Step out of the office and work together in a hands-on woodworking experience. This workshop is designed for corporate teams to boost communication, solve problems, and build something unique from scratch. Guided by our instructors, your team will learn new skills while creating a tangible symbol of their collaboration. Key Benefits: Better Collaboration: Work together to achieve a shared, hands-on goal. Problem Solving: Tackle design and building challenges as a unit. Take-Home Creations: Keep the finished wooden pieces as a memory of your teamwork. Please Note: The workshop price covers all tools, materials, and instructor guidance. This rate does not include transportation or delivery fees. 

Discover the art of woodworking and create your own handcrafted furniture. Learn essential carpentry skills, including wood selection, cutting, sanding, and assembly, with expert guidance every step of the way. ✨ Suitable for beginners ✨ Flexible learning schedule ✨ Classes session: once a week or 3 sessions consecutively ✨ Tools and materials included

Tired of clutter? Join our hands-on woodworking workshop and transform a simple afternoon into a finished piece of functional decor! In this session, you'll learn the basics of woodworking as you design, build, and take home your very own stylish Wooden Shoe Bench. 

Tired of clutter? Join our hands-on woodworking workshop and transform a simple afternoon into a finished piece of functional decor! In this session, you'll learn the basics of woodworking as you design, build, and take home your very own stylish Book hut. Perfect for storing books on a bedside table, organizing items on your desk, or displaying small treasures.

Tired of clutter? Join our hands-on woodworking workshop and transform a simple afternoon into a finished piece of functional decor! In this session, you'll learn the basics of woodworking as you design, build, and take home your very own stylish Table Bookshelf. Perfect for storing books on a bedside table, organizing items on your desk, or displaying small treasures.

Tired of clutter? Join our hands-on woodworking workshop and transform a simple afternoon into a finished piece of functional decor! In this session, you'll learn the basics of woodworking as you design, build, and take home your very own stylish Table Bookshelf. Perfect for storing books on a bedside table, organizing items on your desk, or displaying small treasures.

Be careful who you let in. Soon after her twenty-fifth birthday, Libby Jones returns home from work to find the letter she's been waiting for her entire life. She rips it open with one driving thought: I am finally going to know who I am. She soon learns not only the identity of her birth parents, but also that she is the sole inheritor of their abandoned mansion on the banks of the Thames in London's fashionable Chelsea neighborhood, worth millions. Everything in Libby's life is about to change. But what she can't possibly know is that others have been waiting for this day as well—and she is on a collision course to meet them. Twenty-five years ago, police were called to 16 Cheyne Walk with reports of a baby crying. When they arrived, they found a healthy ten-month-old happily cooing in her crib in the bedroom. Downstairs in the kitchen lay three dead bodies, all dressed in black, next to a hastily scrawled note. And the four other children reported to live at Cheyne Walk were gone. In The Family Upstairs, the master of "bone-chilling suspense" (People) brings us the can't-look-away story of three entangled families living in a house with the darkest of secrets.

When Korede's dinner is interrupted one night by a distress call from her sister, Ayoola, she knows what's expected of her: bleach, rubber gloves, nerves of steel and a strong stomach. This'll be the third boyfriend Ayoola's dispatched in, quote, self-defence and the third mess that her lethal little sibling has left Korede to clear away. She should probably go to the police for the good of the menfolk of Nigeria, but she loves her sister and, as they say, family always comes first. Until, that is, Ayoola starts dating the doctor where Korede works as a nurse. Korede's long been in love with him, and isn't prepared to see him wind up with a knife in his back: but to save one would mean sacrificing the other... My Sister, the Serial Killer is a blackly comic novel about how blood is thicker - and more difficult to get out of the carpet - than water...

