"Exotic...erotic... Ocean Sea is highly romantic and breathtakingly lyrical."--The New York Times Book Review With Silk, his first novel to appear in English, Alessandro Baricco immediately proved himself to be a magical storyteller. With Ocean Sea, he has been acclaimed as the successor to Italo Calvino, and a major voice in modern literature. In Ocean Sea, Alessandro Baricco presents a hypnotizing postmodern fable of human malady--psychological, existential, erotic--and the sea as a means of deliverance. At the Almayer Inn, a remote shoreline hotel, an artist dips his brush in a cup of ocean water to paint a portrait of the sea. A scientist pens love letters to a woman he has yet to meet. An adulteress searches for relief from her proclivity to fall in love. And a sixteen-year-old girl seeks a cure from a mysterious condition which science has failed to remedy. When these people meet, their fates begin to interact as if by design. Enter a mighty tempest and a ghostly mariner with a thirst for vengeance, and the Inn becomes a place where destiny and desire battle for the upper hand. Playful, provocative, and ultimately profound, Ocean Sea is a novel of striking originality and wisdom.

Avi's suspense-filled, seafaring adventure gets a bold new package!It's 1851. Fifteen-year-old Maura O'Connell and her twelve-year-old brother Patrick are about to set sail on an epic voyage to America to flee the brutal poverty of Ireland and to be reunited with their father.Eleven-year-old Laurence Kirkle, the son of an English lord, runs away from home to escape his cruel older brother and start a new life in a new world.All three children face nothing but obstacles along the way--from stolen money to con men to hunger and fatigue. It seems that none of them will get out of the port city of Liverpool until fate brings them together. Avi's masterful plot-spinning skills create an adventure filled with unexpected twists and turns.

The “down-to-earth, unsentimental, [and] high-humored” Pema Chödrön classic on learning to face our lives just as they are (Los Angeles Times) It's true, as they say, that we can only love others when we first love ourselves—and we can only experience real joy when we stop running from pain. The key to understanding these truisms is simple but not easy: we must learn to open ourselves up to life in all its manifestations. Here, spiritual teacher and When Things Fall Apart author Pema Chödrön presents a uniquely practical approach to doing just that, showing us the true value in having “no escape” from the ups and downs of life. Drawing from her own experiences with marriage, divorce, motherhood, and more, Pema reveals that when we embrace the happiness and heartache, the inspiration and confusion—all the twists and turns that are part of natural life—we can begin to discover a true wellspring of courageous love that’s been within our hearts all along. As she writes in chapter four: “Our neurosis and our wisdom are made out of the same material. If you throw out your neurosis, you also throw out your wisdom.”

From Jeff VanderMeer, the author of Borne and Annihilation, comes the paperback reissue of his cult classic City of Saints and Madmen. In this reinvention of the literature of the fantastic, you hold in your hands an invitation to a place unlike any you’ve ever visited—an invitation delivered by one of our most audacious and astonishing literary magicians. City of elegance and squalor. Of religious fervor and wanton lusts. And everywhere, on the walls of courtyards and churches, an incandescent fungus of mysterious and ominous origin. In Ambergris, a would-be suitor discovers that a sunlit street can become a killing ground in the blink of an eye. An artist receives an invitation to a beheading—and finds himself enchanted. And a patient in a mental institution is convinced that he’s made up a city called Ambergris, imagined its every last detail, and that he’s really from a place called Chicago . . . By turns sensuous and terrifying, filled with exotica and eroticism, this interwoven collection of stories, histories, and “eyewitness” reports invokes a universe within a puzzle box where you can lose—and find—yourself again.

An introduction to the Buddhist concept of nirvana, offering its own interpretations of key texts and translations for non-specialist readers.