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"Everyone Worth Knowing" by Lauren Weisberger Length: 4 hours and 58 min. ISBN: 0-7435-4427-7 New York Times Best Seller Listen to an excerpt with:     Windows Media Player     Real Player

On paper, Bette Robinson’s life is good. At 26, she’s got a great deal on an apartment in Manhattan, and she’s on target to become an associate at the prestigious investment bank where she works with her best friend. Her 80-hour workweeks might keep her from socializing or dating outside her office walls, but she’s paying her dues on the well-trod path to wealth and happiness. So when Bette quits her job like the impulsive girl she’s never been, she not only shocks her friends and family, she has no idea what to do next.

For months, Bette gets out and about by walking her four-pound dog around her decidedly unglamorous Murray Hill neighborhood. Then she meets Kelly, head of Manhattan’s hottest PR and events planning firm, and suddenly Bette has a brand-new job where the primary requirement is to see and be seen.

The work at Kelly & Company takes Bette inside the VIP rooms of the city’s most exclusive nightclubs, to parties crowded with celebrities and socialites. Bette learns not to blink at the famous faces, the black Amex cards, the magnums of Cristal, or the ruthless paparazzi. Soon she’s dating an infamous playboy who’s great for her career but bad for her sanity, and scaring off the one decent guy she meets. Still, as her coworkers repeatedly point out, how can you complain about a job that pays you to party? Bette has to agree, until she begins appearing in a vicious new gossip column. That’s when Bette’s life on paper takes on a whole new meaning, and she learns the line between her personal and professional lives is invisible.

Tags: everyone worth knowing, lauren weisberger, arts & leisure, fiction, romance, public relations, partying, gossip, dating, men, guys, eliza dushku

• The Devil Wears Prada
• The Devil Wears Prada

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"Lunar Park" by Bret Easton Ellis Length: 11 hours and 23 min. ISBN: 0-7393-2178-1 New York Times Best Seller Listen to an excerpt with:     Windows Media Player     Real Player

Imagine becoming a best-selling novelist, and almost immediately famous and wealthy, while still in college, and before long seeing your insufferable father reduced to a bag of ashes in a safety-deposit box, while after American Psycho your celebrity drowns in a sea of vilification, booze, and drugs.

Then imagine having a second chance 10 years later, as the Bret Easton Ellis of this remarkable novel is given, with a wife, children, and suburban sobriety, only to watch this new life shatter beyond recognition in a matter of days. At a fateful Halloween party he glimpses a disturbing (fictional) character driving a car identical to his late father’s, his stepdaughter’s doll violently “malfunctions”, and their house undergoes bizarre transformations both within and without. Connecting these aberrations to graver events, a series of grotesque murders that no longer seem random and the epidemic disappearance of boys his son’s age, Ellis struggles to defend his family against this escalating menace even as his wife, their therapists, and the police insist that his apprehensions are rooted instead in substance abuse and egomania.

Lunar Park confounds one expectation after another, passing through comedy and mounting horror, both psychological and supernatural, toward an astonishing resolution, about love and loss, fathers and sons, in what is surely the most powerfully original and deeply moving novel of an extraordinary career.

Bonus Feature: Includes an interview with the author.

Tags: lunar park, bret easton ellis, arts & leisure, fiction, writer, novelist, drugs, addiction, father and son, fathers, james van der beek

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"The Universe in a Single Atom" by His Holiness the Dalai Lama Length: 6 hours ISBN: 0-7393-2265-6 New York Times Best Seller Listen to an excerpt with:     Windows Media Player     Real Player

Gallileo, Copernicus, Newton, Niels Bohr, Einstein. Their insights shook our perception of who we are and where we stand in the world and in their wake have left an uneasy co-existence: science vs. religion, faith vs. empirical enquiry. Which is the keeper of truth? Which is the true path to understanding reality?

After 40 years of study with some of the greatest scientific minds as well as a lifetime of meditative, spiritual, and philosophical study, the Dalai Lama presents a brilliant analysis of why both disciplines must be pursued in order to arrive at a complete picture of the truth. Science shows us ways of interpreting the physical world, while spirituality helps us cope with reality. But the extreme of either is impoverishing. The belief that all is reducible to matter and energy leaves out a huge range of human experience: emotions, yearnings, compassion, culture. At the same time, holding unexamined spiritual beliefs, beliefs that are contradicted by evidence, logic, and experience, can lock us into fundamentalist cages.

