Fiction. A bond between three friends forms over a mutual fascination with an obscure Peruvian novella and is fractured by an accidental death. From the streets of Montreal's Plateau and Latin Quarter to the ruins of Machu Picchu, award-winning author Devon Code's INVOLUNTARY BLESS traces this tragic affinity with dark humour and linguistic verve. Over one hazy weekend in late August, an unnamed narrator visits his troubled friend James following a gap of many months. The two young men are set adrift in the city by way of James's memories, which flow out of him as lush set pieces--an affair, a stint volunteering at a children's hospital, a striptease show--assembling a picture of James's haunted life in the wake of their close friend's death. By turns comic, erotic, tender and harrowing, this freewheeling narrative sees Montreal's bohemians and biker gangs entwine with psychotropic shamanic practices in the mountains of Peru, in a tale of friendship and mortality as unpredictable as it is true to life. "A wry elegy for youth and a melancholy ode to Montreal. Almost as disquieting as it is entertaining, INVOLUNTARY BLISS is a literary derangement of the senses and an elegant addition to the current stream of coming-of-age fiction."--Mike Steeves "INVOLUNTARY BLISS is the right kind of coming-of-age-as-an-artist novel in that it's wry, dark, and mercifully self-aware. Even when he literally lets us admire his impressive scaffolding, Code remains a natural storyteller with a clear, urgent voice. This is a sophisticated and impressive debut."--Jonathan Bennett "How does one create urgency and profound emotional attachment in a novel about two characters conversing as they wander around Montreal? By writing one beautiful, brilliant sentence after another. By constructing an essential, inimitable spiral of narrative encoded, like DNA, with a particular life. Devon Code is up to the job: INVOLUNTARY BLISS is a marvel."--Alissa York

"To come across Gavin in person or in anecdote was always a pleasure. He was an inspiration and.. a true journalist" - James Brown Gavin Hills wrote about football and nightclubs, computer games and drugs. He reported on wars and famine, child soldiers in Africa, guerillas in South America and his own struggles with mental health at home. And also about football casuals, parties in Eurodisney and the Berlin Love Parade. He won an Amnesty International Award for his reporting. He got marriage proposals from his readers. He was loved by everyone who met him, and by quite a few others who had only read his words. His writing could be hilarious and heart-breaking, sometimes even in the same sentence. He wrote for The Faceand The Idler, for national newspapers and skateboard magazines. He founded Phat, the short-lived but innovative lads mag that inspired Loaded. He edited the official Manchester United and England football magazines. Selected by his long-time editor at The Face magazine, Sheryl Garratt, with a new foreword by Miranda Sawyer, Bliss to be Alive is a unique journey through the late eighties and nineties with this brilliant and much-missed writer. One of the most original journalists of his generation, he died tragically in May 1997. "An inspirational catalyst, Hills' writing lights up the page" - Robert Newman "Big, beautiful, bonkers, a little balding, bold and brave like a lion, a true crusader. Nothing I write about Gavin is good enough: not funny enough, not wild enough or tender enough, and it doesn't do what In want to, which is make him alive again." - Miranda Sawyer

These are vivid, visceral poems about coming of age in a place 'where the Ferris Wheel / was the tallest thing in the valley, ' where a boy would learn 'to fire a shotgun at nine and wring a chicken's neck / with one hand by twirling the bird and whipping it straight like a towel.' . . . In spite of such hardscrabble cruelties"or because of them"there is also a real tenderness in these poems, the revelations of bliss driving along an empty highway 'like opening a heavy book, / letting the pages feather themselves and finding a dried flower.' . . . The poet has a gift for rendering his world in cinematic images. . . . In short, these poems are the stuff of life itself, ugly and beautiful, wherever or whenever we happen to live it. "Martin Espada

Joseph Campbell famously defined myth as ''other people's religion.'' But he also said that one of the basic functions of myth is to help each individual through the journey of life, providing a sort of travel guide or map to reach fulfillment - or, as he called it, bliss. For Campbell, many of the world's most powerful myths support the individual's heroic path toward bliss. In Pathways to Bliss, Campbell examines this personal, psychological side of myth. Like his classic bestselling books Myths to Live By and The Power of Myth, Pathways to Bliss draws from Campbell's popular lectures and dialogues, which highlight his remarkable storytelling and ability to apply the larger themes of world mythology to personal growth and the quest for transformation. Here he anchors mythology's symbolic wisdom to the individual, applying the most poetic mythical metaphors to the challenges of our daily lives. Campbell dwells on life's important questions. Combining cross-cultural stories with the teachings of modern psychology, he examines the ways in which our myths shape and enrich our lives. He explores the many insights of Carl Jung; the notion of self as the hero; and how East and West differ in their approaches to the ego. The book also includes an extensive question-and-answer session that ranges from mythological readings of the Bible to how the Hero's Journey unfolds for women. With his usual wit and insight, Campbell draws connections between ancient symbols and modern art, schizophrenia and the Hero's Journey. Along the way, he shows how myth can help each of us truly identify and follow our bliss.

Since the time of Mesmer, in the late eighteenth century, spectacular feats of hypnosis have been documented by respected scientific researchers, yet hypnosis has remained divorced from the main body of science. In this groundbreaking work, Dr. Eugene Bliss shows that the hypnotic capability of the mind is important to the theory and practice of psychiatry, and suggests that it deserves much more attention and research. In Multiple Personality, Allied Disorders and Hypnosis, Bliss explores both the nature of multiple personality and hypnosis, and discusses how an understanding of the latter can provide insight into the nature of certain psychiatric disorders. For instance, he views multiple personality as a form of self-hypnosis, an instance of learned schizophrenia rather than an organic disorder, as is generally thought. He outlines the trace elements involved in multiple personality and other psychiatric disorders, provides a fascinating history of the origins and current ideas about hypnosis, and gives a detailed account of the use of hypnosis in the treatment of multiple personality. Based on thirty years of clinical experience, and filled with insightful personal observations, Multiple Personality, Allied Disorders and Hypnosis is an informative, fascinating book for psychiatrists, psychologists, and anyone intrigued by hypnosis and its possible beneficial use.