A sweeping, evocative epic of two women's intertwined fates and their search for identity, that moves from the lavish parlors of Shanghai courtesans to the fog-shrouded mountains of a remote Chinese village. Spanning more than forty years and two continents, The Valley of Amazement resurrects pivotal episodes in history: from the collapse of China's last imperial dynasty, to the rise of the Republic, the explosive growth of lucrative foreign trade and anti-foreign sentiment, to the inner workings of courtesan houses and the lives of the foreign "Shanghailanders" living in the International Settlement, both erased by World War II. A deeply evocative narrative about the profound connections between mothers and daughters, The Valley of Amazement returns readers to the compelling territory of Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club. With her characteristic insight and humor, she conjures a story of inherited trauma, desire and deception, and the power and stubbornness of love.

Managing Your Scarcest Resources Business leaders know that the key to competitive success is smart management of scarce resources. That's why companies allocate their financial capital so carefully. But capital today is cheap and abundant, no longer a source of advantage. The truly scarce resources now are the time, the talent, and the energy of the people in your organization--resources that are too often squandered. There's plenty of advice about how to manage them, but most of it focuses on individual actions. What's really needed are organizational solutions that can unleash a company's full productive power and enable it to outpace competitors. Building off of the popular Harvard Business Review article "Your Scarcest Resource," Michael Mankins and Eric Garton, Bain & Company experts in organizational design and effectiveness, present new research into how you can liberate people's time, talent, and energy and unleash your organization's productive power. They identify the specific causes of organizational drag --the collection of institutional factors that slow things down, decrease output, and drain people's energy--and then offer a pragmatic framework for how managers can overcome it. With practical advice for using the framework and in-depth examples of how the best companies manage their people's time, talent, and energy with as much discipline as they do their financial capital, this book shows managers how to create a virtuous circle of high performance.

First published in 1962, a year after Revolutionary Road , this sublime collection of stories seems even more powerful today. Out of the lives of Manhattan office workers, a cab driver seeking immortality, frustrated would-be novelists, suburban men and their yearning, neglected women, Richard Yates creates a haunting mosaic of the 1950s, the era when the American dream was finally coming true - and just beginning to ring a little hollow.

Welcome to No.12 rue des Amants A beautiful old apartment block, far from the glittering lights of the Eiffel Tower and the bustling banks of the Seine. Where nothing goes unseen, and everyone has a story to unlock. The watchful concierge The scorned lover The prying journalist The naïve student The unwanted guest There was a murder here last night. A mystery lies behind the door of apartment three. Who holds the key?

"Are you a gifted child looking for special opportunities?" When this peculiar ad appears in the newspaper, dozens of children enroll to take a series of mysterious, mind-bending tests. (And you, dear reader, can test your wits right alongside them.) But in the end just four very special children will succeed. Their challenge: to go on a secret mission that only the most intelligent and resourceful children could complete. To accomplish it they will have to go undercover at the Learning Institute for the Very Enlightened, where the only rule is that there are no rules. As our heroes face physical and mental trials beyond their wildest imaginations, they have no choice but to turn to each other for support. But with their newfound friendship at stake, will they be able to pass the most important test of all? This tenth anniversary edition of The Mysterious Benedict Society includes over thirty pages of bonus materials that will delight old and new fans alike.

Another masterpiece from the author of Revolutionary Road Michael Davenport, a minor poet, is an intensely ambitious young man - just old enough to have served in the US Air Force at the tail end of World War Two. Every failure he suffers in his efforts to become established as a professional writer weighs against the uneasy knowledge that his wife, Lucy, has an untapped private fortune amounting to millions of dollars. Lucy, for her part, always elegant but often shy, is never quite certain what is expected of her. And as a couple, the Davenports are repeatedly dismayed at meeting other people whose lives appear brighter and better than their own. In this magnificent novel, at once bitterly sad and achingly funny, Richard Yates again shows himself to be the supreme, tenderly ironic chronicler of the 'American Dream' and its casualties.

