Learn how to better navigate the challenges of adult life with Gail Sheehy’s landmark bestseller—named one of the ten most influential books of our times by the Library of Congress. For decades, Gail Sheehy’s Passages has been inspiring readers to see the predictable crises of adult life as opportunities for growth. She charts the stages between 18 and 50 as unfolding in a pattern of adult development: once recognized, more easily managed. Passages is an insightful road map of adulthood that illustrates with vivid stories our continuing personality and sexual changes throughout the “Trying 20s,” “Catch 30s,” “Forlorn 40s,” and “Refreshed (or Resigned) 50s.” One comment is continuously repeated by men, women, singles, couples, and people who recover from a midlife crisis: “This book changed my life.”

Susan Frybort steps into the eye of bewildering times with a fresh collection of encouraging poems that bravely speak to the many facets of life. Connections, transitions, loss, and change meet us in the center of our hearts. Look to the Clearing will offer a cornerstone of comfort and validation in the moments most needed. It will assure you that there is a way out of the dark, a promise tucked inside each purposeful season and a calm, benevolent grace walking beside you on your path towards home. We move through dense forest into open glades on our journey, creating experiences of going from shadow to light, from enclosure into spaciousness- allowing for a different level of perspective, appreciation, and acceptance. Each poem is a loving reminder of a place waiting for you to softly land. A place to integrate, be nurtured, or rest. A place of much needed restoration, where the sunlight filters through the leaves to offer clarity.

Just look closely-and creative doors will open! This second book in the successful FOCUS series unlocks a doorway to the imagination, with a collection of approximately 250 photographs of passages of all kinds, captured by amateur photographers. Doors are rich in meaning: they literally allow us to move from one place to the other, but also symbolize temptation, invitation, separation, and mystery. For these reasons, as well as their physical beauty, photographers have found them irresistible. From a graffiti-scrawled urban door and an aged barn door to an elegant glass door glowing with dappled light and a curious circular door set into an ivy-covered rock wall, these images redefine the ordinary…and shine a new light on the world.

A critical approach to interactive fiction, as literature and game. Interactive fiction—the best-known form of which is the text game or text adventure—has not received as much critical attention as have such other forms of electronic literature as hypertext fiction and the conversational programs known as chatterbots. Twisty Little Passages (the title refers to a maze in Adventure, the first interactive fiction) is the first book-length consideration of this form, examining it from gaming and literary perspectives. Nick Montfort, an interactive fiction author himself, offers both aficionados and first-time users a way to approach interactive fiction that will lead to a more pleasurable and meaningful experience of it. Twisty Little Passages looks at interactive fiction beginning with its most important literary ancestor, the riddle. Montfort then discusses Adventure and its precursors (including the I Ching and Dungeons and Dragons), and follows this with an examination of mainframe text games developed in response, focusing on the most influential work of that era, Zork. He then considers the introduction of commercial interactive fiction for home computers, particularly that produced by Infocom. Commercial works inspired an independent reaction, and Montfort describes the emergence of independent creators and the development of an online interactive fiction community in the 1990s. Finally, he considers the influence of interactive fiction on other literary and gaming forms. With Twisty Little Passages, Nick Montfort places interactive fiction in its computational and literary contexts, opening up this still-developing form to new consideration.

Messages and prayers for those facing life-threatening illness, preparing for dying, or meeting other transitions.

A random collection of verse that offers various Christian, familial, humorous and imaginary themes.

WINNER OF THE COSTA FIRST NOVEL AWARD A NATIONAL BOOK FOUNDATION 5 UNDER 35 WINNER OF THE BRITISH BOOK AWARD FOR DEBUT FICTION “Open Water is tender poetry, a love song to Black art and thought, an exploration of intimacy and vulnerability between two young artists learning to be soft with each other in a world that hardens against Black people.”—Yaa Gyasi, author of Homegoing In a crowded London pub, two young people meet. Both are Black British, both won scholarships to private schools where they struggled to belong, both are now artists—he a photographer, she a dancer—and both are trying to make their mark in a world that by turns celebrates and rejects them. Tentatively, tenderly, they fall in love. But two people who seem destined to be together can still be torn apart by fear and violence, and over the course of a year they find their relationship tested by forces beyond their control. Narrated with deep intimacy, Open Water is at once an achingly beautiful love story and a potent insight into race and masculinity that asks what it means to be a person in a world that sees you only as a Black body; to be vulnerable when you are only respected for strength; to find safety in love, only to lose it. With gorgeous, soulful intensity, and blistering emotional intelligence, Caleb Azumah Nelson gives a profoundly sensitive portrait of romantic love in all its feverish waves and comforting beauty. This is one of the most essential debut novels of recent years, heralding the arrival of a stellar and prodigious young talent.

A collection of daily affirmations and meditations that articulate the often unspoken emotions experienced at important moments in our lives. These poignant, often beautiful short prayers or acknowledgments are designed to be read at the same time each day when our lives are changing dramatically--perhaps a loved one is dying, someone is being born, or we are leaving home.

A remarkable weaving of faith, myth, and humanity from award-winning novelist Walter Wangerin Jr. Faith, writes Walter Wangerin, is 'a relationship with the living God enacted in this world.' It is ever-changing and inherently dramatic. The Orphan Passages is Wangerin's compelling story of a Christian pastor's career and the drama of his faith. Interlaced with the classical myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, this daring and unconventional inquiry into Christian experience ranks among the most challenging of Wangerin's works. Wangerin sees in the ancient myth an extraordinary parallel of the twists and turns individuals follow in their journeys of faith. In the author's own present-day Reverend Orpheus, that parallel is vividly played out -- rendering the modern story of one man both universal and timeless. The Orphan Passages asserts the truth of a legend that people of all times have experienced. It has the immediacy of a well-wrought novel, driving readers on to the surprising yet inevitable conclusion.

Being Myself is a contemplative exploration of the essential nature of our self. Everyone has the sense of ‘being myself,' but not everyone knows their self clearly. In most cases, our sense of self is mixed up with the content of experience and, as a result, its natural condition of peace and happiness is veiled. Through investigation and analogy, the meditations in this collection take us back to our true nature again and again, until we begin to find our self naturally and effortlessly established there, as that. In time, experience loses its capacity to veil our being, and its innate peace and joy emerge from the background of experience. * * * The Essence of Meditation Series presents meditations on the essential, non-dual understanding that lies at the heart of all the great religious and spiritual traditions, compiled from contemplations led by Rupert Spira at his meetings and retreats. This simple, contemplative approach, which encourages a clear seeing of one’s experience rather than any kind of effort or discipline, leads the reader to an experiential understanding of their own essential being and the peace and fulfilment that are inherent within it.