Presents the lives of eight individuals whose experiences illuminate a variety of dilemmas and anxieties that most of us encounter at different points of our lives. According to Spinelli (psychology, Regent's College), therapy at its most fundamental level involves the act of revealing, reassessing, and reconstructing the life stories that clients tell themselves in order to establish or maintain meaning. The existential therapist must not only listen, but must remain "un-knowing," i.e. open to new interpretation of that which is seemingly familiar, thus bringing to light unexamined possibilities. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Funny, tough, and heartbreaking — often all at once — Mimi Lipson’s debut collection is a grand tour of bars, diners, bus stations, dog parks, hardcore clubs, vacant lots, and other places that draw people whose inner lives are richer than their wallets. Lipson’s alter ego, the sharp-tongued and sharp-eyed Kitty, appears in a variety of guises: as a seven-year-old on a Florida vacation scammed by her roguish father, as a college student who receives a stunningly crucial education outside the classroom, as a passenger whose life changes on a cross-country bus. After meeting her parents, her brother, her friends and coworkers, we are introduced to Isaac, the sui generis man-child who becomes both her lover and her charge, a human roller-coaster who swings her between delight, exasperation, and mortal peril. Like a dinner composed of appetizers, Lipson’s book is very nearly a novel, in mosaic form, without all the boring parts. Her wit is as sharp as a serpent’s tooth, her sentences as percussively satisfying as billiard balls clicking into the pocket.

Spinelli is one of the leading exponents existential therapy and one of its most brilliant practitioners.

In the winter of 2012 a series of recording were made in the small hamlet of Osikovce, West Carpathians. The subject of the recordings was a man called Marus Pohansky, considered by many to be one of the last true Carpathian Witches. Descended from a long line of Pagan practitioners he lived according to a philosophy that would have been familiar to his ancestors, yet without the pretension often found in modern or new age "guru's". He was a man who simply did what he and his family had always done. Not much of a teacher, he often told stories and it was only after a while that I began to realise the nuggets I was looking for were buried somewhere in these innocuous tales. This is a book of four of his tales. They are true stories, according to Marus, and involve real life characters. The places are certainly real enough as I have visited them myself, but as for the tales.....well, who knows. However, whether the stories are true or not, they were believed by Marus and many local people; and wrapped within tales are perhaps deeper memories of times and ways of being which may soon pass.

MACHINE OF DEATH tells thirty-four different stories about people who know how they will die. Prepare to have your tears jerked, your spine tingled, your funny bone tickled, your mind blown, your pulse quickened, or your heart warmed. Or better yet, simply prepare to be surprised. Because even when people do have perfect knowledge of the future, there's no telling exactly how things will turn out.

When Denise Levertov died on December 20, 1997, she left behind forty finished poems, which now form her last collection, This Great Unknowing. Few poets have possessed so great a gift or so great a body of work—when she died at 74, she had been a published poet for more than half a century. The poems themselves shine with the artistry of a writer at the height of her powers.

The author of a two-decades-old, but world-famous, novel in the last days of Communist East Germany is asked to appraise a mysterious manuscript that has dangerous political overtones, putting himself and his young lover in danger.

The Cloud of Unknowing is an anonymous work of Christian mysticism written in Middle English in the latter half of the 14th century. The text is a spiritual guide on contemplative prayer in the late Middle Ages. The underlying message of this work suggests that the way to know God is to abandon consideration of God's particular activities and attributes, and be courageous enough to surrender one's mind and ego to the realm of "unknowing", at which point one may begin to glimpse the nature of God.