A heartwarming novel about hope after loss as a young widow receives mysterious messages of love from the author of Eight Perfect Hours .Sparkly and charming Natalie Fincher has it all—a handsome new husband, a fixer-upper cottage of her dreams, and the opportunity to tour with the musical she's spent years writing. But when her husband suddenly dies, all her hopes and dreams instantly disappear.Two and a half years later, Natalie is still lost. She works, sleeps (well, as much as the sexually frustrated village foxes will allow), and sees friends just often enough to allay their worries, but her life is empty. And she can only bring herself to play music at a London train station's public piano where she can be anonymous. She's lost motivation, faith in love, in happiness…in everything.But when someone begins to mysteriously leave the sheet music for her husband's favorite songs at the station's piano, Natalie begins to feel a sense of hope and excitement for the first time. As she investigates just who could be doing this, Natalie finds herself on an unexpected journey toward newfound love for herself, for life, and maybe, for a special someone.

Setting out to reconstruct a murder that took place 27 years earlier, this chronicle moves backwards and forwards in time, through the contradictions of memory and moments lost in time. Its irony gives the book the nuances of a political fable.

As the richest record we have of human consciousness, literature may offer a kind of understanding that is complementary, not opposed, to scientific knowledge. Lodge explores the representation of human consciousness in fiction, mainly English and American, in the light of recent investigations in science.

The instant New York Times Bestseller You knew their name. You didn't know the real story. The world knew Alyson Stoner as the charming tomboy from Cheaper by the Dozen , the iconic kid dancer with Missy Elliott, and the friendly face on Disney Channel hits like Camp Rock and Phineas and Ferb . But behind the scenes, a different story was unfolding—one of relentless pressure, family trauma, and a lonely battle to get help. Semi-Well-Adjusted is more than a Hollywood memoir, it's a fierce and unflinching look at what it takes to heal in a society that seems determined to break us. With bravely and hard-earned wisdom, Alyson shares their harrowing journey from an eighty-hour work week at age eight and stratospheric child stardom, to navigating religious trauma and rebuilding a life on their own terms. Now a mental health advocate, Alyson offers a masterclass in self-reclamation for anyone ready to break free from the narratives that have defined them. Semi-Well-Adjusted is a roadmap for finding your own voice and power—despite literally everything.

Bestselling author Michael Lewis examines how a Nobel Prize–winning theory of the mind altered our perception of reality. Forty years ago, Israeli psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky wrote a series of breathtakingly original studies undoing our assumptions about the decision-making process. Their papers showed the ways in which the human mind erred, systematically, when forced to make judgments about uncertain situations. Their work created the field of behavioral economics, revolutionized Big Data studies, advanced evidence-based medicine, led to a new approach to government regulation, and made much of Michael Lewis's own work possible. Kahneman and Tversky are more responsible than anybody for the powerful trend to mistrust human intuition and defer to algorithms. The Undoing Project is about the fascinating collaboration between two men who have the dimensions of great literary figures. They became heroes in the university and on the battlefield―both had important careers in the Israeli military―and their research was deeply linked to their extraordinary life experiences. In the process they may well have changed, for good, mankind's view of its own mind.

The articles with which David Lodge entertained and delighted readers of the Independent on Sunday and The Washington Post are now revised, expanded, and collected together in book form. The art of fiction is considered under a wide range of headings, such as the Intrusive Author, Suspense, the Epistolary Novel, Time-shift, Magic Realism and Symbolism, and each topic is illustrated by a passage or two taken from classic or modern fiction. Drawing on writers as diverse as Henry James and Martin Amis, Jane Austen and Fay Weldon and Henry Fielding and James Joyce, David Lodge makes accesible to the general reader the richness and variety of British and American fiction. Technical terms, such as Interior Monologue, Metafiction, Intertextuality and the Unreliable Narrator, are lucidly explained and their applications demonstrated. Bringing to criticism the verve and humour of his own novels, David Lodge has provided essential reading for students of literature, aspiring writers, and anyone who wishes to understand how literature works.

