Mary Ellen Keating
Corporate Communications
Barnes & Noble, Inc.
(212) 633-3323
mkeating@bn.com

Carolyn J. Brown
Corporate Communications
Barnes & Noble, Inc.
(212) 633-4062
cbrown@bn.com

NEW YORK, NY – March 19, 2012 – Barnes & Noble, Inc. (NYSE: BKS), the leading retailer of content, digital media and educational products, today announced that Jonah Lehrer’s Imagine: How Creativity Works (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt) is the latest – and first nonfiction – selection in the Barnes & Noble Recommends program.  The book is on sale today and can be purchased at any Barnes & Noble store, online at Barnes & Noble.com (www.bn.com/recommends) or instantly downloaded on Barnes & Noble’s NOOK® eBook readers and tablets.

Here’s just some of what our booksellers are saying:

 Imagine is an engaging, snappy look at a mysterious subject. This book could change how we work, think, interact with each other,
and educate our children.
 – Suzette Davis, bookseller, Des Moines, IA

Imagine is one of those books that has the power to change the world. It's a book that artists, writers, musicians, comics, CEOs, elected officials, educators, scientists, anyone who wants to create change or something meaningful should read.
– Jessica Valeske, store manager, Tigard, OR

Amazingly readable and accessible. …I found myself reading passages out loud to whomever was nearby.
I will be passing this book on to almost everyone I know.
– Rosey McArdell, bookseller, Eden Prairie, MN

Lehrer has written about imagination and innovation in ways that are accessible to even the cautious reader and will inspire discussion and sharing of our own creative aspirations.
This book flows like a novel yet challenges and enlightens like the best of teachers.
– Nathan Dunbar, assistant store manager, Skokie, IL

Imagine is a sparkling and revelatory look at the new science of creativity.  Shattering the myth of muses, higher powers, even creative “types,” Jonah Lehrer demonstrates that creativity is not a single gift possessed by the lucky few.  It’s a variety of distinct thought processes that we can all learn to use more effectively.  Lehrer reveals the importance of embracing the rut, thinking like a child, daydreaming productively, and adopting an outsider’s perspective.  He unveils the optimal mix of old and new partners in any creative collaboration and explains why criticism is essential to the process.  Then, he zooms out to show how we can make our neighborhoods more vibrant, our companies more productive, and our schools more effective.

Jonah Lehrer is a contributing editor at Wired, and a frequent contributor to The New Yorker.  He writes the “Head Case” column for The Wall Street Journal and regularly appears on WNYC’s Radiolab.  His writing has also appeared in Nature, The New York Times Magazine, Scientific American, and Outside.  The author of two previous books, Proust Was a Neuroscientist – a 2007 selection of Barnes & Noble’s Discover Great New Writers program — and the national bestseller How We Decide, he graduated from Columbia University and attended Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar.

The Barnes & Noble Recommends program includes promotion in stores, on bn.com, and on NOOK.

• An exclusive interview with Jonah Lehrer in The Barnes & Noble Review http://bnreview.barnesandnoble.com/
• A free reading group guide for Imagine: How Creativity Works posted on bn.com http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/imagine-jonah-lehrer/1104512940?ean=9780547386072
• An original essay written by Jonah Lehrer will appear as a More in Store feature on NOOK eReaders and tablets.
• Author appearances in select Barnes & Noble stores

Titles selected for the B&N Recommends program are the books our booksellers can’t stop talking about.  Thought-provoking and uniquely engaging, B&N Recommends selections are chosen for sheer reading pleasure and their appeal as book club picks.

The first B&N Recommends selection of 2012 was William Landay’s Defending Jacob.

“All of us at Ballantine Bantam Dell have been so thrilled with the support of the BN Recommends program for Defending Jacob,” says Libby McGuire, Executive Vice President and Publisher of Ballantine Bantam Dell.  “It has been so gratifying to see our enthusiasm for the book spread to Barnes & Noble booksellers and translate into such fantastic sales for both the hardcover and the eBook.  The B&N Recommends program was a cornerstone in the very successful launch of this much loved book.”

Previous selections of the B&N Recommends program include:

• William Landay’s Defending Jacob (Ballantine Books)
• Chris Bohjalian’s The Double Bind (Shaye Areheart Books)
• Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (Harcourt)
• Tom Rob Smith’s Child 44 (Grand Central Publishing)
• Ethan Canin’s America America (Random House)
• Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows’ The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society (The Dial Press)
• Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo (Knopf)
• Katherine Howe’s The Physick Book of Deliverance Dane (Hyperion/Voice)
• Diane Setterfield’s The Thirteenth Tale (Simon & Schuster)