Sky Lantern: The Story of a Father's Love for His Children and the Healing Power of the Smallest Act of Kindness


Matt Mikalatos - 2015
    Miss you so much. Steph.”A brokenhearted daughter scribbled those words on a sky lantern before setting it aloft. She had no way of knowing the lantern would fly halfway across the country.Matt Mikalatos found the lantern, broken and crushed, the words still legible. As a father of three daughters, Matt could not let Steph’s heart-wrenching note go unanswered, but he wasn’t sure where he could find her. So he posted an open letter to her on his blog, which went viral overnight. Little did he know how that small act of kindness would lead him to the real Steph and change his family’s life in remarkable ways.A poignant and lyrical account of the beauty and wonder of domestic life, Sky Lantern tells the miraculous events that followed Matt finding the sky lantern in his yard—of meeting Steph and forming a friendship that impacted him and his family—proving that the bond between a parent and their child is lasting and far-reaching.Sky Lantern will bring a tear to your eyes and a smile to your face as you fall in love with Matt and his family in this heartwarming, beautifully written memoir.This book is for people with questions about what it means to love, to be loved, and to love well. It’s for anyone who has had a parent relationship: absent, complicated, or amazing. It’s about embracing the truth about ourselves: that we are worthy of love, and that love makes our lives worth living.

The Subtleties of the Inimitable Mulla Nasrudin


Idries Shah - 1983
    At the same time they are intended to reach other levels.

The Guardians: An Elegy for a Friend


Sarah Manguso - 2012
    The police officers pulled the body from the track and found no identification. The train’s 425 passengers were transferred to another train and delayed about twenty minutes.” The Guardians is an elegy for Manguso’s friend Harris, two years after he escaped from a psychiatric hospital and jumped under that train. The narrative contemplates with unrelenting clarity their crowded postcollege apartment, Manguso’s fellowship year in Rome, Harris’s death and the year that followed—the year of mourning and the year of Manguso’s marriage. As Harris is revealed both to the reader and to the narrator, the book becomes a monument to their intimacy and inability to express their love to each other properly, and to the reverberating effects of Harris’s presence in and absence from Manguso’s life. There is grief in the book but also humor, as Manguso marvels at the unexpected details that constitute a friendship. The Guardians explores the insufficiency of explanation and the necessity of the imagination in making sense of anything.

Flipside: A Tourist's Guide on How to Navigate the Afterlife


Richard Martini - 2011
    Based on the evidence of thousands of people who claim that under deep hypnosis, they saw and experienced the same basic things about the Afterlife, the book interviews hypnotherapists around the world trained in the method pioneered by Dr. Michael Newton, as well as examining actual between life sessions.

Where I Belong


Gwendolyn Heasley - 2011
    She's living every girl's dream in New York City—shopping sprees at Barneys, open access to the best clubs and parties, and her own horse at the country club. Her perfect life is perfectly on track. At least it was. . . . When Corrinne's father is laid off, her world suddenly falls apart. Instead of heading to boarding school, she's stripped of her credit cards and shipped off to the boonies of Texas to live with her grandparents. On her own in a big public school and forced to take a job shoveling manure, Corrinne is determined to get back to the life she's supposed to be living. She doesn't care who she stomps on in the process. But when Corrinne makes an unlikely friend and discovers a total hottie at work, she begins to wonder if her life B.R.—before the recession—was as perfect as it seemed.

The Buddha in Me, The Buddha in You: A Handbook for Happiness


David Hare - 2016
    The Buddha in Me, the Buddha in You combines the tried-and-tested wisdom of Nichiren Buddhism with the best of popular psychology and personal development, making this a brilliant guide to how life works, and how to get the most from it.Nichiren Buddhism differs from other Buddhist schools in its focus on the here-and-now, and places great importance on individual growth as the starting point for a better world. This, combined with powerful techniques such as NLP, mindfulness, journalling and coaching, makes The Buddha in Me, the Buddha in You the quintessential handbook for happiness.'Buddha' simply means someone who is awakened - yet while Nichiren Buddhists will find fascinating insights into their practice, there is no need to follow a spiritual path to benefit from this book. Through his experience as an internationally acclaimed life coach and practising Buddhist, author David Hare shows us how to wake up to our own potential and that of those around us – to discover everyday enlightenment.

Love and Leftovers


Sarah Tregay - 2011
    Dragged to New Hampshire for the summer, Marcie soon realizes that her mom has no plans for them to return to Marcie's father in Idaho. As Marcie starts at a new school, without her ragtag group of friends called the Leftovers, a new romance heats up, but she struggles to understand what love really means.Perfect for fans of romances like Anna and the French Kiss and those by Sarah Dessen as well as readers of poetry, Love and Leftovers is a beautiful and fresh take on love.