Like Willows on a Riverbank is a collection of short stories and devotionals meant to encourage, uplift, and inspire the reader. It will hit all the right notes and chords, filling your heart and playing its strings like an orchestra.

In this delightful dive into the bygone world of Kenneth Grahame’s The Wind in the Willows staunch Mole, sociable Water Rat, severe Badger, and troublesome and ebullient Toad of Toad Hall are joined by a young mole lady, Beryl, and her dear friend, Rabbit. There are adventures, kidnappings, lost letters, and family secrets—lavishly illustrated throughout by award-winning artist Kathleen Jennings. Praise for Kij Johnson: “The Fox Woman immediately sets the author in the front rank of today’s novelists.” —Lloyd Alex-ander “Johnson has a singular vision and I’m going to be borrowing (stealing) from her.” —Sherman Alexie “Johnson’s language is beautiful, her descriptions of setting visceral, and her characters compellingly drawn.” —Publishers Weekly (starred re-view) “Johnson would fit quite comfortably on a shelf with Karen Russell, Erin Morgen-stern and others who hover in the simultaneous state of being both “literary” and “fantasy” writ-ers.” —Shelf Awareness Kij Johnson’s stories have won the Sturgeon, World Fantasy, and Nebula awards. She has taught writing and has worked at Dark Horse, Microsoft, and Real Networks. She has run bookstores, worked as a radio announcer and engineer, edited cryptic crosswords, and waitressed in a strip bar. Kathleen Jennings was raised on fairytales in western Queensland. She trained as a lawyer and filled the margins of her notes with pen-and-ink illustrations. She has been nominated for the World Fantasy award and has received several Ditmar Awards. She lives in Brisbane, Australia.

The Wind in the Willows is a classic of children's literature, first published in 1908. Alternately slow moving and fast paced, it focuses on four anthropomorphised animal characters in a pastoral version of England. The novel is notable for its mixture of mysticism, adventure, morality, and camaraderie and celebrated for its evocation of the nature of the Thames valley.

When a spooky nocturnal creature starts terrorizing the riverfront, Mr. Rat's clever daughter sets to work solving the mystery and unmasking the culprit. But that is only the beginning of the intrigue and adventure one summer on a New England coastal estuary in the 1920's.

I received Kenneth Grahames The Wind in the Willows as a present on my seventh birthday. My mother probably read it to me at least fifty times in the next few years. A cousin suggested it as a gift for me. One of her teachers fi nished out class time reading aloud from her favorite books, of which The Wind in the Willows was one. I later learned that my cousins teacher continued to read it every other year for the rest of her life. Her devotion to it and the comment of an adult fictional character on TV that The Wind in the Willows was her favorite book convinced me that it isnt just for children and that I could go back to it. I now read it once a year.

The Essential Evangelical Parallel Bible enables readers to easily compare the texts of a quarter of modern translations that span the full range of scholarly approaches to the ancient text.

The Yada Yada Prayer Group is in trouble—and they’re having a hard time getting out. Jodi Baxter is feeling overwhelmed, to say the least. Every day it seems that more blessings, problems, and everything in between crop up among her Yada Yada sisters, and their prayer list is getting out of control. Not only are the Yada Yadas still recovering from the vicious racial attack on Mark, but Ruth and Ben’s midlife pregnancy takes a dangerous turn, Avis’s daughter and grandbaby show up unannounced, Florida’s artistic son gets caught tagging, and Uptown is talking about merging with New Morning into one racially mixed church—raising anxiety and stress to new levels. To top it all off, Jodi keeps saying yes—to everything. It’s getting harder to see God in the everyday rat race of life, especially in the face of exhaustion. With so many burdens resting on her circle of sisters, Jodi fi nds herself trapped by the good—and bad—habit of trying to fi x everything and everyone. After lots (and lots) of failures, Jodi begins to learn that God can use anything, even the messes we make, to accomplish His good purposes. What will it take to help the Yada Yadas focus on God’s promises instead of getting caught by the lies we so easily believe?

Is God a man? If God is our Heavenly Father, does that require God to be male? Does the Bible ever describe God as a mother, as well as a father? If human fathers can show us what God is like, can we see God's image in our mothers too? How do women uniquely reveal the nature of the One who created both male and female in the image of God? Mothers as the Image of God explores answers to these important questions, along with many others. This book guides the reader on a series of biblical reflections designed to help both men and women experience the motherly love of God revealed in Scripture, and to nourish women with the deep confidence that the most feminine aspects of their nature are a profound reflection of the very image of God, an image that is exquisitely displayed through mothering--whether that takes place biologically, through adoption, or by pouring into spiritual children.

Mole, Ratty, Toad, and Badger are back for more rollicking adventures in this sequel to The Wind in the Willows. With lavish illustrations by Clint Young, Jacqueline Kelly masterfully evokes the magic of Kenneth Grahame's beloved children's classic and brings it to life for a whole new generation. A riveting tale of bravery, bravado, and hot-air ballooning!

The waters of river and sea represent a kind of freedom, a liberty which, as Iris Murdoch writes, enables man "to exist sanely without fear and to perceive what is real." As settings in fiction, the riverbank and seashore are rich in potential, offering a sense of destiny and suggesting the possibility of self-truth and self-knowledge. In British literature, the rural costal setting-shadowed by cliffs, tugged by the constant movement of the sea--becomes the site of revelation and generates the energy that brings characters to a new level of self-awareness. The river's embankments, bridges and tunnels often mark specific stages of revelation and movement in plot. Entrapment and isolation, contingency and communication are themes that seem born of such settings. This book examines the ways in which 21 modern and postmodern writers (from Tennyson to Ted Hughes, from Jane Austen to Jane Gardam) have made use of the physical environment of riverbank and seashore in their work. It considers how each author employs the physical settings in the service of plot and character development, and how those settings are used to connect with some of the major intellectual concerns of the late19th and 20th centuries. Appendices offer significant quotations from the texts under discussion, arranged according to the location they describe: the rural river, the urban river, river into sea, the rural shore, and the urban shore.