Breaking Murphy's Law: How Optimists Get What They Want from Life - and Pessimists Can Too

Pollyannas take heart, pessimists take note: Recent studies on achievement and well-being show that optimistic behavior contributes to better physical health, greater resilience in the face of life’s twists and turns, and more satisfying relationships. As psychologists Suzanne Segerstrom reveals, optimists lay groundwork for the success they envision. While the rest of us worry whether our goals are attainable, those who practice optimism try to achieve theirs. Breaking Murphy’s Law shows you simple ways to develop the skills that natural-born optimists use to get what they want from life.

The Business of Science Fiction: Two Insiders Discuss Writing and Publishing Zoom See larger image (with zoom) Share your own customer images Publi

Two prolific and award-winning science fiction writers, Mike Resnick and Barry N. Malzberg, have been publishing a "Dialogue" in every issue of the SFWA Bulletin, official publication of the Science Fiction Writers of America, for more than a decade. These collected columns explore every aspect of the literary genre, from writing to marketing to publishing, combining wit and insight with decades of experience in 25 topics.

The Castle of Dreams

This novel by ground-breaking sleep researcher Jouvet (The Paradox of Sleep) is written as a series of discovered journal entries and letters by fictional 18th-century French scientist Hugues la Scève: wealthy, intensely curious and obsessed with tinkering. Painstakingly documenting seven years of his own dreams and applying novel methods of classification and analysis, la Scève attempts to pioneer the science of dreaming. He follows this work by collecting empirical evidence to support his theories, spending years observing sleeping rabbits, toads, Siamese twins and postcoital couples.

Searching for Cioran

Ilinca Zarifopol-Johnston's critical biography of the Romanian-born French philosopher E. M. Cioran focuses on his crucial formative years as a mystical revolutionary attracted to right-wing nationalist politics in interwar Romania, his writings of this period, and his self-imposed exile to France in 1937. This move led to his transformation into one of the most famous French moralists of the 20th century. As an enthusiast of the anti-rationalist philosophies widely popular in Europe during the first decades of the 20th century, Cioran became an advocate of the fascistic Iron Guard.

Zora Neale Hurston and a History of Southern Life (Critical Perspectives on the Past)

A historian hoping to reconstruct the social world of all-black towns or the segregated black sections of other towns in the South finds only scant traces of their existence. In this book Tiffany Ruby Patterson uses the ethnographic and literary work of Zora Neale Hurston to augment the few official documents, newspaper accounts, and family records that pertain to these places hidden from history. Hurston's ethnographies, plays, and fiction focused on the day-to-day life in all-black social spaces as well as 'the Negro farthest down' in labor camps.Patterson shows how Hurston's work coincides with the fragmented historical record.