Through an examination of Darwinism and karma, quantum mechanics and philosophical insight into the nature of reality, neurobiology and the study of consciousness, the Dalai Lama draws significant parallels between contemplative and scientific examination of reality. “I believe that spirituality and science are complementary but different investigative approaches with the same goal of seeking the truth,” His Holiness writes. “In this, there is much each may learn from the other, and together they may contribute to expanding the horizon of human knowledge and wisdom.”

This breathtakingly personal examination is a tribute to the Dalai Lama’s teachers, both of science and spirituality. The legacy of this book is a vision of the world in which our different approaches to understanding ourselves, our universe, and one another can be brought together in the service of humanity.

This audio includes an interview with Richard Gere.

Tags: the universe in a single atom, his holiness the dalai lama, arts & leisure, nonfiction, science, spirituality, science, religion, evolution, creationism, intelligent design, evolution, darwinism

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"John" by Cynthia Lennon Length: 10 hours and 51 min. ISBN: 141-592-587-9 New York Times Best Seller Listen to an excerpt with:     Windows Media Player     Real Player

When she was 18-years-old, a girl named Cynthia Powell met a boy named John Lennon, and they fell in love. Their 10-year relationship coincided with the start of the Beatles phenomenon, from Liverpool’s dockside clubs to the dizzying world-wide fame that followed. And Cynthia Lennon, John’s first wife, was an integral part of the swirl of events that are now an indelible part of the history of rock and roll.

In John, Cynthia recalls those times with the loving honesty of an insider, offering new and fascinating insights into the life of John Lennon and the early days of the Beatles. And with the perspective only years can provide, she also tells the compelling story of her marriage to a man who was to become a music legend, a cultural hero, and a defining figure of the twentieth century.

Cynthia has seldom talked in any detail about her marriage and the painful events that followed John’s tragic assassination in 1980. Now she candidly reveals the good and the bad, the loving and the cruel sides of John. She tells of the breakdown of their marriage and the beginning of his relationship with Yoko Ono in more detail than has ever been disclosed before and documents the difficulties estrangement from John, and his subsequent death, brought for herself and their son, Julian.

In John, Cynthia Lennon has created a vivid portrait of the 1960s, the Beatles, and the man she never stopped loving.

Tags: john, cynthia lennon, arts & leisure, biographies and memoirs, beatles, ringo starr, paul mccartney, john lennon, george harrison

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"Wild Ducks Flying Backward: The Short Writings of Tom Robbins" by Tom Robbins Length: 7 hours and 39 min. ISBN: 0-7393-2175-7 New York Times Best Seller Listen to an excerpt with:     Windows Media Player     Real Player

Known for his meaty seriocomic novels, expansive works that are simultaneously lowbrow and highbrow, Tom Robbins has also published over the years a number of short pieces, predominantly nonfiction. His travel articles, essays, and tributes to actors, musicians, sex kittens, and thinkers have appeared in publications ranging from Esquire to Harper’s, from Playboy to The New York Times, High Times, and Life. A generous sampling, collected here for the first time and including works as diverse as scholarly art criticism and some decidedly untypical country music lyrics, Wild Ducks Flying Backward offers a rare sweeping overview of the eclectic sensibility of an American original.

Whether he is rocking with the Doors, depoliticizing Picasso’s Guernica, lamenting the angst-ridden state of contemporary literature, or drooling over tomato sandwiches and a species of womanhood he calls “the genius waitress,” Robbins’s briefer writings often exhibit the same five traits that perhaps best characterize his novels: an imaginative wit, a cheerfully brash disregard for convention, a sweetly nasty eroticism, amystical but keenly observant eye, and an irrepressible love of language.

Embedded in this primarily journalistic compilation are a couple of short stories, a sheaf of largely unpublished poems, and an off-beat assessment of our divided nation. And wherever we open Wild Ducks Flying Backward, we’re apt to encounter examples of the intently serious playfulness that percolates from the mind of a self-described “romantic Zen hedonist” and “stray dog in the banquet halls of culture.”

Tags: wild ducks flying backward: the short writings of tom robbins, tom robbins, arts & leisure, biographies and memoirs, fiction, nonfiction, travel and adventure, fiction, nonfiction, poetry, new york times, high times, life, harper’s, esquire, playboy