Are you comfortable living on the surface of life, or do you strive to explore life’s enigmatic deeper core? Are you conscious of the possible immense insignificance of life when viewed as a tiny splinter in the fabric of a multi-universe some astrophysicists speak of? Can that realization be grounded in an existential sound sense that might make for communal coherence? How do you discover truth? Does a probing deep introspection help? How important is it to understand one’s Self? How severely do our existential confinements restrict our ability to grasp enlarging awareness? Is higher honesty something mankind is capable of? Exercising our God-given capacity for Reason may be the only outlet available to us for escaping the indited cloisters and confinements of our human condition. Becoming a pioneer in the forest of doubt may be the only way to attain to a newer vision of human reality.

Engaging with the work of Nobel Prize-winning poet Odysseus Elytis within the framework of international modernism, Marinos Pourgouris places the poet's work in the context of other modernist and surrealist writers in Europe. At the same time, Pourgouris puts forward a redefinition of European Modernism that makes the Mediterranean, and Greece in particular, the discursive contact zone and incorporates neglected elements such as national identity and geography. Beginning with an examination of Greek Modernism, Pourgouris's study places Elytis in conversation with Albert Camus; analyzes the influence of Charles Baudelaire, Gaston Bachelard, and Sigmund Freud on Elytis's theory of analogies; traces the symbol of the sun in Elytis's poetry by way of the philosophies of Heraclitus and Plotinus; examines the influence of Le Corbusier on Elytis's theory of architectural poetics; and takes up the subject of Elytis's application of his theory of Solar Metaphysics to poetic form in the context of works by Freud, C. G. Jung, and Michel Foucault. Informed by extensive research in the United States and Europe, Pourgouris's study makes a compelling contribution to the comparative study of Greek modernism, the Mediterranean, and the work of Odysseus Elytis.

Sonia Delaunay, wife of painter Robert Delaunay, and co-founder of the Orphist school in 1910, was the center of a brilliant circle in Paris. Madsen offers a rich and compelling look at this fascinating and influential woman, the first living female artist to have a retrospective show at the Louvre.

"Oh, no-" the anguished cry rang out. For a sister and her brothers, it was terrible news-of a death in the family-the death that left them dumbfounded. Broken hearted, here they were, a grand family suddenly bereft of a great part. It made no sense. "...Sorry to inform you," the awful words struck like a thunderbolt. Mom and dad had crashed on their vacation trip. -So unfair, so unreal, so jarring...so final. All the siblings could think of was how much love was lost to them. Their parents were the linchpins; they were the finest; they were the most revered. At a loss due to a loss. So much love and affection was denied them in an unpredictable moment. What was to become of them? Mom with her daily wisdom. Dad with his usual counsel. Mom with her laugh. Dad with his wry humor. Mom with her catering and caring. Dad with his hugs and counsel. What will they do without them? The sister and her husband, the brothers and their wives, succumbed to the pain, weakening them. Where would the strength come from that was required to survive such a tragedy? When ravaged by happenstance, What holds the family together when hope and promise lose some of their dash? In the moments of crisis, inevitably, people are hanging on by hanging tough. That courage comes from their heritage, which is the real force, the saving grace. It's not just what they have inherited in family lore, but the bond that ties endowment and legacy together in a triumvirate that can spark the spirit. Haunting Memories says something about how desire can influence perception; by allowing-or causing-us to see what we want to see. We wonder when they're gone, Did we do enough for them? Did we express our love and affection often enough? Were we good to them? We aren't going to be able to answer yes to all such questions without some reservation. -Because we're never going to think we've done all that we could have or should have done for our loved ones. We can't get our minds off them. We can't let them go. We want them back. But we can't have them back. They are where they are. -And we can't get there from here.

Intended as a contribution to the study of religion and society, this book examines Buddhist monasticism in Myanmar. The book focuses on the Shwegyin, one of the most important but least understood monastic groups in the country. It illuminates key aspects of monastic and wider Burmese Buddhist thought and practice, and ultimately argues for the distinctiveness of elements of that thought and practice in comparison to the Buddhist cultures of Sri Lanka and Laos.

What are the origins of greatness? Few other questions have caused such intense debate, controversy, and diversity of opinions. In recent years, a large body of research has accumulated that suggests that the origins of greatness are extraordinarily complex. Instead of talent or practice, it's talent and practice. Instead of nature or nature, it's nature via nurture. Instead of practice, it's deliberate practice. Instead of the causes of greatness in general, it's the determinants of greatness specific to a field. The Complexity of Greatness brings together a variety of perspectives and the most cutting-edge research on genes, talent, intelligence, expertise, deliberate practice, creativity, prodigies, savants, passion, and persistence. A variety of different domains are represented, including science, mathematics, expert memory, acting, visual arts, music, and sports. This book demonstrates that the truth about greatness is far more nuanced, complex, and fascinating than any one viewpoint or paradigm can possibly reveal. Indeed, it suggests that the time has come to go beyond talent or practice. Greatness is much, much more.

