By birth a native of Georgia and a Roman Catholic, O'Connor depicts, in all its comic and horrendous incongruity, the limits of worldly wisdom and the mysteries of divine grace in the "Christ-haunted" Protestant South. This Library of America collection, the most comprehensive ever published, contains all of her novels and short-story collections, as well as nine other stories, eight of her most important essays, and a selection of 259 witty, spirited, and revealing letters, twenty-one published here for the first time.Her fiction brilliantly explores the human obsession with seemingly banal things. It might be a new hat or clean hogs or, for Hazel Motes, hero of Wise Blood (1952), an automobile. "Nobody with a good car needs to be justified," Hazel assures himself while using its hood for a pulpit to preach his "Church Without Christ." As in O'Connor's subsequent work, the characters in this novel are driven to violence, even murder, and their strong vernacular endows them with the discomforting reality of next-door neighbors. "In order to recognize a freak," she remarks in one of her essays, "you have to have a conception of the whole man."In the title story of her first, dazzling collection of stories, A Good Man Is Hard to Find (1955), the old grandmother discovers the comic irrelevance of good manners when she and her family meet up with the sinister Misfit, who claims there is "no pleasure but meanness." The terror of urban dislocation in "The Artificial Nigger," the bizarre baptism in "The River," or one-legged Hulga Hopewell's encounter with a Bible salesman in "Good Country People"--these startling events give readers the uneasy sense of mysteries about to be revealed.Her second novel, The Violent Bear It Away (1960), casts the shadow of the Old Testament across a landscape of backwoods shacks, modern towns, and empty highways. Caught between the prophetic fury of his great-uncle and the unrelenting rationalism of his uncle, fourteen-year-old Francis Tarwater undergoes a terrifying trial of faith when he is commanded to baptize his idiot cousin.The nine stories in Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965) show O'Connor's powers at their height. The title story is a terrifying, heart-rending drama of familial and racial misunderstanding. "Revelation" and "The Enduring Chill" probe further into conflicts between parental figures and recalcitrant offspring, where as much tension is generated from quiet conversation as from the physical violence of gangsters and fanatics.

    Despite distressing statistics that show suicide rates rising, the subject, long a taboo, is infrequently talked about. In this sweeping intellectual and cultural history, poet and historian Jennifer Michael Hecht channels her grief for two friends lost to suicide into a search for history’s most persuasive arguments against the irretrievable act, arguments she hopes to bring back into public consciousness. From the Stoics and the Bible to Dante, Shakespeare, Wittgenstein, and such twentieth-century writers as John Berryman, Hecht recasts the narrative of our “secular age” in new terms. She shows how religious prohibitions against self-killing were replaced by the Enlightenment’s insistence on the rights of the individual, even when those rights had troubling applications. This transition, she movingly argues, resulted in a profound cultural and moral loss: the loss of shared, secular, logical arguments against suicide. By examining how people in other times have found powerful reasons to stay alive when suicide seems a tempting choice, she makes a persuasive intellectual and moral case against suicide.

    This book is his most direct and radical challenge to the educational status quo and a clarion to call parents to save their children from schools of all kinds. Holt advocates self-directed learning and a creative life.

    An account of a spiritual crisis, marking a shift of Tolstoy's central focus from the aesthetic to the religious and philosophical.A confession --What is religion and of what does its essence consist? --Religion and morality --The law of love and the law of violence.

    . . not only a poetics of reading . . . but a much more difficult achievement, an erotics of reading . . . . Like filings which gather to form a figure in a magnetic field, the parts and pieces here do come together, determined to affirm the pleasure we must take in our reading as against the indifference of (mere) knowledge." --Richard Howard

    Here he argues that punishment has gone from being mere spectacle to becoming an instrument of systematic domination over individuals in society – not just of our bodies, but our souls.

    This provocative book undertakes a new and challenging reading of recent semiotic and structuralist theory, arguing that films, novels, and poems cannot be studied in isolation from their viewers and readers.

    Singer "one of the great masters of the art." Now, in a completely revised edition of Boundaries Of The Soul, Dr. Singer incorporates the latest developments in Jungian psychology over the last two decades, particularlv in the areas of masculine/feminine relationships, the use of psychotherapeutic drugs, and the evolution of Jung's concept and personality types and its application both clinically and in the world of business and industry.  In addition, the case histories, so central to understanding many of Jung's concepts, have been re-examined and revised where necessary to correspond to the spirit of today's world. The updated edition of Boundaries Of The Soul should reaffirm the book's long-standing reputation as the best introduction to Jung's thought available.

    While no one knows exactly how or why, birthdays do tend to be uncannily accurate predictors of psychological tendencies. The Secret Language of Birthdays by Gary Goldschneider and Joost Effers describes in detail the characteristics and quirks of personality associated with being born on a particular day of the year.The 366 personality profiles in The Secret Language of Birthdays are based on a combination of astrology, numerology, the tarot, and Gary Goldschneider's many years of observation of more than 14,000 people, including contemporary and historical figures. Goldschneider's theory of "personology" proposes that all of life is cyclical: people born on the same day occupy the same point in the year's cycle and thus share certain characteristics.Learn what famous personalities were born on your birthday....Study your astrological sign and your personology profile....Your strengths, weaknesses, and major concerns will be illuminated while you are given practical advice and spiritual guidance. While you study your profile, you will find it hard to resist examining those of family, friends, colleagues, and favorite celebrities.Non one who reads this book can feel left out, since each one of us has a birthday. The Secret Language of Birthdays may help to bring people to a better understanding of themselves and of others, including those living now, those who have gone before, and even those yet to come. The Secret Language of Birthdays is truly a celebration of our differences and similarities as human beings.

