A must-read for anyone who makes business decisions that have a major financial impact.As the recent collapse on Wall Street shows, we are often ill-equipped to deal with uncertainty and risk. Yet every day we base our personal and business plans on uncertainties, whether they be next month’s sales, next year’s costs, or tomorrow’s stock price. In The Flaw of Averages, Sam Savageknown for his creative exposition of difficult subjects describes common avoid...

"I had always imagined that my life story...would have a great first line: something like Nabokov's 'Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins;' or if I could not do lyric, then something sweeping like Tolstoy's 'All happy families are alike, but every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.'... When it comes to openers, though, the best in my view has to be the first line of Ford Madox Ford's The Good Soldier: 'This is the saddest story I have ever heard.'"So begins th...

Piquant, elegiac, surreal short portraits of animals, human and otherwise, sketching a vision of life as a measure of loss.Sam Savage’s final book is a collection of stripped down visitations, flash fictions of smoke breaks and long drives and friends who finally stop showing up. The acidic tang of disappointment is here, and sparks of biting insight, in portraits of people and animals, in all our absurdity and failed attempts at meaning. As Sam says, “What a life....

A meditation on memory and futility among the ruins of artistic ambition, family myth, and the fall of the South.Savage’s latest novel dismantles the mythic greats of the past—an American South that never was, and a mother’s artistic pretensions that never should have been. In the story of Eve, Savage finds a voice that captures both the frustrations of our degraded world and the tender sympathy it evokes for all our sad efforts to leave something beautiful behind....

The four-month odyssey of a literary lowlife.Set in middle America during the economic hard times of the Nixon era, this tragicomic, epistolary masterpiece chronicles everything Andrew Whittaker—literary journal editor, negligent landlord, and aspiring novelist—commits to paper over the course of four critical months.From his letters, diary entries, and fragments of fiction, to grocery lists and posted signs, we find our hero hounded by tenants and creditor...

“Typically, memoir gives us the emotional high points, but Savage’s Edna inverts that: She writes loneliness and tedium, the bits and pieces that are hard to look at, or that typically wind up on the cutting room floor.” —The Los Angeles Times“A dazzling, graceful novel. . . . Glass gives us both a life story told well and tantalizingly in unspooled snippets, and a thoughtful rumination on the nature of late-life reflection itself.” —T...

A disillusioned artist looks for meaning in the wreckage of his life, and finds it in unexpected places.Sam Savage’s most intimate, tender novel yet follows Harold Nivenson, a decrepit, aging man who was once a painter and arts patron. The death of Peter Meinenger, his friend turned romantic and intellectual rival, prompts him to ruminate on his own career as a minor artist and collector and make sense of a lifetime of gnawing doubt.Over time, his bitternes...

Set in middle America during the economic hard times of the Nixon era, this tragicomic, epistolary masterpiece chronicles everything Andrew Whittaker—literary journal editor, negligent landlord, and aspiring novelist—commits to paper over the course of four critical months.From his letters, diary entries, and fragments of fiction, to grocery lists and posted signs, we find our hero hounded by tenants and creditors, harassed by a loathsome local arts group, tormented by his ex-wife,...

The church is reeling because of the relativistic mindset of our world. Up until a generation ago, most adults had similar moral intuitions whether they were believers or not, and the core of protestant orthodoxy was still intact. Yet, in the wake of postmodernity and secularism, all that has changed.Convinced that gospel-centered ministry is utterly imperative for such a time as this, contributors D. A. Carson, Tim Keller, Kevin DeYoung, Philip Ryken, Bryan Chapell, Thabiti Anyabw...

Genocide. Terrorism. Hate crimes. In a world where racism is far from dead, is unity amidst diversities even remotely possible?Sharing from his own experiences growing up in the segregated South, pastor John Piper thoughtfully exposes the unremitting problem of racism. Instead of turning finally to organizations, education, famous personalities, or government programs to address racial strife, Piper reveals the definitive source of hope—teaching how the good news about Jes...

Humans are hardwired for awe.Our hearts are always captured by something—that's how God made us. But sin threatens to distract us from the glory of our Creator. All too often, we stand in awe of everything but God.Uncovering the lies we believe about all the earthly things that promise us peace, life, and contentment, Paul Tripp redirects our gaze to God's awe-inducing glory—showing how such a vision has the potential to impact our every thought, w...

The New York Times bestselling author of The Prodigal Prophet uncovers the essential message of Jesus, locked inside his most familiar parable.Newsweek called renowned minister Timothy Keller "a C.S. Lewis for the twenty-first century" in a feature on his first book, The Reason for God. In that book, he offered a rational explanation of why we should believe in God. Now, in The Prodigal God, Keller takes his trademark in...