My husband is one of those people who can sleep anywhere, anytime.

He can sleep sprawled halfway on and halfway off the sofa, in a straight-back chair, with three grands crawling all over him styling his hair, and during cross-country flights with severe turbulence.

It’s a gift. The man is so gifted he can even fall asleep while I’m ...Read more

The art of the con is just as much a part of human nature as the need for food, shelter, water and clothing. People have been attempting to get something for nothing, or get by with something, for as long as humans have been contemplating the meaning of life.

In "Anatomy Of A Con Artist," author and podcaster Johnathan Walton, himself a victim ...Read more

With the new school year underway, you’ve likely heard new names — and requests to have friends over.

For elementary schoolers, typically that means getting the other parents’ contact information and setting up a playdate. However, things change for middle school and high school students.

Making your home a place where older kids and ...Read more

Why do we root for people we’d cross the street to avoid in real life? Fiction is crowded with liars, schemers, stalkers, even killers … and somehow, they have fan clubs. Whether it’s Tom Ripley’s suave cons, Amy Dunne’s razor-sharp vengeance, or Joe Goldberg’s murderous devotion, these characters inspire not just fascination but ...Read more

We just dropped some serious money on an air purifier thinking it might help with my allergies. I have seasonal allergies. They’re bad in fall, winter, spring and summer.

I do a lot of sniffing.

Some days I sniff, hack and cough so much that if you heard it from another room, you’d think an old ranch hand is choking on chewing tobacco and...Read more

Some memoirs invite you to sit quietly and listen. "Maya Blue" does the opposite.

Brenda Coffee’s story swings the door wide open and pulls you into a life that starts like a dream and veers, chapter by chapter, into places you don’t expect to go. It reads with the tension of a thriller, yet it’s rendered with the candor and empathy of a ...Read more

History’s darkest chapters are often best understood not through dates and battles, but through the intimate stories of those who lived them.

For readers drawn to the emotional weight of World War II fiction, these six novels balance sorrow with hope. Each powerfully reminds us: though war shatters worlds, the bonds of humanity endure.

The ...Read more

Some books whisper, while others hit like lightning … then there are the rare ones that do both. Those books tend to shift something deep inside you with their quiet insistence on truth. The following 7 books are shaped by memory and sharpened by resistance. They dig deep and unearth what we’re told to keep buried. Family dynamics. Cultural ...Read more

We used to tell our kids to act their age. Now they tell us to act our age. We try, but it’s not easy when you are 20-somethings trapped inside the bodies of seasoned citizens.

The husband spent five days last fall channeling Paul Bunyan, swinging an ax at the roots on a 60-year-old maple tree that a removal service had taken down. In ...Read more

In an era defined by shifting alliances, relentless technology races and deepening mistrust in institutions, these geopolitical thrillers feel ripped from tomorrow’s headlines. When the smallest spark can ignite global war, only the few — whether from the military or any number of alphabet agencies (or a well-trained rogue operative) — ...Read more

"Anchored by Love" by Marie-Claire Moriah Wright and David Saccoh Wright is a heartwarming multigenerational family saga. The book explores the lives of Asher and Charlotte Kingsley and their children as they grow through life’s milestones.

The story begins with Asher and Charlotte’s teenage years. Asher Kingsley, a confident and ...Read more

It happens once in a while: you think of a clever twist of phrase, one that’s not only funny but insightful. Maybe you were in the shower, in the car, doing the dishes. “I should write that down,” you think. But, of course, most of us never do.

Not so with Piotr Bardzik. He’s made a point of getting it all down on paper, and you’ll be...Read more

I’m stealthy about slipping outside each morning to retrieve newspapers from the driveway. I dread someone driving by, lowering their window and yelling, “Get with the times!”

Oh, darlin’, we’re with the Times — and the Journal and the Star and the News. Two papers in print and four online.

Back when an apple was still a fruit and ...Read more

Open the first page of Ann Hardcastle Kilgore’s "The White Cheyenne" for a quick peek, and you might find yourself reading long past sundown. Kilgore — a South Texas rancher turned novelist — writes like someone who has hauled hay and watched the stars from a back‑of‑beyond pasture, then carried those sounds and silences to the page. ...Read more

As a reader of "TART," you may have come for the promise of unabashed shagging and haute cuisine, but stay for the writing, which is crisp and unapologetic, a hard dive into an excess of just about everything. “I’m a greedy person at my core,” our protagonist writes right up front. “I don’t want my job to be a means to an end; I want ...Read more

Annie Guest, a lawyer, mental health therapist and family caregiver renovated her home and recharged her life. Her debut book, "Design for Your Mind: How a Family Caregiver and Mental Health Therapist Renovated Her Home to Recharge Her Life—and Didn’t Break the Bank," is far more than a home makeover story.

An uplifting blend of memoir and ...Read more

A woman once emailed to invite me to join her book club for lunch at a country club in Malibu. She offered to reserve a parking spot for me near the front door. It was a lovely gesture, but it would have been a 2,100-mile drive.

The trip would have taken four days, maybe five. I stop a lot for Diet Cokes.

Another reader wrote expressing ...Read more

Joelle Babula’s debut novel "Infidelity Rules" is — yes! — a captivating read and a delicious, upbeat escape, but it is even more. Its engaging and iconoclastic protagonist breaks the rules with her unexpected depth of interiority that expands the sometimes-breezy genre of romance novels. Well-drawn characters, lots of humor, and insights ...Read more

Some scars don’t fade and some threats don’t disappear. They evolve, adapt and burrow into the cracks of modern life, waiting …

These thrillers don’t just tell stories, but rather dig up what we thought was buried — ideologies dressed in new skin, Cold War ghosts whispering through modern politics, conspiracies that fester until ...Read more

It’s 1944 in Nazi-occupied France, and Resistance operative Charlotte Denneau is quite literally a woman on the run. Pursued by the Gestapo through moonlit fields and sleepy villages, Charlotte carries critical secrets that could influence the impending Allied invasion. Across the English Channel, Lieutenant Philippe Gerard – a French pilot ...Read more