It's the Mountain Way is a coming-of-age story filled with suspense and memories of first love. Savannah Benjamin, born and raised in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee, knew the ways of the mountain. She had only experienced the outside world from the books she read. But books couldn't teach her how first love felt, or explain why some people who seemed good were not always trustworthy. They didn't tell her that teenagers could be mean or unfriendly. These lessons she had to learn for herself. Set in 1983, marrying young was not unusual in the isolated hollows and villages of the mountains. At fourteen, Savannah was no longer a child, but not yet an adult. Her mother had married at fifteen, she wanted more for her daughter. Horace Jenks, the local moonshiner, had other plans for Savannah.

Masterfully wrought and keenly observed, Mountain Path draws on Harriette Simpson Arnow’s experiences as a schoolteacher in downtrodden Pulaski County, Kentucky, deep in the heart of Appalachia, prior to WWII. Far from a quaint portrait of rural life, Arnow’s novel documents hardships, poverty, illiteracy, and struggles. She also recognizes a fragile cultural richness, one characterized by “those who like open fires, hounds, children, human talk and song instead of TV and radio, the wisdom of the old who had seen all of life from birth to death,” and which has since been eroded by the advent of highways and industry. In Mountain Path, Arnow exquisitely captures the voices, faces, and ways of a people she cared for deeply, and who evoked in her a deep respect and admiration.

THIS IS A BOOK ABOUT SELF-SABOTAGE. Why we do it, when we do it, and how to stop doing it-for good. Coexisting but conflicting needs create self-sabotaging behaviors. This is why we resist efforts to change, often until they feel completely futile. But by extracting crucial insight from our most damaging habits, building emotional intelligence by better understanding our brains and bodies, releasing past experiences at a cellular level, and learning to act as our highest potential future selves, we can step out of our own way and into our potential. For centuries, the mountain has been used as a metaphor for the big challenges we face, especially ones that seem impossible to overcome. To scale our mountains, we actually have to do the deep internal work of excavating trauma, building resilience, and adjusting how we show up for the climb. In the end, it is not the mountain we master, but ourselves.

Journalism professor Adam Colbert has come home to Albuquerque after a reporting career that took him all over the world. A nineteenth century adobe house with a mansard roof that he admired as a boy is now his home on Mountain Road. He loves the old neighborhood and the road that once connected Albuquerque with the Sandia Mountains. But some unwelcome new neighbors are the organizers of a twenty-week abortion ban initiative on the fall municipal election ballot. Adam’s journalism students write investigative stories about the initiative and its backers, which puts him in the crosshairs of a corrupt university regent who supports the anti-abortion campaign. Two women, one a young anti-fascist vagabond and the other a gorgeous and ambitious graduate student, enter his life and dramatically influence his political activism and his romantic experience.

Mystic, teacher, and therapist Dr Joseph Randolph Bowers reveals the secrets of solitary life, contemplation, and enlightenment. Like a master weaver and guru Dr Bowers teaches the reader how to experience relief from suffering and how to attain awakening in freedom, mindfulness, and true joy. Seekers on the way will want to learn how to create your own 'rule of life' and how to nurture life-long vow practices that grow with you and that match your values and aspirations. Be forewarned, this knowledge of the ages can change you forever. Made for the western mind this is a modern secular synergy of Christian, Franciscan, Buddhist, Hindu, Mi'kmaq First Nation, Science, and Zen traditions. 'Solitude Awakens: The Heart Forest Mountain Way' is like a modern Lotus Flower Sutra of the Bodhisattva of Compassion in a clear and practical wisdom.

In this masterpiece of nature writing, Nan Shepherd describes her journeys into the Cairngorm mountains of Scotland. There she encounters a world that can be breathtakingly beautiful at times and shockingly harsh at others. Her intense, poetic prose explores and records the rocks, rivers, creatures and hidden aspects of this remarkable landscape. Shepherd spent a lifetime in search of the 'essential nature' of the Cairngorms; her quest led her to write this classic meditation on the magnificence of mountains, and on our imaginative relationship with the wild world around us. Composed during the Second World War, the manuscript of The Living Mountain lay untouched for more than thirty years before it was finally published.

John Darnielle describesMaster of Reality in the voice of a fifteen-year-old boy being held in an adolescent psychiatric center in southern California in 1985. The narrator explains Black Sabbath like an emissary from an alien race describing his culture to his captors: passionately, patiently, and lovingly.

"Should appeal to all rugged individualists who dream of escape to the forest."—The New York Times Book Review Sam Gribley is terribly unhappy living in New York City with his family, so he runs away to the Catskill Mountains to live in the woods—all by himself. With only a penknife, a ball of cord, forty dollars, and some flint and steel, he intends to survive on his own. Sam learns about courage, danger, and independence during his year in the wilderness, a year that changes his life forever. “An extraordinary book . . . It will be read year after year.” —The Horn Book

"The bear knows exactly what the mountain looks like a forest. The sheep, octopus, and ant also know the mountain. It's a meadow! It's surrounded by water...The chamois and snow hare have their opinions too. It seems the mountain looks different to every animal. How can that be? And whose point of view is right?"--