Klaus Merz is one of the most prominent, prolific, and versatile Swiss writers working today. Celebrated as a master of concise, condensed sentences, Merz brings depth and resonance to spare narratives with lyrical prose and striking images. Stigmata of Bliss brings together three of Merz's critically acclaimed novellas, offering English readers the perfect introduction to his work. Jacob Asleep introduces a family marked by illness, eccentricity, and a child's death. In A Man's Fate, a moment of inattention on a mountainous hike upends a teacher's life and his understanding of mortality. And finally, The Argentine traces the fluctuations of memory and desire in a man's journey around the world. In each novella, Merz takes readers on a profound and intimate journey. Read as a whole, the works complement, enrich, and echo each other.

The American fixation with marriage, so prevalent in today's debates over marriage for same-sex couples, owes much of its intensity to a small group of reformers who introduced Americans to marriage counseling in the 1930s. Today, millions of couples seek help to save their marriages each year. Over the intervening decades, marriage counseling has powerfully promoted the idea that successful marriages are essential to both individuals' and the nation's well-being. Rebecca Davis reveals how couples and counselors transformed the ideal of the perfect marriage as they debated sexuality, childcare, mobility, wage earning, and autonomy, exposing both the fissures and aspirations of American society. From the economic dislocations of the Great Depression, to more recent debates over government-funded "Healthy Marriage" programs, counselors have responded to the shifting needs and goals of American couples. Tensions among personal fulfillment, career aims, religious identity, and socioeconomic status have coursed through the history of marriage and explain why the stakes in the institution are so fraught for the couples involved and for the communities to which they belong. Americans care deeply about marriages—their own and other people's—because they have made enormous investments of time, money, and emotion to improve their own relationships and because they believe that their personal decisions about whom to marry or whether to divorce extend far beyond themselves. This intriguing book tells the uniquely American story of a culture gripped with the hope that, with enough effort and the right guidance, more perfect marital unions are within our reach.

What makes a nation happy? Is one country's sense of happiness the same as another's? In the last two decades, psychologists and economists have learned a lot about who's happy and who isn't. The Dutch are, the Romanians aren't, and Americans are somewhere in between... After years of going to the world's least happy countries, Eric Weiner, a veteran foreign correspondent, decided to travel and evaluate each country's different sense of happiness and discover the nation that seemed happiest of all. ·He discovers the relationship between money and happiness in tiny and extremely wealthy Qatar (and it's not a good one) ·He goes to Thailand, and finds that not thinking is a contented way of life. ·He goes to the tiny Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan, and discovers they have an official policy of Gross National Happiness! ·He asks himself why the British don't do happiness? In Weiner's quest to find the world's happiest places, he eats rotten Icelandic shark, meditates in Bangalore, visits strip clubs in Bangkok and drinks himself into a stupor in Reykjavik. Full of inspired moments, The Geography of Bliss accomplishes a feat few travel books dare and even fewer achieve: to make you happier.

Aristotle believed semen to be the purest of all bodily secretions, a vehicle for the spirit or psyche that gives form to substance. For Proust's narrator in Swann's Way, waking to find he has experienced a nocturnal emission, it is the product of "some misplacing of my thigh." The heavy metal band Metallica used it to adorn an album cover. Beyond its biological function, semen has been applied with surprising frequency to metaphorical and narratological purposes. In Images of Bliss, Murat Aydemir undertakes an original and extensive analysis of images of male orgasm and semen. In a series of detailed case studies--Aristotle's On the Generation of Animals; Andres Serrano's use of bodily fluids in his art; paintings by Holbein and Leonardo; Proust's In Search of Lost Time; hard-core pornography (both straight and gay); and key texts from the poststructuralist canon, including Lacan on the phallus, Bataille on expenditure, Barthes on bliss, and Derrida on dissemination--Aydemir traces the complex and often contradictory possibilities for imagination, description, and cognition that both the idea and the reality of semen make available. In particular, he foregrounds the significance of male ejaculation for masculine subjectivity. More often than not, Aydemir argues, the event or object of ejaculation emerges as the instance through which identity, meaning, and gender are not so much affirmed as they are relentlessly and productively questioned, complicated, and displaced. Combining close readings of diverse works with subtle theoretical elaboration and a keen eye for the cultural ideals and anxieties attached to sexuality, Images of Bliss offers a convincing and long overdue critical exploration of ejaculation in Western culture. Murat Aydemir is assistant professor of comparative literature at the University of Amsterdam.

The discourse of Buddhist studies has traditionally been structured around texts and nations (the transmission of Buddhism from India to China to Japan). And yet, it is doubtful that these categories reflect in any significant way the organizing themes familiar to most Buddhists. It could be argued that cultic practices associated with particular buddhas and bodhisattvas are more representative of the way Buddhists conceive of their relation to tradition. This volume aims to explore this aspect of Buddhism by focusing on one of its most important cults, that of the Buddha Amitabha. Approaching the Land of Bliss is a rich collection of studies of texts and ritual practices devoted to Amitabha, ranging from Tibet to Japan and from early medieval times to the present.