New & Noteworthy

Nothing undermines people's health and happiness more than shame, but we don't understand how shame really works nor how powerfully it affects us. Beyond the difficult, distressing emotion we hide or try to defeat, shame is also a universal, continuous, neurologically-based communications system designed to protect your well-being, guide you to success, warn you of harm, secure your community, and potentially save your life.

In How Shame Runs the World, Dr. Judith Pilla upends our traditional view with groundbreaking understanding that finally gets it right about shame. Her practical, clinically-proven, jargon-free steps will teach you to decode all of shame's messages--the hurtful, damaging ones you'll finally be able to eliminate permanently as well as vital ones that better your life every day. Her steps will guide professionals, too, improving outcomes in psychotherapy, addiction treatment, medical care, and even in social policy.

Through plentiful historical, cultural, and clinical examples, you will learn to:

A New Yorker Best Book of 2025

An irreverent new take on the Renaissance, which reveals it as anything but Europe's golden age.

From the darkness of a plagued and war-torn Middle Ages, the Renaissance (we're told) heralds the dawning of a new world--a halcyon age of art, prosperity, and rebirth. Hogwash! or so says award-winning novelist and historian Ada Palmer. In Inventing the Renaissance, Palmer turns her witty and irreverent eye on the fantasies we've told ourselves about Europe's not-so-golden age, myths she sets right with sharp clarity.

Palmer's Renaissance is altogether desperate. Troubled by centuries of conflict, she argues, Europe looked to a long-lost Roman Empire (even its education practices) to save it from unending war. Later historians met their own political challenges with a similarly nostalgic vision, only now they looked to the Renaissance and told a partial story. To right this wrong, Palmer offers fifteen provocative portraits of Renaissance men and women (some famous, some obscure) whose lives reveal a far more diverse, fragile, and wild Renaissance than its glowing reputation suggests.

A culinary and philosophical memoir about the secret menus in every aspect of immigrant life, and what it really means to be "Chinese."

Shiamin Kwa uses food, history, poetry, art, and the story of her coming of age to explore the deepest and most evocative aspects of what it means to belong to and succeed in a new home, and what it even means to be "Chinese." From her childhood in Malaysia to her family's immigration to the United States and her years in China, Kwa paints a wide-ranging portrait of the centuries of movements between countries and continents that have shaped Chinese culture and food as they adapted to each new place.

Kwa's descriptions of food are lush and vivid, plumbing the historical, personal, and philosophical depths of dishes and bringing in the difficult histories around Chinese immigration to America in complex and illuminating ways. In delicious prose that reads with the swiftness of a novel and the depth of a philosophical treatise, The Secret Menu shows us how the thinking and cooking lives are connected, and how the hunt for harmony, success, and a sense of belonging have helped generations of immigrants find their own menus for a delicious life filled with delights, against the odds.