It's hardest to belong when you're closest to home . . . One wet Friday evening, Professor Andrew Martin of Cambridge University solves the world's greatest mathematical riddle. Then he disappears. When he is found walking naked along the motorway, Professor Martin seems different. Besides the lack of clothes, he now finds normal life pointless. His loving wife and teenage son seem repulsive to him. In fact, he hates everyone on the planet. Everyone, that is, except Newton. And he's a dog. Can a bit of Debussy and Emily Dickinson keep him from murder? Can the species which invented cheap white wine and peanut butter sandwiches be all that bad? And what is the warm feeling he gets when he looks into his wife's eyes?

Do the things on your desk betray the thoughts on your mind? Does your dining room décor carry clues to your character? Award-winning psychologist Sam Gosling has dispatched teams of scientific investigators to poke around bedrooms and offices, check out iPods, and peek at personal websites—to see what can be learned about us simply from looking at our belongings. What he has discovered is intriguing: When it comes to the most essential components of our personality—from friendliness and flexibility to openness and originality—the things we own and the way we arrange them can say more about who we are than even our most intimate conversations. Packed with original research and a wealth of fascinating stories, Snoop is a captivating guide to our not-so-secret selves, and reveals how intensely connected we are to the places in which we live and work.

Which is more dangerous, a gun or a swimming pool? What do schoolteachers and sumo wrestlers have in common? Why do drug dealers still live with their moms? How much do parents really matter? What kind of impact did Roe v. Wade have on violent crime? Freakonomics will literally redefine the way we view the modern world. These may not sound like typical questions for an economist to ask. But Steven D. Levitt is not a typical economist. He is a much heralded scholar who studies the stuff and riddles of everyday life -- from cheating and crime to sports and child rearing -- and whose conclusions regularly turn the conventional wisdom on its head. He usually begins with a mountain of data and a simple, unasked question. Some of these questions concern life-and-death issues; others have an admittedly freakish quality. Thus the new field of study contained in this book: freakonomics. Through forceful storytelling and wry insight, Levitt and co-author Stephen J. Dubner show that economics is, at root, the study of incentives -- how people get what they want, or need, especially when other people want or need the same thing. In Freakonomics, they set out to explore the hidden side of ... well, everything. The inner workings of a crack gang. The truth about real-estate agents. The myths of campaign finance. The telltale marks of a cheating schoolteacher. The secrets of the Ku Klux Klan. What unites all these stories is a belief that the modern world, despite a surfeit of obfuscation, complication, and downright deceit, is not impenetrable, is not unknowable, and -- if the right questions are asked -- is even more intriguing than we think. All it takes is a new way of looking. Steven Levitt, through devilishly clever and clear-eyed thinking, shows how to see through all the clutter. Freakonomics establishes this unconventional premise: If morality represents how we would like the world to work, then economics represents how it actually does work. It is true that readers of this book will be armed with enough riddles and stories to last a thousand cocktail parties. But Freakonomics can provide more than that. It will literally redefine the way we view the modern world. (front flap)

With an Introduction and Notes by Merry M. Pawlowski, Professor and Chair, Department of English, California State University, Bakersfield. Virginia Woolf's Orlando 'The longest and most charming love letter in literature', playfully constructs the figure of Orlando as the fictional embodiment of Woolf's close friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West. Spanning three centuries, the novel opens as Orlando, a young nobleman in Elizabeth's England, awaits a visit from the Queen and traces his experience with first love as England under James I lies locked in the embrace of the Great Frost. At the midpoint of the novel, Orlando, now an ambassador in Costantinople, awakes to find that he is a woman, and the novel indulges in farce and irony to consider the roles of women in the 18th and 19th centuries. As the novel ends in 1928, a year consonant with full suffrage for women. Orlando, now a wife and mother, stands poised at the brink of a future that holds new hope and promise for women.

Tommy and Tuppence Beresford return in Agatha Christie's classic Postern of Fate , to investigate a deadly poisoning sixty years after the fact. Tommy and Tuppence Beresford have just become the proud owners of an old house in an English village. Along with the property, they have inherited some worthless bric-a-brac, including a collection of antique books. While rustling through a copy of The Black Arrow , Tuppence comes upon a series of apparently random underlinings. However, when she writes down the letters, they spell out a very disturbing message: "Mary Jordan did not die naturally." And sixty years after their first murder, Mary Jordan's enemies are still ready to kill. . . .

