A game design company has mysterious forces at play in the new YA thriller 'Darkly'

Do you ever feel that there is a more authentic, primal self within you waiting to be free? Glennon Doyle has felt this way, too—like a wild animal in captivity who was conditioned not to feel, think, or trust herself. She tells her story in Untamed, part memoir—covering her personal story of addiction and rehab, falling in love with a woman, leaving her marriage, and rebuilding her life—and part call to action for any woman who feels held captive by society’s rules and expectations.

Through exploration of her story, she instructs readers to rebuild their lives using emotion, intuition, and imagination as guiding forces. In this guide, we’ll explore Doyle’s journey out of captivity and her lessons for other captive women. Along the way, we’ll explore complementary ideas from other feminist thinkers, psychological reasoning for aspects of captivity, and practical actionables to help you live Doyle’s principles.

If you’ve ever felt a creative tug or impulse, writer Elizabeth Gilbert can help you act on it. According to Gilbert, the author of the best-selling memoir Eat Pray Love, creativity is not just the domain of a few brilliant professional artists, but rather an enriching way of life that anyone can adopt at any time. If you embrace creativity, you’ll experience “Big Magic”: a mystical or spiritual force of creativity that brings joy and purpose.

In this guide, you’ll learn how, according to Gilbert, you can commune with the forces of creativity and establish an enjoyable, rewarding creative practice that can last a lifetime. You’ll also find commentary that provides actionables to help you implement Gilbert’s ideas around creativity, gives context around Gilbert’s writing on spirituality and art, and explores scientific explanations for the creative phenomena Gilbert attributes to magic.

Humans play a wide variety of games, from basketball and chess to video games and poker. Why are we so enthralled with these games, even when they don’t really have an impact on our lives outside the game?

Theory of Fun for Game Design, by veteran game designer Raph Koster (lead designer of Ultima Online), discusses why games are fun, what games teach their players, and ultimately how to make a meaningful game.

You probably know someone who regularly blows things out of proportion, or who insists on having the same argument over and over, or constantly tries to one-up other people. According to Dr. Eric Berne, a pioneering psychiatrist who broke away from the Freudian tradition, those are just two of the games that people play in work, love, sex, and friendship.

Games People Play is Berne’s 1964 classic about the many ways that we habitually relate to one another through “games.” These aren’t fun, harmless social games, though—they’re subtle, largely unconscious patterns that harm us and our relationships. Berne explains how most of us don’t even notice our games, and how we’re missing out on the fulfillment of game-free living.

In our guide, we’ll explore the foundations of Berne’s theory and build up to an extensive discussion of games, before finishing with his strategies for growing into a fuller way of living. We’ve also added psychological perspectives from Freud to modern-day and updated Berne’s ideas.

Do you want to understand books better, and remember more of what you read? Do you want to better understand the author’s goal and be a better critic of what you read?

How to Read a Book is the classic guide to reading effectively. It teaches how to understand the crux of a book within 15 minutes, how to analyze a book intelligently, and how to synthesize multiple books together. If you read a lot of books, then it makes sense to learn how to read better and increase the value of your reading.