Each week, we'll be letting you know about new releases the editors of O and Oprah.com couldn't stop reading. This Monday, we're bowled over by the new novel:

The Sandcastle Girls

Each week, we'll be letting you know about new releases the editors of O and Oprah.com couldn't stop reading. This Monday, we're gearing up for Oprah and Cheryl Strayed's discussion of Wild this weekend on "Super Soul Sunday" by checking out Strayed's newest book, just published on July 10:

Tiny Beautiful Things: Advice on Love and Life from Dear Sugar
By Cheryl Strayed

While writing her best-selling memoir—and the first Oprah's Book Club 2.0 selection—Wild, author Cheryl Strayed penned an advice column for the literary website The Rumpus. There, she worked anonymously, using the pen name Sugar, replying to letters from readers suffering everything from loveless marriages to abusive, drug-addicted brothers to disfiguring illnesses. The result: intimate, in-depth essays that not only took the letter writer's life into account but also Strayed's. Collected in a book, they make for riveting, emotionally charged reading (translation: be prepared to bawl) that leaves you significantly wiser for the experience. To a livid woman whose husband cheated on her with her employee, she says, "Acceptance asks only that you embrace what's true." To a woman who suffers a late miscarriage, she says, "Don't listen to those people who suggest you should be over your daughter's death by now. ... They live on Planet Earth. You live on Planet My Baby Died." She then shares, "I know because I've lived on a few planets that aren't Planet Earth myself." Later, she reveals stories about her own struggles with sexual abuse, divorce and marital infidelity (all of which create a much larger backstory for a reading of Wild). One of the most moving anecdotes in the book is a letter that a 22-year-old reader asks Strayed to write to her younger self: "One hot afternoon during the era in which you've gotten yourself ridiculously tangled up with heroin, you will be riding the bus and thinking what a worthless piece of crap you are, when a little girl will get on the bus holding the strings of two purple balloons. She'll offer you one of the balloons, but you won't take it because you believe you no longer have the right to such tiny beautiful things. You're wrong. You do." And like most of the pronouncements in this collection, the subject of those last few sentences can—and should—be changed to "we." As in, we all have the right to such tiny beautiful things—both the purple balloon and the compassionate book it inspired.

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See Cheryl Strayed and Oprah this Sunday on "Super Soul Sunday"
Read the best quotes from Wild

Men! What are they thinking? We can't always answer that, but we'll be posting our favorite glimpses into their world in this space every Thursday.

Photo: Getty Images

* When Roger Federer won his seventh Wimbledon title on Sunday, Oxfam International received almost $158,000 as the proceeds from a nine-year-old $2,350 bet made by a deceased gambler. (Daily Mail via Deadspin)

* Junot Díaz, author of The Brief, Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and this fall's This Is How You Lose Her, discusses how race influences his work and his debt to women writers in this insightful Q&A. (Boston Review)

* In early 2011, Mike Tetreault found out he might get 10 minutes to prove to the Boston Symphony Orchestra that he's one of the best percussionists in the world. Boston Magazine tells the nail-biting story of what it's like to train for the nearly impossible. (Boston Magazine)

* "When you really become a professional at this stuff, what’s important is how well you can do when you’re not inspired. If that’s still workable, then you have a career."—Louis C.K. is talking about comedy in this interview, but it could be applied to pretty much anything. (A.V. Club)

Each week, we'll be letting you know about new releases the editors of O and Oprah.com couldn't stop reading. This week, we're in love with another wildly original memoir:

Swimming Studies
By Leanne Shapton

Growing up in Canada, Leanne Shapton was one of a handful of teenagers hand-picked to become world-class swimmers. She made 5 a.m. practices, traveled to distant meets and developed an obsession with time due to stop watches that gave her "the ability to make still lifes out of tenths of seconds." And then came the moment at age 14, when it occurs to her "gently, in a quiet flash: I'm not going to go to the Olympics. I will not be going. Not me." Rather that quit the team, she continues to train, and the thoughtful, exquisitely written book that results is ostensibly about her lifelong relationship to the sport, complete with photos of her various bathing suits and meditations on the difference between swimming (i.e., competitive swimming) and bathing (i.e., swimming for fun). The story underneath all this, however, concerns a troubling question: What do we do with ourselves when we're good (or even very good) at something we love, but not great? Shapton finds her way, meeting her husband and using her "feel" for water as a painter. She even includes some haunting, cobalt blue illustrations of pools she frequents as an adult, as well as a color guide to different swimming smells, such as "coach: fresh laundry, Windbreaker nylon, Mennen Speed Stick, Magic Marker, and bologna." These extra visual elements dazzle, but the specifics of this world and her insightful take on her own far-from-ordinary life are what makes any reader wonder if Shapton's gold medal might have already been won—in writing.

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Sign up for Oprah's Book Club 2.0
Ask Oprah a question about her first pick, Wild

Each week, we'll be letting you know about new releases the editors of O and Oprah.com couldn't stop reading. This week, we're in love with the memoir:


The Boxer's Heart
Kate Sekules

Kate Sekules is not your average female boxer.  Although a self-admitted tomboy, the British-born former magazine editor (she’s written for Vogue, The New Yorker and O) found her way to the sport circuitously—starting with an aerobic boxing class at a New York City gym in 1992.  Sekules wasn’t a violent person by nature, but “the first time I ever threw a punch,” she says, "I was hooked."  In her memoir The Boxer’s Heart: A Woman Fighting, Sekules not only takes the reader through her journey from curious bystander to pro fighter, she delves deeply into the history of women’s boxing, which was virtually unheard of in the early nineties as Sekules was starting out.  For her, the women who went before her, with nicknames like "The Lady Tyger" and "The Female Ali," served as pioneers, chipping away slowly to achieve some sense of equality in the sport. This summer, 20 years after Sekules stepped into the ring for the first time, women’s boxing will debut at the Olympics in London. In The Boxer's Heart, Sekules examines how her insecurities at the gym and her perception of herself as a fat girl were actually advantageous when it came to boxing—her fighting weight was considered strategic and fear of acting weak or getting hurt were motivators when sparring.  She tracks her own progress in the ring—her work with trainers, her first bloody nose and pair of black eyes and her earned respect from the male boxers at Brooklyn’s famed Gleason’s Gym—alongside the evolution of the sport as it went from being sensationalized and sexualized to acknowledged displays of female athleticism.  What is most captivating about Sekules’ love letter to boxing is how she reconciles the feminine proclivity for tenderness and nurturing with their simultaneous ability to knock one another out, to unleash fury in a controlled and respectful way. One female boxer at the first ever Women's Nationals in 1997 said, "women are up against a lot more in life in general. I feel like I’ve been fighting a lot before." For Sekules, who admits an addiction to the thrill of boxing, it was a chance not only to believe that she herself was capable of succeeding in the ring, but it was an opportunity to kick "against a prescribed female role that restricts us," she says, adding, "I am fighting stereotypes."

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Join Oprah's Book Club 2.0
Ask Oprah or Cheryl Strayed a question about Wild

Are you reading Wild with us this summer? Oprah and author Cheryl Strayed are answering YOUR questions about this unforgettable memoir.Brandy Buenafe asked: How did you make the decision to do something so radical with a portion of your mother's ashes?

See Cheryl's video response:



Do you have a question for Oprah or Cheryl about Wild? Ask away here!