When you think of fiery, passionate lives, the names Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, and Henry David Thoreau may not be the first to trip from your tongue—but you'd be wrong to dismiss them. Literary lioness Susan Cheever plumbs these lives and more, focusing on a mid-19th-century "sudden outbreak of genius" in Concord, Massachusetts. While Herman Melville suffers unrequited love for Hawthorne, Louisa May Alcott pines for both Thoreau and Emerson, and free-spirited and adored Margaret Fuller becomes the prototype for Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter. A stunning look at what may have been America's first literary community, Cheever's book is passionate, provocative, and stunningly alive.

Although this book is warm and playful, there's a serious amount of good information inside. Dubbed "America's Cheapest Family" by Good Morning America, the authors boast a frugality that allowed them to pay off their two houses, buy their cars with cash, and feed their five kids on only $350 a month. This isn't a penny-pinching tome about clipping coupons and chowing down on TV dinners. Some of the advice is a little stringent for my taste (they advise satisfying your movie jones only from the library), but the Economides eat out regularly (they look for entertainment coupons) and take vacations. They also realize that one size doesn't fit all, so they encourage readers to pick and choose the ideas that sound helpful to them. Packed with sidebars, including ones about their kids' spending and saving habits, this thrift-minded book can be money in your bank!

Pulitzer Prize–finalist Joanna Scott (author of The Manikin) examines love in all its fierceness and force in an astonishing collection of stories that span the 20th century. A bride and a groom share a never-ending wedding kiss while the bride's estranged father struggles to free himself from a locked bathroom across town. A young woman's life fractures into several different possible outcomes, each as haunting as it is inevitable, and a flat tire spins a seemingly satisfied husband and father into an uneasy discontent. Couples drift apart, reconfigure, and hunger for lasting connection even as it eludes them. Scott shatters every expectation you think she might be setting up in her stories; in doing so, she's created a collection as mysterious, powerful, and breathtaking as love itself.