A practical, heartfelt guide to the art of truly knowing another person in order to foster deeper connections at home, at work, and throughout our lives—from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Road to Character and The Second MountainAs David Brooks observes, “There is one skill that lies at the heart of any healthy person, family, school, community organization, or society: the ability to see someone else deeply and make them feel seen—to accurately know another person, to let them feel valued, heard, and understood.”And yet we humans don’t do this well. All around us are people who feel invisible, unseen, misunderstood. In How to Know a Person, Brooks sets out to help us do better, posing questions that are essential for all of us: If you want to know a person, what kind of attention should you cast on them? What kind of conversations should you have? What parts of a person’s story...

Nonfiction from Malcolm Gladwell, Francine Prose, Jonathan Franzen, and more: "There is not a dud in the bunch. [An] exhilarating collection." —Publishers Weekly (starred review) Whether a personal reflection on a wife's decline from Alzheimer's, a critique of the overdiagnosis of mood disorders, a lighthearted look at menopause, a friend's commentary on David Foster Wallace's heartbreaking suicide, or a memoir of teaching underprivileged children, this collection highlights the best essays of the year with contributions from: Benjamin AnastasMarcia AngellMiah ArnoldGeoffrey BentRobert BoyersDudley ClendinenPaul CollinsMark DotyMark EdmundsonJoseph EpsteinJonathan FranzenMalcolm GladwellPeter HesslerEwa Hryniewicz-YarbroughGarret KeizerDavid J. LawlessAlan LightmanSandra Tsing LohKen MurrayFrancine ProseRichard SennettLauren SlaterJose Antonio...

Evidently she knew who I was, or thought she did, since I had apparently needed no introduction and certainly hadn't received one... She told stories. One could almost say she rushed into them, on the merest of pretexts, as if the world was ending very shortly and they had to be got through before it happened. A century of family secrets starts to unravel when Benedict Waters is summoned to an audience with an old friend of his mother. He is seduced by her storytelling and it takes time and an astonishing revelation before he realises that it is his own family he has been hearing about, his own life that is being undone. From the Blue Mountains to the Hawkesbury and from Sydney to the south coast of New South Wales, The Fern Tattoo takes us on a kaleidoscopic journey through several generations of three families. We meet a range of extraordinary characters including a bigamist bishop, a librarian tattooed from neck to knee, a young girl who kills her best friend in a tragic...

A writer questions the architecture of words, struggling to capture his ideas before they are lost; a husband excavating beneath his house becomes mesmerised by silence and disappears in search of solitude; a lighthouse keeper dreams that he is a man dreaming that he is the keeper of a lighthouse. Magnificent in its scope and imagery, David Brooks' mastery of the written word is eclipsed in this thought-provoking collection. Both evocative and experimental, Brooks' stories conjure fragments of memory and time, capturing streetscapes and heartscapes in a mosaic-style splendour. Lyrical and perceptive, brave and illuminating, Napoleon's Roads explores the richness of language and the possibilities of expression, while exemplifying some of the most sophisticated, polished and beautiful contemporary literature in Australia today.