This masterful translation of a recent Bolivian novel, En el pais del silencio, transports us to a mysterious, silent, and unfamiliar land where astonishing truths are placed within our grasp. Like a parabola, this amazing story begins and ends in the same place on the same day in the life of a single persona with three interior entities: Jursafú, The Other, and The Dead Man. By portraying them as separate, Urzagasti accentuates their interrelatedness, for one character cannot grow without the others, nor can any one of them move toward an ultimate goal without the experience and knowledge of the other two. The author’s mature and thoroughly Bolivian style is marked by a synthesis of poetic and novelistic techniques which blend perfectly the indigenous and European voices of his ancestral home.

A splendid collection from a true master It is often in solitude that a writer begins to understand herself. This becomes evident in The Land of Silence, May Sarton’s collection of poems previously published in the New Yorker and Harper’s Magazine, as Sarton searches for solitude and tries to understand the regrets and ecstasies associated with it. Images from these poems linger in the mind’s eye: a bird, a dream. Sarton’s verse feels real, yet it represents something more. Published in 1953, the year after Sarton won the Reynolds Lyric Award of the Poetry Society of America, The Land of Silence presents a poet at peak form.

2017 INSPY Award winner, general fiction category Before Christ called her daughter . . . Before she stole healing by touching the hem of his garment . . . Elianna is a young girl crushed by guilt. After her only brother is killed while in her care, Elianna tries to earn forgiveness by working for her father’s textile trade and caring for her family. When another tragedy places Elianna in sole charge of the business, her talent for design brings enormous success, but never the absolution she longs for. As her world unravels, she breaks off her betrothal to the only man she will ever love. Then illness strikes, isolating Elianna from everyone, stripping everything she has left. No physician can cure her. No end is in sight. Until she hears whispers of a man whose mere touch can heal. After so many years of suffering and disappointment, is it possible that one man could redeem the wounds of body . . . and soul?

Lilly and Jimmy were traveling through the woods late at night to escape from their hometown. They run into a bloodthirsty fiend, who attacks them within a moments notice. They are scattered, running wild into the night, as Jimmy gets dangerously wounded. They then get separated as Lillys left alone, where she too gets caught by the beast. As her human life ends, a new one startsshe becomes something else as she awakens in a new form. She runs wild as she is set free from her worries, ready to slaughter all who did her wrong in her town.

Written by a young human rights worker, "Silence on the Mountain" is a virtuoso work of reporting and a masterfully plotted narrative tracing the history of Guatemala's 36-year internal war, a conflict that claimed the lives of more than 200,000 people.

Roger Ebert was the most influential film critic in the United States, the first to win a Pulitzer Prize. For almost fifty years, he wrote with plainspoken eloquence about the films he loved for the Chicago Sun-Times, his vast cinematic knowledge matched by a sheer love of life that bolstered his appreciation of films. Ebert had particular admiration for the work of director Werner Herzog, whom he first encountered at the New York Film Festival in 1968, the start of a long and productive relationship between the filmmaker and the film critic. Herzog by Ebert is a comprehensive collection of Ebert’s writings about the legendary director, featuring all of his reviews of individual films, as well as longer essays he wrote for his Great Movies series. The book also brings together other essays, letters, and interviews, including a letter Ebert wrote Herzog upon learning of the dedication to him of “Encounters at the End of the World;” a multifaceted profile written at the 1982 Cannes Film Festival; and an interview with Herzog at Facet’s Multimedia in 1979 that has previously been available only in a difficult-to-obtain pamphlet. Herzog himself contributes a foreword in which he discusses his relationship with Ebert. Brimming with insights from both filmmaker and film critic, Herzog by Ebert will be essential for fans of either of their prolific bodies of work.

Sitting in stillness, the practice of meditation, and the cultivation of awareness are commonly thought to be the preserves of Hindus and Buddhists. Martin Laird shows that the Christian tradition of contemplation has its own refined teachings on using a prayer word to focus the mind, working with the breath to cultivate stillness, and the practice of inner vigilance or awareness. But this book is not a mere historical survey of these teachings. In Into the Silent Land, we see the ancient wisdom of both the Christian East and West brought sharply to bear on the modern-day longing for radical openness to God in the depths of the heart. Laird's book is not like the many presentations for beginners. While useful for those just starting out, this book serves especially as a guide for those who desire to journey yet deeper into the silence of God. The heart of the book focuses on negotiating key moments of struggle on the contemplative path, when the whirlwind of distractions or the brick wall of boredom makes it difficult to continue. Laird shows that these inner struggles, even wounds, that any person of prayer must face, are like riddles, trying to draw out of us our own inner silence. Ultimately Laird shows how the wounds we loathe become vehicles of the healing silence we seek, beyond technique and achievement. Throughout the language is fresh, direct, and focused on real-life examples of people whose lives are incomparably enriched by the practice of contemplation.