"Imagine is a great introduction for anyone curious about the nature and dynamics of creativity."
--Booklist  

Did you know that the most creative companies have centralized bathrooms? That brainstorming meetings are a terrible idea? That the color blue can help you double your creative output?

This is a sparkling and revelatory look at the new science of creativity. Shattering the myth of muses, higher powers, even creative "types," Jonah Lehrer demonstrates that creativity is not a single gift possessed by the lucky few. It's a variety of distinct thought processes that we can all learn to use more effectively.

Lehrer reveals the importance of embracing the rut, thinking like a child, daydreaming productively, and adopting an outsider's perspective (travel helps). He unveils the optimal mix of old and new partners in any creative collaboration, and explains why criticism is essential to the process. Then he zooms out to show how we can make our neighborhoods more vibrant, our companies more productive, and our schools more effective.

Collapsing the layers separating the neuron from the finished symphony, Imagine reveals the deep inventiveness of the human mind, and its essential role in our increasingly complex world.

Author Jonah Lehrer is a Contributing Editor at Wired and a frequent contributor to The New Yorker. He writes the Head Case column for The Wall Street Journal and regularly appears on WNYC's Radiolab. His writing has also appeared in Nature, The New York Times Magazine, Scientific American and Outside. He's the author of two previous books, Proust Was A Neuroscientist and How We Decide.

In this celebration of three legendary champions on the centennial of their births in 1912, one of the most accomplished and successful writers about the game explains the circumstances that made each of them so singularly brilliant and how they, in turn, saved not only the professional tour but modern golf itself, thus making possible the subsequent popularity of players from Arnold Palmer to Tiger Woods.

During the Depression - after the exploits of Walter Hagen and Gene Sarazen and Bobby Jones (winning the Grand Slam as an amateur in 1930) had faded in the public's imagination - golf's popularity fell year after year, and as a spectator sport it was on the verge of extinction. This was the unhappy prospect facing two dirt-poor boys from Texas and another from Virginia who had dedicated themselves to the game yet could look forward only to eking out a subsistence living along with millions of other Americans. But then lightning struck, and from the late thirties into the fifties these three men were so thoroughly dominant - each setting a host of records - that they transformed both how the game was played and how society regarded it. 

Sports fans in general are well aware of Hogan and Nelson and Snead, but even the most devoted golfers will learn a great many new things about them here. Their hundredth birthdays will be commemorated throughout 2012 - Nelson born in February, Snead in May, and Hogan in August - but as this comprehensive and compelling account vividly demonstrates, they were, and will always remain, a triumvirate for the ages.

"Marvelous and entertaining."

 -- Julian Fellowes, creator of Downton Abbey

From the Gilded Age until 1914, more than 100 American heiresses invaded Britannia and swapped dollars for titles -- just like Cora Crawley, Countess of Grantham, the first of the Downton Abbey characters Julian Fellowes was inspired to create after reading To Marry An English Lord. 

Filled with vivid personalities, gossipy anecdotes, grand houses, and a wealth of period details -- plus photographs, illustrations, quotes, and the finer points of Victorian and Edwardian etiquette -- To Marry An English Lord is social history at its liveliest and most accessible. 

"George's mastery of period detail and her sure navigation through the rocky shoals of Elizabethan politics mean this lengthy novel never flags."

-- Booklist

The most recent New York Times bestseller from Margaret George is now in paperback - a captivating novel about history's most enthralling queen.