Prepare to be swept away by a story that is intimate, true, and utterly compelling. Margi Gibb’s much-loved father dies and, with her immediate family largely gone, her life is changed irrevocably. Immersing herself more deeply in art and music, she travels to America to study the sacred art of the mandala, exploring the wisdom traditions of Indigenous Indian peoples in the process. Then after a serendipitous encounter back in Australia she travels to Dharamsala to care for children in an after school program at a Tibetan women's handicraft cooperative. Her underlying passion is to initiate guitar lessons for Tibetan refugees. What follows is unexpected. Margi’s developing bonds with two very different Tibetan men, Tenzin and Yonten, change her life in complex and enduring ways. Eventually she journeys to Tibet. Kissed by a Deer is a book about East and West. It is a passionate quest for the personal and intellectual truth that only comes through lived experience. Gibb’s story gives us amazing places, and wonderful characters, people we come to love and care about despite their failings. In its pages, wisdom searchingly finds its humble roots in the connections of heart, imagination and mind; in the midst of the act of living.

This book records the stories of doctoral study experiences of the twenty-two writers. These research degree experiences are embedded in the lives and careers of the writers and the twenty-two distinctive projects draw from those individual lives and careers. The authors write about meeting the continuing demands of older and younger family members and of their struggles with ill health and work place demands while working through their studies. There is also the joy of coming to see themselves and being seen as research scholars and supporting and celebrating with others as they move through candidature proposals and ethics applications to graduation. Apart from the stories that bring the writers to their particular projects and that colour their individual journeys, storying methodology is most often selected for the research, all of which is undertaken within the arts, humanities and education. Phenomenology, narrative, ethnography are central to most of the studies and the detailed accounts of each research topic, methods and outcomes locate each of the research projects in rich bodies of knowledge. Valued writers and readers in these fields, Mary Beattie and Elaine Martin have read each reflection and provided in turn a foreword and an afterword which bookend the volume and further enrich these reflections on learning, life and work.

Deer Companions includes several years of observations and experiences at a deer farm. The reader will be introduced to a herd of several dozen white-tailed deer, become closely acquainted with several (and their human caretakers), and even see a little of what used to be called natural history. The nearest likeness to the author’s experience is the proverbial traveler to a distant land who becomes adopted into an exotic tribe. We will see the herd’s social structure, as it were, from the inside, and acquire a jealous, but very devoted, sweetheart. (That’s her on the cover.) The author has seen this happen to several other people but, after extensive research, can find no published mention of it. The picture doesn’t do it justice; no one else can see the look in Sugar’s eyes when she does that. There is also an extensive appendix describing habitat and herd manipulations in all fifty states of the Union to “enhance sporting opportunities”—multiply deer populations for hunters’ benefit. This puts away any claim that hunting is about population control.

Interesting facts about deer in a smooth narrative.

When Ben wakes up in a hospital, he wants answers. He gets them from his dreams and remembers Layla, the Assistant Manager at the grocery store he works at. Was she an important part of his life? How did he get there? Why was no one telling him anything?

Modern-day doctor Karen Anderson finds herself transported into the past and into the arms of Standing Deer, a dreamy Native American warrior.

The search for a mysterious artifact leads to a trek across the globe in this thriller from the New York Times–bestselling author of the Bourne novels. In the French countryside, a man is brutally murdered. In a Connecticut church, a priest is sacrificed. All in pursuit of an artifact rumored to possess mystical powers . . . The three-bladed weapon known as the Prey Dauw will make its owner the most feared man in the world, powerful enough to control all of Asia and its drug trade. But there is still one piece left to find. New York lawyer Chris Haye and NYPD lieutenant Seve Guarda are drawn into the bloody search when they learn their brothers have been killed. Their quest for vengeance takes them from Manhattan to France to the depths of Southeast Asia. But the man behind their brothers’ savage murders will stop at nothing to gain the ultimate prize. From the acclaimed author of the Nicholas Linnear series and many other bestsellers, as well as the novels that continue the story of Robert Ludlum’s Jason Bourne character, French Kiss is packed with “suspense that is sustained to the final page” (Los Angeles Times).

The five heartbreaking and radiant stories in John Fulton's The Animal Girl explore the awkwardness of situations in which grief and erotic love collide. Here are people in extremis, struggling mightily, and often failing, to keep it together. In the Pushcart Prize--winning "Hunters," Fulton contrasts the humorous clumsiness of dating with the grim realities of death in the tale of a middle-aged woman who keeps her cancer a secret when she starts a relationship with an avid hunter. In the novella-length title story, a lonely adolescent girl deals with the recent loss of her mother and the alien presence of her father's new girlfriend by taking out her aggression on her boss and on the animals she cares for in her summer job at a research laboratory. The final story in the collection, "The Sleeping Woman," delves into the inner life of Evelyn, a divorced professional woman who falls in love with Russell, a man whose wife is permanently brain damaged and has been unresponsive for years. The ghostly presence of Russell's wife haunts Evelyn as she discovers how her lover has been scarred by his misfortune and searches for ways they might build a long-term relationship in the wake of personal tragedy. These powerful stories approach the often sentimentalized subject of romance with tenderness and insight into the heart-worn perspective of characters who have failed at love in the past. In lucid, revelatory prose, Fulton navigates the complexity of both mid-life courtship and adolescent rage with humor and intelligence.