Author: Douglas J. Penick
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1681377675
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 164
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Book Description
One of the oldest books in the world, The Oceans of Cruelty is a sequence of twenty-five tales from India whose central theme is the dark power of storytelling. At the start, a young king falls into the hands of a wicked sorcerer, who orders him to find a vetala, or corpse spirit, to serve him; the young king must do as he is told, and soon enough he is also under the sway of the no less malevolent spirit. Like a bat, the spirit hangs from the branches of a tree, and the king is condemned to bear it on his back through a dark forest as it whispers a riddling story in his ear. These are tales of suicidal passion, clever deceit, patriarchal oppression, and narrow escapes from death, and as long as the king can resolve the problems they pose, his bondage continues; the vampiric creature goes on commanding his attention in the dark. Only when the king is out of answers will he at last be free, though when that comes to pass—well, that’s when the whole story takes a new turn. Douglas Penick’s re-creation of this ancient work brings out all its humor and horror and vitality, as well its unmistakable relevance in a world of stories gone viral.
Author: Douglas J. Penick
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780974597447
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 226
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Book Description
Two ancient scrolls, The Secret Annals, are discovered in the 1950's in a Tokyo bombsite. They purport to be the history of an unknown 15th-Century Japanese spiritual teacher who, in a time of social chaos, sets out to establish enlightened society. He begins his teaching saying: "Abstinence is no path at all. We are gambling on true love. It is an untested path." In documents from students and spies, the Annals then give an intimate portrait of a charismatic leader, his teachings and the transformative journey he shares with his eccentric band of followers. The scrolls are unmasked as forgeries, but ten years later, a retired professor becomes obsessed. Who created this hoax? And why? To the professor the Annals offer new possibilities from a kind of parallel reality. On his deathbed, he makes his American assistant promise to continue searching and to translate the scrolls. The assistant moves to New York. It is the time of the Vietnam war and the counter-culture. He has doubts about the professor, but the world of the Secret Annals begins to seep into his life. He finds within the Prince's teaching a path through this world of trackless uncertainty. Tantalized, he senses a new world of passionate intensity just within reach. **************************************** "A compelling, passionate evocation, an ethos of the imagination, a new kind of metaphoric history, DREAMERS AND THEIR SHADOWS channels a chorus of intimacies in a chronicle of age-old conflicts." - Gaetano Kazuo Maeda, Founding Director - International Buddhist Film Festival and Festival Media *************************************** "This incredibly beautiful and unique. DREAMERS AND THEIR SHADOWS entices the reader into rich new worlds of understanding and enjoyment." - William Osborne, composer, author, journalist and, with Abbie Conant, founder of The Wasteland Company.
Author: Barrett Swanson
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1640094199
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 342
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Book Description
Barrett Swanson embarks on a personal quest across the United States to uncover what it means to be an American amid the swirl of our post-truth climate in this collection of critically acclaimed essays and reportage. A trip with his brother to a New York psychic community becomes a rollicking tour through the world of American spiritualism. At a wilderness retreat in Ohio, men seek a cure for toxic masculinity, while in the hinterlands of Wisconsin, antiwar veterans turn to farming when they cannot sustain the heroic myth of service. And when his best friend’s body washes up on the shores of the Mississippi River, he falls into the gullet of true crime discussion boards, exploring the stamina of conspiracy theories along the cankered byways of the Midwest. In this exhilarating debut, Barrett Swanson introduces us to a new reality. At a moment when grand unifying narratives have splintered into competing storylines, these critically acclaimed essays document the many routes by which people are struggling to find stability in the aftermath of our country’s political and economic collapse, sometimes at dire and disillusioning costs.
Author: Douglas J. Penick
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780974597416
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 300
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Book Description
"...These stories and songs emerge from the chaos of war to invoke telopa, essence of lineage transmission, kukkuripa, embodiment of limitless compassion, mehkhala and kankhala who unify prajna and devotion, and king indrabhuti, exemplar of an enlightened ruler. It includes biographies of all 32 rulers and rigdens of Shambhala."--P.4 Cover.
