The Books of Moses - Because you know it's nonsense, but were never sure why.The Books of Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy.

    They make harsh judgments, engage in endless self-criticism and are unforgiving of even the smallest of failings. At the same time these people are often loving and kind parents, generous and encouraging friends, and supportive and committed colleagues. They give everyone else their best, only to give themselves their worst.The Kindness Pact introduces the reader to the Eight Promises: commitments they need to make to feel good about who they are and the life they live and invite readers to be as kind to themselves as they are to others.

    As the two follow clues and journey deeper into the woods amid the eerily quiet and hauntingly beautiful landscape-bypassing tokens and remains of the departed, suicide notes tacked to trees and shrines put up by forlorn loved ones-they'll depend on one another in ways they never had to before, testing the very fabric of their relationship. And, as daylight quickly escapes them and they find themselves lost in the dark veil of night, Bill discovers a truth Junko has hidden deep within her-a truth that will change them both forever.

    It appears terrible to sinners, but lovely and precious to the saints. - St. Alphonsus LiguoriSt. Alphonsus teaches the proper attitude toward death, which is one of readiness; of always having one's "debts cleared". He cautions against letting even one day pass without reflecting on the certainty of death, the shortness of time and the length of eternity.Each chapter is a short consideration on some aspect of death, divided into three points easily understood by people in every state of life. Each point is followed by reflections and prayers to help one persevere in his efforts to lead a holy life, St. Alphonsus prefaces each chapter with a quotation from Scripture designed to touch the heart of every reader.Death is the one journey every man must go through alone. This book demonstrates how only consistent, thoughtful meditation on this reality can set people on a more resolute path to holiness.

    He spent the next year there, living among its 450 inhabitants and teaching English to its schoolchildren.At first blush, "Surviving Paradise" is a thoughtful and laugh-out-loud hilarious documentation of Rudiak-Gould's efforts to cope with daily life on Ujae as his idealistic expectations of a tropical paradise confront harsh reality. But Rudiak-Gould goes beyond the personal, interweaving his own story with fascinating political, linguistic, and ecological digressions about the Marshall Islands. Most poignant are his observations of the noticeable effect of global warming on these tiny, low-lying islands and the threat rising water levels pose to their already precarious existence.An "Eat, Pray, Love" as written by Paul Theroux, "Surviving Paradise" is a disarmingly lighthearted narrative with a substantive emotional undercurrent.

    Icons of anti-celebrity rock, who bacame huge celebrity rock stars, they were, according to the story, the first U.S. post new-wave band who were both commercially successful and cool. Drawing on exclusive interviews with Mike Mills, Peter Buck and other members of R.E.M.'s nuclear family, Fiction re-evaluates the music and career of a group who sold almost no records for the first half of their existence, then became 'the biggest rock group in the world' in the second half.

    A huge collection of incredible cautionary tales about the undignified ways you can kick the bucket - and they're all true! .the mechanic who blew himself up while trying to open a rocket-propelled grenade with a sledgehammer .A woman felled by a fatal flying lettuce .the octogenarian who caught a shopping trolley to a permanent vacation .the convicted murderer who electrocuted himself on the toilet as he repaired a tV these are all true reports which reveal the silliest ways you can bite the big one. Death may seem like a serious business, but this is a seriously funny book.

    L. Doctorow is acclaimed internationally for such novels as "Ragtime, Billy Bathgate, " and "The March." Now here are Doctorow's rich, revelatory essays on the nature of imaginative thought. In "Creationists," Doctorow considers creativity in its many forms: from the literary (Melville and Mark Twain) to the comic (Harpo Marx) to the cosmic (Genesis and Einstein). As he wrestles with the subjects that have teased and fired his own imagination, Doctorow affirms the idea that "we know by what we create." Just what is Melville doing in "Moby-Dick"? And how did "The Adventures of Tom Sawyer" impel Mark Twain to radically rewrite what we know as "Huckleberry Finn"? Can we ever trust what novelists say about their own work? How could Franz Kafka have written a book called Amerika without ever leaving Europe? In posing such questions, Doctorow grapples with literary creation not as a critic or as a scholar-but as one working writer frankly contemplating the work of another. It's a perspective that affords him both protean grace and profound insight. Among the essays collected here are Doctorow's musings on the very different Spanish Civil War novels of Ernest Hemingway and Andre Malraux; a candid assessment of Edgar Allan Poe as our "greatest bad writer"; a bracing analysis of the story of Genesis in which God figures as the most complex and riveting character. Whether he is considering how Harpo Marx opened our eyes to surrealism, the haunting photos with which the late German writer W. G. Sebald illustrated his texts, or the innovations of such literary icons as Heinrich von Kleist, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Sinclair Lewis, Doctorow is unfailingly generous, shrewd, attentive, surprising, and precise.In examining the creative works of different times and disciplines, Doctorow also reveals the source and nature of his own artistry. Rich in aphorism and anecdote, steeped in history and psychology, informed by a lifetime of reading and writing, "Creationists" opens a magnificent window into one of the great creative minds of our time.