‘Indian Roots, Ivy Admits: 85 Essays that Got Indian Students into the Ivy League and Stanford’ is an inspired collaborative by Viral Doshi, top education consultant in India, and Mridula Maluste, leading writing and editorial consultant for university applications and more. Writing the Common Application essay is one of the most anxiety-inducing tasks that many aspiring university students encounter. The essay is meant to uniquely identify each student, and give him and her the winning edge. But how do fresh young high-schoolers captivate admissions officers through their narratives, portray themselves as agents of change, and chronicle personal achievements and individual talents without seeming to brag? How does one avoid such pitfalls, stand out and even shine in this highly competitive environment? Here to answer all these questions is a rare, illuminating gem of a book that will lead all young contenders on the path to drafting successful overseas education applications. ‘Indian Roots, Ivy Admits: 85 Essays that got Indian Students into the Ivy League and Stanford’ is for any student who aims to pursue higher education in world-class universities. It fulfils its promise to engage and empower aspiring candidates, and tops that by giving them valuable perspectives in reflecting on their lives, and in analyzing and composing thoroughly engaging essays. Every essay within these pages has been written by a young student who earned a well-deserved place in an Ivy League university or Stanford. Each essay is followed by an insightful review and an in-depth assessment that will help aspirants understand how to approach, map and write their own strongly structured, creative application essays. Curated by Viral Doshi and Mridula Maluste, two of India’s leading experts in the domain of education, this book is an invaluable resource for students and teachers, as well as enthusiastic parents.

Through pedagogical narratives, literary analyses, reflective essays, and collaborative dialogues, Narratives of Educating for Sustainability in Unsustainable Environments explores the professional and intellectual tensions of curricula, pedagogies, and personal practices that honor the relationships of interspecies ecologies, reinhabit and reconceive wounded landscapes and wounding institutions, and allow us to reattune ourselves to new yet ancient frameworks for sustainability. For the writers here, fostering sustainability in higher education means focusing on place, creating positive relationships with humans and other beings, and creating administrative structures that will maintain new approaches for the long-term, showing how teaching environmentally is at once intensely site-specific yet powerfully global, deeply personal yet visibly public. Narratives of Educating for Sustainability in Unsustainable Environments confronts the contexts that make environmental pedagogies difficult, the challenges to the well-being of the teacher-scholar, and the corrosive academic structures that compartmentalize knowledge and people. The collection simultaneously offers models for working through and within these challenges to advance understandings and ways of being on local, global, and personal levels that will turn the planetary tide toward effective and shared sustainability.

Scholarship of literature and the environment demonstrates myriad understandings of nature and culture. While some work in the field results in approaches that belong in the realm of cultural studies, other scholars have expanded the boundaries of ecocriticism to connect the practice more explicitly to disciplines such as the biological sciences, human geography, or philosophy. Even so, the field of ecocriticism has yet to clearly articulate its interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary nature. In Toward a Literary Ecology: Places and Spaces in American Literature,editors Karen E. Waldron and Robert Friedman have assembled a collection of essays that study the interconnections between literature and the environment to theorize literary ecology. The disciplinary perspectives in these essays allow readers to comprehend places and environments and to represent, express, or strive for that comprehension through literature. Contributors to this volume explore the works of several authors, including Gary Snyder, Karen Tei Yamashita, Rachel Carson, Terry Tempest Williams, Chip Ward, and Mary Oliver. Other essays discuss such topics as urban fiction as a model of literary ecology, the geographies of belonging in the work of Native American poets, and the literary ecology of place in “new” nature writing. Investigating texts for the complex interconnections they represent, Toward a Literary Ecology suggests what such texts might teach us about the interconnections of our own world. This volume also offers a means of analyzing representations of people in places within the realm of an historical, cultural, and geographically bounded yet diverse American literature. Intended for students of literature and ecology, this collection will also appeal to scholars of geography, cultural studies, philosophy, biology, history, anthropology, and other related disciplines.

Like few other works of contemporary literature, Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels found an audience of passionate and engaged readers around the world. Inspired by Ferrante’s intense depiction of female friendship and women’s intellectual lives, four critics embarked upon a project that was both work and play: to create a series of epistolary readings of the Neapolitan Quartet that also develops new ways of reading and thinking together. In a series of intertwined, original, and daring readings of Ferrante’s work and her fictional world, Sarah Chihaya, Merve Emre, Katherine Hill, and Juno Jill Richards strike a tone at once critical and personal, achieving a way of talking about literature that falls between the seminar and the book club. Their letters make visible the slow, fractured, and creative accretion of ideas that underwrites all literary criticism and also illuminate the authors’ lives outside the academy. The Ferrante Letters offers an improvisational, collaborative, and cumulative model for reading and writing with others, proposing a new method the authors call collective criticism. A book for fans of Ferrante and for literary scholars seeking fresh modes of intellectual exchange, The Ferrante Letters offers incisive criticism, insouciant riffs, and the pleasure of giving oneself over to an extended conversation about fiction with friends.