Author: John Platis
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
ISBN: 3368132121
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 193
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Book Description
Reprint of the original, first published in 1871.
Author: Marie Phillips
Publisher: Vintage Canada
ISBN: 0307371271
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 290
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Book Description
A highly entertaining novel set in North London, where the Greek gods have been living in obscurity since the seventeenth century. Being immortal isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Life’s hard for a Greek god in the twenty-first century: nobody believes in you any more, even your own family doesn’t respect you, and you’re stuck in a dilapidated hovel in North London with too many siblings and not enough hot water. But for Artemis (goddess of hunting, professional dog walker), Aphrodite (goddess of beauty, telephone sex operator) and Apollo (god of the sun, TV psychic) there’s no way out... until a meek cleaner and her would-be boyfriend come into their lives and turn the world upside down. Gods Behaving Badly is that rare thing, a charming, funny, utterly original novel that satisfies the head and the heart.
Author: Josep Pla
Publisher: Archipelago
ISBN: 1939810728
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 466
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Book Description
Peter Bush, winner of the Ramon Llull Prize for Literary Translation, brings to English this most prolific and influential of Catalan writers. Dripping with a panache that can turn in a comic instant to the most conciliatory humility, Josep Pla's foray into the land and sea most familiar to him will plunge readers head-first into its mysterious (and often tasty!) depths. Here are adventures and shipwrecks, raspy storytellers and the fishy meals that sustain them. After describing the process of beating an octopus with branches to soften up its flesh, Pla writes, "These are dishes that must be seen as a last resort." Pla inflects the mundane with the hidden rhythms of power sculpting culture, so that a hot supper is never just food--it embodies economic precarity and environmental erosion along with its own peculiar flavor. A lifetime of reporting on current events gave Pla the necessary skills to describe the world in all its gritty, funny, invigorating detail.
Author: Stefan Zweig
Publisher: Pushkin Press
ISBN: 1782273468
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 257
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Book Description
A new collection of essays by Stefan Zweig: tributes to the great artists and thinkers of the Europe of his day Stefan Zweig was one of the twentieth century's greatest authors and a tireless champion of freedom, tolerance and friendship across borders. Encounters and Destinies collects his most impassioned and moving tributes to his many illustrious friends and peers: literary, philosophical and artistic luminaries from across the Old Europe that Zweig loved so much, and which he grieved to see so cruelly destroyed by two world wars. Including pieces on Rainer Maria Rilke, Marcel Proust, Sigmund Freud, Maxim Gorky and Arturo Toscanini, this essential collection is also Zweig's tribute to the ideal of friendship: an ideal he clung to as the world he knew was torn apart.
Author:
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 9780807062173
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 224
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Book Description
This book is for the once, never, and much married. For believers and skeptics, love's fools and love's thieves. It is for people with long memories and long histories and for people who reinvent themselves in every new town, new decade, new relationship. This book is for everyone whose heart lies where it should, where it shouldn't, and, in the end, where it must. -Amy Bloom, from the Foreword In these intensely personal essays, contemporary writers probe their experiences in and thoughts about one of our most enduring social and cultural institutions. Husbands and wives celebrate marriages that work, mourn those that don't, and write frankly about adultery. Includes essays by Mark Doty, Gerald Early, Barbara Ehrenreich, Cynthia Heimel, Vivian Gornick, Phillip Lopate, Nancy Mairs, and David Mamet.
Author: Scott Russell Sanders
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 9780807062975
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 190
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Book Description
Scott Russell Sanders reveals how the pressure of the sacred breaks through the surfaces of ordinary life-a life devoted to grown-up children and aging parents, the craft of writing, and the natural world. Whether writing to his daughter and his son as each prepares to get married, or describing an encounter with a red-tailed hawk in whose form he glimpses his dead father, or praising the disciplines of writing and carpentry and teaching, Sanders registers, in finely tuned prose, the force of spirit.