    Explaining Jung's complex ideas in simple terms, and backing it up with references to his own texts, you will learn all the essential concepts, from the collective unconscious to archetypes in dreams. You will learn about Jung's upbringing and the development of his thinking. Discover his early work and influences and how they came to shape his ideological and spiritual development. The intricacies of Jung's complex systems of thought are discussed in a straightforward and jargon-free way with particular focus on his lifelong fascination with the spiritual, the numinous, the inner world and the self-realization of the unconscious. Jung's exploration of mythology, dreams, visions and fantasies, as well as his studies into the journey of the psyche, are all explained, making often complex theories easy to get to grips with and the book also looks at his legacy and how his work and ideas have shaped psychology with many therapists still trained in the Jungian method.

    As he did in his hard-hitting and widely read New York Times Magazine article "Dr. Drug Rep," and as he continues to do in his popular watchdog newsletter, The Carlat Psychiatry Report, he writes with bracing honesty about how psychiatry has so largely forsaken the practice of talk therapy for the seductive—and more lucrative—practice of simply prescribing drugs, with a host of deeply troubling consequences. Psychiatrists have settled for treating symptoms rather than causes, embracing the apparent medical rigor of DSM diagnoses and prescription in place of learning the more challenging craft of therapeutic counseling, gaining only limited understanding of their patients’ lives. Talk therapy takes time, whereas the fifteen-minute "med check" allows for more patients and more insurance company reimbursement. Yet DSM diagnoses, he shows, are premised on a good deal less science than we would think. Writing from an insider’s perspective, with refreshing forthrightness about his own daily struggles as a practitioner, Dr. Carlat shares a wealth of stories from his own practice and those of others that demonstrate the glaring shortcomings of the standard fifteen-minute patient visit. He also reveals the dangers of rampant diagnoses of bipolar disorder, ADHD, and other "popular" psychiatric disorders, and exposes the risks of the cocktails of medications so many patients are put on. Especially disturbing are the terrible consequences of overprescription of drugs to children of ever younger ages. Taking us on a tour of the world of pharmaceutical marketing, he also reveals the inner workings of collusion between psychiatrists and drug companies. Concluding with a road map for exactly how the profession should be reformed, Unhinged is vital reading for all those in treatment or considering it, as well as a stirring call to action for the large community of psychiatrists themselves. As physicians and drug companies continue to work together in disquieting and harmful ways, and as diagnoses—and misdiagnoses—of mental disorders skyrocket, it’s essential that Dr. Carlat’s bold call for reform is heeded.

    It seeks to answer a simple question: why is there such a thing as style? The question may be simple but there is no easy answer, and Professor Gombrich's brilliant and wide-ranging exploration of the history and psychology of pictorial representation leads him into countless crucial areas. Gombrich examines, questions and re-evaluates old and new ideas on such matters as the imitation of nature, the function of tradition, the problem of abstraction, the validity of perspective and the interpretation of expression: all of which reveal that pictorial representation is far from being a straightforward matter. First published more than 40 years ago, Art and Illusion has lost none of its vitality and importance. In applying the findings of experimental science to a nuanced understanding of art and in tackling complex ideas and theoretical issues, Gombrich is rigorous.Yet he always retains a sense of wonder at the inexhaustible capacity of the human brain, and at the subtlety of the relationships involved in seeing the world and in making and seeing art. With profound knowledge and his exceptional gift for clear exposition, he advances each argument as an hypothesis to be tested. The problems of representation are forever fundamental to the history of art: Art and Illusion remains an essential text for anyone interested in understanding the complexities of art. For the sixth edition Professor Gombrich has written an entirely new 12-page preface, in which he makes use of the distinction between an image and a sign, so as to clarify his intentions in writing the book in the first place.

    In a style accessible to any lay reader or beginning student in psychology, Kahn presents key ideas such as the Oedipus complex, the repetition compulsion, guilt, anxiety, and defense mechanisms, along with recent research that has supported or expanded Freud's findings. He also presents case studies from his own work as a psychotherapist to show how Freudian thought has been instrumental in helping patients discover who they are and escape from destructive patterns. Readers aware of Freud's ideas and those discovering them for the first time will benefit from Kahn's fresh, informed, and unpretentious approach.

    This unique selection of illustrations with commentaries and source texts guides us on a fascinating journey through the representations of the secret arts.

    Like many of Lukacs's early essays, it is a radical critique of bourgeois culture and stems from a specific Central European philosophy of life and tradition of dialectical idealism whose originators include Kant, Hegel, Novalis, Marx, Kierkegaard, Simmel, Weber, and Husserl.The Theory of the Novel marks the transition of the Hungarian philosopher from Kant to Hegel and was Lukacs's last great work before he turned to Marxism-Leninism.