The Orison Anthology is an annual collection of the finest spiritually engaged writing that appeared in periodicals in the preceding year. Our anthology aims to not only fill, but expand the space left by the absence of the Best American Spiritual Writing series. In addition to reprinted material, each year the anthology will also include new, previously unpublished works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry by the winners of The Orison Anthology Awards, judged by different prominent writers each year. The judges for Vol. 6 were Blair Hurley (fiction), E. J. Koh (nonfiction), and Joy Ladin (poetry).

Rodney Gómez's Arsenal With Praise Song somehow manages to yoke together lament and celebration, reproach and veneration across the borders of eras and nations. Set in the stark desert landscape of the México-U.S. border all too familiar to so many refugees and migrants, these poems scrutinize human bodies and the body of the earth as the sites of great injustices and violences-political, social, and spiritual-and as the vehicles that carry our collective legacy generation to generation.

Poems of Devotion is a collection of the finest recent poems in the devotional mode, which the editor examines in detail in the introductory essay. The seventy-seven poets collected here demonstrate the ongoing vitality of poetry as a spiritual practice, in the long tradition of poets, psalmists, and mystics from the East and West. This is an anthology that will prove deeply rewarding in the classroom, at home, or in the library of your religious institution.

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice An essential book for those coping with Alzheimer’s and other cognitive disorders that “reframe[s] our understanding of dementia with sensitivity and accuracy . . . to grant better futures to our loved ones and ourselves” (The New York Times). An estimated fifty million people in the world suffer from dementia. Diseases such as Alzheimer's erase parts of one's memory but are also often said to erase the self. People don't simply die from such diseases; they are imagined, in the clichés of our era, as vanishing in plain sight, fading away, or enduring a long goodbye. In On Vanishing, Lynn Casteel Harper, a Baptist minister and nursing home chaplain, investigates the myths and metaphors surrounding dementia and aging, addressing not only the indignities caused by the condition but also by the rhetoric surrounding it. Harper asks essential questions about the nature of our outsized fear of dementia, the stigma this fear may create, and what it might mean for us all to try to “vanish well.” Weaving together personal stories with theology, history, philosophy, literature, and science, Harper confronts our elemental fears of disappearance and death, drawing on her own experiences with people with dementia both in the American healthcare system and within her own family. In the course of unpacking her own stories and encounters—of leading a prayer group on a dementia unit; of meeting individuals dismissed as “already gone” and finding them still possessed of complex, vital inner lives; of witnessing her grandfather’s final years with Alzheimer’s and discovering her own heightened genetic risk of succumbing to the disease—Harper engages in an exploration of dementia that is unlike anything written before on the subject. A rich and startling work of nonfiction, On Vanishing reveals cognitive change as it truly is, an essential aspect of what it means to be mortal.

Cleave, loss, spell, hand, home: words that have existed in the English language for over a thousand years. In the poems of Thousand-Year-Old Words, Nan Cohen explores such words, revealing both their touching sturdiness through a thousand years of constant use, and the radiant individuality of the experiences they describe.

The first anthology of its kind, The World I Leave You: Asian American Poets on Faith and Spirit spotlights poets of the Asian diaspora with connections to East, West, South, and Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands who represent a variety of cultures and religious traditions including Islam, Hinduism, Christianity, Buddhism, and Zoroastrianism. Among the contributors are active religious practitioners, recent converts, agnostics, and those who practice a personal spirituality. This vibrant collection includes many of this generation's most acclaimed writers and exciting new voices to create a nuanced and dynamic portrait of today's Asian American poets and their spiritual engagements with issues such as poetry as spiritual witness, locating the divine in the natural world, relationships with cultural history and ancestors, spiritual practice as a form of political resistance, questions of faith and doubt, and prayers and rituals.

This new collection of linked short stories from award-winning author Jeff Fearnside explores the lives of ordinary people in Kazakhstan as they face the challenges of post-Soviet transition in the early 21st century. These stories illuminate the soul of a people tested by their circumstances: a man struggling between tradition and his conscience, a woman remembering her coming of age during perestroika, a woman who through memory comes to identify with the other, a husband and wife who seek reconciliation through the words they've used to hurt, and a grandfather who lost his loved ones and now must face his past.

The captivating story of the search through Europe for the Slender-billed curlew which stands on the brink of extinction.

#1 INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER • A timeless, structure-bending classic that explores how actions of individual lives impact the past, present and future—from a postmodern visionary and one of the leading voices in fiction Featuring a new afterword by David Mitchell and a new introduction by Gabrielle Zevin, author of Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century • Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize Cloud Atlas begins in 1850 with Adam Ewing, an American notary voyaging from the Chatham Isles to his home in California. Ewing is befriended by a physician, Dr. Goose, who begins to treat him for a rare species of brain parasite. The novel careens, with dazzling virtuosity, to Belgium in 1931, to the West Coast in the 1970s, to an inglorious present-day England, to a Korean superstate of the near future where neocapitalism has run amok, and, finally, to a postapocalyptic Iron Age Hawaii in the last days of history. But the story doesn’t end even there. The novel boomerangs back through centuries and space, returning by the same route, in reverse, to its starting point. Along the way, David Mitchell reveals how his disparate characters connect, how their fates intertwine, and how their souls drift across time like clouds across the sky. As wild as a video game, as mysterious as a Zen koan, Cloud Atlas is an unforgettable tour de force that, like its incomparable author, has transcended its cult classic status to become a worldwide phenomenon.

In the tradition of Daniel Wallace’s Big Fish and Eowyn Ivey’s The Snow Child, a gorgeously written and fable-like novel recasting Noah’s Ark as a story of relationships, courage, resilience, and hope. “Variously romantic, symbolic, philosophical, feminist, and fanciful, this is an atmospheric tale that meanders to a sweetly rousing conclusion. . . . Forget the ark, forget the patriarch. It's the women who tend to triumph in this modern take on an Old Testament parable.” – Kirkus Reviews In loving Noah, his wife never imagined she’d end up in this gray and wet little town where it’s been raining for as long as anyone can remember. Newly appointed as pastor, Noah is determined to bring the eccentric townspeople back to the church, but the members of his congregation only want to keep their homes afloat. As the water swallows up the houses, the renowned zoo, and the single highway out of town, Noah, his wife, and their new neighbors must confront not only the savage forces of nature but also the fragile ties that bind them to one another. Poignant and whimsical, playful and wise, Noah’s Wife challenges our expectations of love, commitment, and redemption. By reimagining this classic story in a new and modern light, the novel asks: how do we know when to stay and when it’s time to go?