LETRAS

We live in a world that’s obsessed with talent. We celebrate gifted students in school, natural athletes in sports, and child prodigies in music. But admiring people who start out with innate advantages leads us to overlook the distance we ourselves can travel. We underestimate the range of skills that we can learn and how good we can become. We can all improve at improving. And when opportunity doesn’t knock, there are ways to build a door. Hidden Potential offers a new framework for raising aspirations and exceeding expectations. Adam Grant weaves together groundbreaking evidence, surprising insights, and vivid storytelling that takes us from the classroom to the boardroom, the playground to the Olympics, and underground to outer space. He shows that progress depends less on how hard you work than how well you learn. Growth is not about the genius you possess—it’s about the character you develop. Grant explores how to build the character skills and motivational structures to realize our own potential, and how to design systems that create opportunities for those who have been underrated and overlooked.

In 1919, a high school teacher from Washington, D.C arrives in Harlem excited to realize her lifelong dream. Jessie Redmon Fauset has been named the literary editor of The Crisis. The first Black woman to hold this position at a preeminent Negro magazine, Jessie is poised to achieve literary greatness. But she holds a secret that jeopardizes it all. W. E. B. Du Bois, the founder of The Crisis, is not only Jessie’s boss, he’s her lover. And neither his wife, nor their fourteen-year-age difference can keep the two apart. Amidst rumors of their tumultuous affair, Jessie is determined to prove herself. She attacks the challenge of discovering young writers with fervor, finding sixteen-year-old Countee Cullen, seventeen-year-old Langston Hughes, and Nella Larsen, who becomes one of her best friends. Under Jessie’s leadership, The Crisis thrives…every African American writer in the country wants their work published there.

War leaves nobody alone. Neither the past, the present, nor the future offers true safety, and the only refuge is what you can protect: your family, your friends, your home. Jamie Fraser and Claire Randall were torn apart by the Jacobite Rising in 1746, and it took them twenty years of loss and heartbreak to find each other again. Now it’s 1779, and Claire and Jamie are finally reunited with their daughter, Brianna, her husband, Roger, and their children, and are rebuilding their home on Fraser’s Ridge—a fortress that may shelter them against the winds of war as well as weather. But tensions in the Colonies are great: Battles rage from New York to Georgia and, even in the mountains of the backcountry, feelings run hot enough to boil Hell’s teakettle. Jamie knows that loyalties among his tenants are split and it won’t be long before the war is on his doorstep. Brianna and Roger have their own worry: that the dangers that provoked their escape from the twentieth century might catch up to them. Sometimes they question whether risking the perils of the 1700s—among them disease, starvation, and an impending war—was indeed the safer choice for their family.

She might not have a famous name, funding, or her family’s support, but Katarina Shaw has always known that she was destined to become an Olympic skater. When she meets Heath Rocha, a lonely kid stuck in the foster care system, their instant connection makes them a formidable duo on the ice. Clinging to skating—and each other—to escape their turbulent lives, Kat and Heath go from childhood sweethearts to champion ice dancers, captivating the world with their scorching chemistry, rebellious style, and roller-coaster relationship. Until a shocking incident at the Olympic Games brings their partnership to a sudden end. As the ten-year anniversary of their final skate approaches, an unauthorized documentary reignites the public obsession with Shaw and Rocha, claiming to uncover the “real story” through interviews with their closest friends and fiercest rivals. Kat wants nothing to do with the documentary, but she can’t stand the thought of someone else defining her legacy. So, after a decade of silence, she’s telling her story: from the childhood tragedies that created her all-consuming bond with Heath to the clash of desires that tore them apart. Sensational rumors have haunted their every step for years, but the truth may be even more shocking than the headlines.

Why is it so hard to stand up to authority, even when we know something’s wrong? Many of us comply much more than we realize. How many times have you wanted to object, disagree, or opt out of something but ended up swallowing your words, shaking your head, and just going along? Analyzing cases ranging from corporate corruption and sexual abuse to everyday acquiescence at work, the doctor’s office, and in our personal lives, award-winning organizational psychologist Dr. Sunita Sah delves deep into why the pressure to comply is a corrosive and often invisible force in our society. With her own revelatory research, she radically transforms our idea of defiance from a misunderstood negative trait into a crucial, positive force for personal and societal change. Taking us through her five stages of defiance, Dr. Sah equips readers with simple tools to make decisions that align with their values. Defy is the essential playbook for how to speak up and act when it matters most.

At the end of the Second World War Gershom Scholem, the magisterial scholar of Jewish mysticism, is commissioned by the Hebrew University in what was then British-ruled Palestine to retrieve a lost world. He is sent to sift through the rubble of Europe in search of precious Jewish books stolen by the Nazis or hidden by the Jews themselves in secret places throughout the ravaged continent. The search takes him into ruined cities and alien wastelands. The terrible irony of salvaging books that had outlasted the people for whom they’d been written leaves Dr. Scholem longing for the kind of magic that had been the merely theoretical subject of his lamplit studies. Steve Stern's A Fool’s Kabbalah, a novel featuring numerous real-life historic figures, reimagines Gershom Scholem’s quest and how it sparked in him the desire to realize the legacy of his dear friend, the brilliant philosopher Walter Benjamin.