Brief Encounters expands the vibrant field of shorts-as these sharply focused pieces have come to be known-with nearly eighty new selections: representing an impressive range of voices, perspectives, sensibilities and forms. From the rant to the rave, the meditation to the polemic, the confession to the valediction, this collection will enlarge your world.

Do you know a teen that's been bitten by the acting bug? Here's just the book they need! "Acting for Young Actors", aimed at teens and tweens, lets kids hone their skills and develop their craft. It begins with the five W's: Who am I? What do I want? Why do I want it? Where am I? When does this event take place? Sounds basic - but many young child actors are told simply to "get up there and act." This book explores each of these questions, using helpful exercises to allow young actors to work through problems of character identity and motivation. With comprehensive chapters on auditioning, rehearsal, and improvisation, plus a primer on how young actors can break into film, theatre, and television, "Acting for Young Actors" is every kid's ticket to the big time. It is aimed at teens age 12-18, and is written in a full accessible style.

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. Coffee--it's the thing that gets us through, and over, and around. The thing--the beverage, the break, the ritual--we choose to slow ourselves down or speed ourselves up. The excuse to pause; the reason to meet; the charge we who drink it allow ourselves in lieu of something stronger or scarier. Coffee goes to lifestyle, and character, and sensibility: where do we buy it, how do we brew it, how strong can we take it, how often, how hot, how cold? How does coffee remind us, stir us, comfort us? But Coffee is about more than coffee: it's a personal history and a promise to self; in her confrontation with the hours (with time--big picture, little picture), Dinah Lenney faces head-on the challenges of growing older and carrying on. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

This new collection of interconnected essays marches to a provocative premise: what if one way to understand your life was to examine the objects within it? Which objects would you choose? What memories do they hold? And, lined up in a row, what stories do they have to tell?In recalling her experience, Dinah's essays each begin with one thing  real or imaginary, lost or found, rare or ordinary, animal, vegetable, mineral, edible. Each object comes with a memory or a story, and so sparks an opportunity for rue or reflection or confession or revelation, having to do with her coming of age as a daughter, mother, actor, and writer: the piano that holds secrets to family history and inheritance; the gifted watches that tell so much more than time; the little black dress that carries all of youth's love and longing; the purple scarf that stands in for her journey from New York to Los Angeles, across stage and screen, to pursue her acting dream.Read together or apart, the essays project the bountiful mosaic of life and love, of moving to Los Angeles and raising a family; or coming to terms with place, relationship, failures, and success; of dealing with up-ended notions about home and family and career and aging, too. Taken together, they add up to a pastiche of an artful and quirky life, lovingly remembered, compellingly told, wrapped up in the ties that bind the passage of time.

Nelson Gross led an outsized life-one in which he played many roles: father, brother, husband, politician, entrepreneur. When he was killed by a couple of teenagers in a botched abduction and robbery, the murder shook his family in predictable and terrible ways. For his daughter, Dinah Lenney, parent of her own young children, the loss sparked a self-reckoning that led to this book, which is both a meditation on grief and a coming-of-age story. By turns funny and sad, frustrating and fulfilling, her candid memoir conducts readers through marriage and divorce, blended and broken families-and, finally, the kinds of conflict that infect the best of us under even the best of circumstances. In the end, Lenney leaves us with the sense that in spite of extraordinary events-as with most families-it is mutual forgiveness and love that lead us to empathy, acceptance, and the will to carry on.