Kathy Roth-Douquet is a Jew and a liberal. Frank Schaeffer is a Christian and a conservative. Can’t we all just get along?  Those two certainly hope so. They have written a book together, How Free People Move Mountains, which seeks to find “common purpose and meaning” between Americans divided by religion, economic status, red and blue states. Their answer, at least in part, is to stop thinking of consumerism as the answer and get back to the basic values that built the country.  The devil, as always, will be in the details.

In fiction, Debra Ginsberg — author of Blind Submission — returns with The Grift, a story about a woman who makes money conning people into believing she is a physic suddenly finds herself gifted with the powers she has, for so long, faked.

Also in fiction, Chris Adrian has released a collection of short stories, A Better Angel. Adrian, a pediatrician at Boston Children’s Hopsital and a student at the Harvard School of Divinity, offers a series of short stories exploring suffering, and how we all deal with it. Adrian’s offbeat stories often involve supernatural encounters, so prepare yourself for that.