    Set in Hillbrow during the tumultuous years of apartheid’s demise, the rapid changes taking place both in the neighbourhood and the country are charted by staid, conservative Aubrey Tearle, a retired proofreader whose life has been devoted to reading telephone directories. Obsessed with what he terms ‘corrigenda’––mistakes that crop up with increasing frequency as ‘standards decline’––he embarks on a grandiose plan to enlighten his fellow–citizens, with disastrous, hilarious and poignant results.Demonstrating a Cervantes–like knack for creating innocents who tilt at windmills, Vladislavić continues to demonstrate the dazzling and unique talent seen in his previous writings as he explores the age–old theme of how individuals respond when ‘things fall apart’––and what can occur when language itself is in a state of flux. This highly original novel reflects post–apartheid, post–modern writing at its best.

    A German cruise ship turned refugee carrier, it was attacked by a Soviet submarine in January 1945. Some 9,000 people went down in the Baltic Sea, making it the deadliest maritime disaster of all time. Born to an unwed mother on a lifeboat the night of the attack, Paul Pokriefke is a middle-aged journalist trying to piece together the tragic events. While his mother sees her whole existence in terms of that calamitous moment, Paul wishes their life could have been less touched by the past. For his teenage son, who dabbles in the dark, far-right corners of the Internet, the Gustloff embodies the denial of Germany's wartime suffering. "Scuttling backward to move forward," Crabwalk is at once a captivating tale of a tragedy at sea and a fearless examination of the ways different generations of Germans now view their past.Winner of the Nobel Prize

    A believer and an unbeliever, a socialist and a snob, an unhappy husband and a desolate widower, Hardy challenged the sexual and religious conventions of his time in his novels and then abandoned fiction to reestablish himself as a great twentieth-century lyric poet. In this acclaimed new biography, Claire Tomalin, one of today's preeminent literary biographers, investigates this beloved writer and reveals a figure as rich and complex as his tremendous legacy.

    

    The marketplace now operates through every hour of the clock, pushing us into constant activity and eroding forms of community and political expression, damaging the fabric of everyday life.Jonathan Crary examines how this interminable non-time blurs any separation between an intensified, ubiquitous consumerism and emerging strategies of control and surveillance. He describes the ongoing management of individual attentiveness and the impairment of perception within the compulsory routines of contemporary technological culture. At the same time, he shows that human sleep, as a restorative withdrawal that is intrinsically incompatible with 24/7 capitalism, points to other more formidable and collective refusals of world-destroying patterns of growth and accumulation.

    Guest editor Lyn Hejinian, acclaimed for her own innovative writing, has chosen seventy-five important new poems and contributed a provocative introductory essay. Through her selections, Hejinian has created an essential nexus -- a meeting place for readers to encounter an extraordinary range of poets. With illuminating comments from the writers, and series editor David Lehman's insightful foreword evaluating the current state of the art, The Best American Poetry 2004 is an indispensable addition to a series that has established itself as the first word on what's new and noteworthy in the poetry of our times.

    Over many nights, hundreds of slaves paddled out to the warships seeking protection for their families from the ravages of slavery. The runaways pressured the British admirals into becoming liberators. As guides, pilots, sailors, and marines, the former slaves used their intimate knowledge of the countryside to transform the war. They enabled the British to escalate their onshore attacks and to capture and burn Washington, D.C. Tidewater masters had long dreaded their slaves as "an internal enemy." By mobilizing that enemy, the war ignited the deepest fears of Chesapeake slaveholders. It also alienated Virginians from a national government that had neglected their defense. Instead they turned south, their interests aligning more and more with their section.In 1820 Thomas Jefferson observed of sectionalism: "Like a firebell in the night [it] awakened and filled me with terror. I considered it at once the knell of the union." The notes of alarm in Jefferson's comment speak of the fear aroused by the recent crisis over slavery in his home state. His vision of a cataclysm to come proved prescient. Jefferson's startling observation registered a turn in the nation’s course, a pivot from the national purpose of the founding toward the threat of disunion. Drawn from new sources, Alan Taylor's riveting narrative re-creates the events that inspired black Virginians, haunted slaveholders, and set the nation on a new and dangerous course.