Full AspenCat Catalog

Sometimes what we appear to have lost is simply something it was time to leave behind. Perhaps our system just lets something go, our having moved through the experience and now needing it no more. A friend of mine was sitting once with two of his best friends, a couple he'd partied long and hard with during the 1960s. At about ten in the evening, the couple's twenty something daughter came home, saw them on the couch, and admonished them, "You guys...

"Judy never intended to start wearing the dog. But when she stumbled across her son Teddy's old baby sling during a halfhearted basement cleaning, something in her snapped. So: the dog went into the sling, Judy felt connected to another living being, and she's repeated the process every day since. Life hasn't gone according to Judy's plan. Her career as a children's book author offered a glimpse of success before taking an embarrassing nose dive....

"Mary Miller seizes the mantle of southern literature with this wry tale of middle age and the unexpected turns a life can take. Like her predecessors Ann Beattie and Raymond Carver, Mary Miller brings an essential voice to her generation. Building on her critically acclaimed novel, The Last Days of California, and her biting collection, Always Happy Hour, Miller slyly transports readers to her unapologetic corner of the South--this time, Biloxi,...

"A dynamic and inspiring exploration of the new science that is redrawing the future for people in their forties, fifties, and sixties for the better--and for good. There's no such thing as an inevitable midlife crisis, Barbara Bradley Hagerty writes in this provocative, hopeful book. It's a myth, an illusion. New scientific research explodes the fable that midlife is a time when things start to go downhill for everybody. In fact, midlife can be...

A year after her divorce, Joyce is settling into being single again. She likes her job archiving family photos and videos, and shes developed a secret comforting hobby: trolling the neighborhood social networking site, Small World, for posts that help solve lifes easiest problems. When her older sister, Lydia, also divorced, calls to tell her shes moving back east from Los Angeles after almost thirty years away, Joyce invites Lydia to move into her...

A man becomes haunted by his past and is presented with a mysterious legacy that causes him to re-think his current situation in life.

"Do you hate the term “middle age?” So does Kristin van Ogtrop, who is still trying to come up with a less annoying way to describe those years when you find yourself both satisfied and outraged, confident and confused, full of appreciation but occasional disdain for the world around you. Like an intimate chat with your best friend, this mostly funny, sometimes sad, always affirming volume from longtime magazine journalist van Ogtrop is a celebration...