Maybe it was a grandparent, or a teacher or a colleague. Someone older, patient and wise, who understood you when you were young and searching, and gave you sound advice to help you make your way through it. For Mitch Albom, that person was Morrie Schwartz, his college professor from nearly twenty years ago. Maybe, like Mitch, you lost track of this mentor as you made your way, and the insights faded. Wouldn't you like to see that person again, ask the bigger questions that still haunt you? Mitch Albom had that second chance. He rediscovered Morrie in the last months of the older man's life. Knowing he was dying of ALS - or motor neurone disease - Mitch visited Morrie in his study every Tuesday, just as they used to back in college. Their rekindled relationship turned into one final 'class': lessons in how to live.

It's been less than a year since beautiful heiress Rosemary Barton took her own life during a birthday dinner in her honor. Her husband George never believed that his fun-loving wife would commit suicide--especially now that he's received two anonymous letters that suggest cold-blooded murder. One implicates even George himself. It's true he long suffered Rosemary's infidelities. But what about her embittered sister who was left out of the family will? Or any of Rosemary's secret lovers, not to mention their betrayed wives? Not one of them has ever forgotten Rosemary. Nor has any one of them ever forgiven her. But only one of them killed her...

Tommy and Tuppence Beresford are restless for adventure, so when they are asked to take over Blunt's International Detective Agency, they leap at the chance. Their first case is a success—the triumphant recovery of a pink pearl. Other cases soon follow—a stabbing on Sunningdale golf course; cryptic messages in the personal columns of newspapers; and even a box of poisoned chocolates. But can they live up to their slogan of "Any case solved in 24 hours"?

The Hundred Secret Senses is an exultant novel about China and America, love and loyalty, the identities we invent and the true selves we discover along the way. Olivia Laguni is half-Chinese, but typically American in her uneasiness with her patchwork family. And no one in Olivia's family is more embarrassing to her than her half-sister, Kwan Li. For Kwan speaks mangled English, is cheerfully deaf to Olivia's sarcasm, and sees the dead with her "yin eyes." Even as Olivia details the particulars of her decades-long grudge against her sister (who, among other things, is a source of infuriatingly good advice), Kwan Li is telling her own story, one that sweeps us into the splendor, squalor, and violence of Manchu China. And out of the friction between her narrators, Amy Tan creates a work that illuminates both the present and the past sweetly, sadly, hilariously, with searing and vivid prose.

"A lively tour through the impulses that cause many of us to cheat, the book offers especially keen insights into the ways in which we cut corners while still thinking of ourselves as moral people." — Time Dan Ariely, behavioral economist and New York Times bestselling author of Predictably Irrational and The Upside of Irrationality, returns with a thought-provoking work that challenges our preconceptions about dishonesty and urges us to take an honest look at ourselves. Does the chance of getting caught affect how likely we are to cheat? How do companies pave the way for dishonesty? Does collaboration make us more or less honest? Does religion improve our honesty? Most of us think of ourselves as honest, but, in fact, we all cheat. From Washington to Wall Street, the classroom to the workplace, unethical behavior is everywhere. None of us is immune, whether it's a white lie to head off trouble or padding our expense reports. In The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty , award-winning author Dan Ariely shows why some things are easier to lie about than others; how getting caught matters less than we think in whether we cheat; and how business practices pave the way for unethical behavior, both intentionally and unintentionally. Ariely explores how unethical behavior works in the personal, professional, and political worlds, and how it affects all of us, even as we think of ourselves as having high moral standards. But all is not lost. Ariely also identifies what keeps us honest, pointing the way for achieving higher ethics in our everyday lives. With compelling personal and academic findings, The (Honest) Truth About Dishonesty will change the way we see ourselves, our actions, and others.