental StrengthEveryone knows that regular exercise and weight training lead to physical strength. But how do we strengthen ourselves mentally for the truly tough timesAnd what should we do when we face these challengesOr as psychotherapist Amy Morin asks, what should we avoid when we encounter adversityThrough her years counseling others and her own experiences navigating personal loss, Morin realized it is often the habits we cannot break that are holding us back from true success and happiness. Indulging in self-pity, agonizing over things beyond our control, obsessing over past events, resenting the achievements of others, or expecting immediate positive results holds us back. This list of things mentally strong people don't do resonated so much with readers that when it was picked up by Forbes.com it received ten million views.Now, for the first time, Morin expands upon the thirteen things from her viral post and shares her tried-and-true practices for increasing mental strength. Morin writes with searing honesty, incorporating anecdotes from her work as a college psychology instructor and psychotherapist as well as personal stories about how she bolstered her own mental strength when tragedy threatened to consume her.Increasing your mental strength can change your entire attitude. It takes practice and hard work, but with Morin's specific tips, exercises, and troubleshooting advice, it is possible to not only fortify your mental muscle but also drastically improve the quality of your life.

Time is not money.Time is more important than money. Today's customers are overwhelmed, overworked, and overstressed, and it seems that everyone from CEOs to soccer moms is short on time and inundated with information. As a result, despite the availability of 24/7 commerce and countless ways of engaging people in our multiscreen (mobile, TV, and PC) economy, companies find it more difficult than ever to claim even a fraction of the 1,440 minutes in their customers' precious 24 hours. In The 24-Hour Customer, Adrian C. Ott, CEO of a successful Silicon Valley consultancy, argues that companies need to strategically harness the ebbs and flows of customer time and attention in order to win in today's competitive landscape. She explores the economics of time and attention, including why customers will devote hours addicted to social networks, yet will say "I have no time!" to other offerings. Based on extensive research and real-world results with market-leading companies, this book provides tools, such as Time-Value Tradeoffs and Time-ographics, that pinpoint opportunities to increase revenue and gain market traction. Filled with fascinating case studies from companies like Johnson Johnson, Amazon, and iPhone app start-ups, The 24-Hour Customer offers fresh ideas for capitalizing on the elements of time, attention, and value to innovate never-before-considered products, services, and programs for today's ber-connected, multitasking customer. Readers will discover how: Zipcar utilized time-slicing to redefine automobile ownership and grew by 70 percent, while the auto industry struggled in 2009; Netflix, Hulu, and others time-shifted to movies on-demand, ultimately restructuring the entertainment industry; P&G leveraged inattention by enabling habit-formation for some of its most successful brands. This book shares the latest strategic weapons for achieving market leadership and will change the way executives think about their businesses and their customers.