In the Mood: Christine Feehan's new ­novel, "Dark Wolf," enters the hardcover fiction list at No. It's the 25th book in her "Dark" series of paranormal romances, about a race of shape-shifters called the Carpathians - basically, kindhearted vampires who refuse to kill humans and often have energetic, soul-trembling sex with them. Feehan discovered her calling while she was still in middle school; speaking with the romance website RBL Romantica early in her career, she remembered sitting in math class and working on her first steamy love scene until the teacher confiscated her notebook. "You should have seen his face," she said. I was about 13 at the time. I don't know which of us was more mortified. But despite her early start she delayed publishing for a long time, working more than 20 years as a martial arts instructor (she has a third-degree black belt in karate) and writing for herself while she and her husband raised 11 children. "I can write with the entire household around me most of the time," she told another website in 2002. My husband reads all my books and had better love them - and if he doesn't, he'd better lie like crazy with a smile on his face. The only thing I avoid while writing a love scene is my children. Children and writing love scenes don't mix; they get you out of the mood very, very fast. Mood Ring: If you look at the best-seller list as a kind of national mood ring, these days it would be pitch black with angst. First Daniel Smith's "Monkey Mind: A Memoir of Anxiety" hit the list in 2012; now here comes Scott Stossel with "My Age of Anxiety: Fear, Hope, Dread, and the Search for Peace of Mind," new on the hardcover nonfiction list at No. Nathan Heller's review appears on Page 13. Stossel is the editor of The Atlantic and the author of a Sargent Shriver biography - and also, as it happens, the nephew of the pundit and Fox Business Network host John Stossel. So what did Uncle John think of the book? "My nephew," he wrote in a Twitter post earlier this month, "would not be anxious if he embraced libertarianism. Nanny State induces stress! But the book, he conceded, "is good." Moody Blues: The highest-ranking new title on this week's hardcover nonfiction list, at No. 4, is Daniel J. Siegel's "Brainstorm: The Power and Purpose of the Teenage Brain." A clinical psychiatrist at U.C.L.A., Siegel appeared recently on NPR's "Diane Rehm Show" and fielded a question from a listener who might have been speaking for parents everywhere: "How do we . . . deal with the moodiness and personality change our teenagers go through?" His advice, more or less, was to remember it's normal and duck. "If you engage your adolescent," he said, "and say, "You shouldn't talk to me like that, young lady, blah blah blah blah," you can be sure you're going to have a long set of negative interactions that are really unnecessary."