Like in every culture, Chinese folktales too have been instrumental in passing on Chinese tradition, beliefs, customs and values from one generation to the next.Chinese folklore consists of fables, legends, mythology tales and historical accounts. Magical creatures, demons, mythical animals, malicious step-mothers and witty and valiant protagonists take you through the common themes of the triumph of cleverness and wisdom.This collection of Chinese folktales includes the well-known tale of the 'Valiant Shu Lang', the woman who dressed herself as a man to join the military, 'The Laughing Monks' who taught the path to a contentted life throguh the only language they knew - laughter, and 'The Great Discovery', the tale of how a phenix led a young couple to a treasure they later discover to be salt.

    Irena Sendler, the female Oskar Schindler, proved herself a heroine of epic proportions, saving more than 2,000 Jewish children as well as many adults from the Treblinka Nazi death camp.

    Convincing her well-intentioned but misinformed coworkers that she’s as capable as ever is her biggest challenge…until Connor shows up on her door. Can they heal old wounds and give their fledgling marriage a fresh start?Meanwhile, tragedy strikes young Zoe, and Emily has a life-changing choice to make.Follow along as Garth and Emily step out, together, to meet every challenge.

    This exceptional book by Dag Heward-Mills will teach you what it means to catch the anointing and how you can be anointed for ministry.

    But it is Anthony as a husband and lover that intrigues her most. She looks at the nature of his love for his wife, Rose and at his love for Kate Field. The author does say that some of it is imagined and she cannot prove what she says happened or is said, but she is "sure of it" herself.

    The novel has been hailed as one of the most striking early examples of postmodernism and has become a famous test case for theories about reading because of the apparent impossibility of deciding between several radically different interpretations. Does the book have two narrators, as it first appears, or one? How much is fantasy and how much is reality? Whose fantasy and whose reality are they? Brian Boyd, Nabokov's biographer and hitherto the foremost proponent of the idea that Pale Fire has one narrator, John Shade, now rejects this position and presents a new and startlingly different solution that will permanently shift the nature of critical debate on the novel. Boyd argues that the book does indeed have two narrators, Shade and Charles Kinbote, but reveals that Kinbote had some strange and highly surprising help in writing his sections. In light of this interpretation, Pale Fire now looks distinctly less postmodern--and more interesting than ever.In presenting his arguments, Boyd shows how Nabokov designed Pale Fire for readers to make surprising discoveries on a first reading and even more surprising discoveries on subsequent readings by following carefully prepared clues within the novel. Boyd leads the reader step-by-step through the book, gradually revealing the profound relationship between Nabokov's ethics, aesthetics, epistemology, and metaphysics. If Nabokov has generously planned the novel to be accessible on a first reading and yet to incorporate successive vistas of surprise, Boyd argues, it is because he thinks a deep generosity lies behind the inexhaustibility, complexity, and mystery of the world. Boyd also shows how Nabokov's interest in discovery springs in part from his work as a scientist and scholar, and draws comparisons between the processes of readerly and scientific discovery.This is a profound, provocative, and compelling reinterpretation of one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century.

    Dorie is eager to introduce her sister’s genius to the public, but Catherine is a cloistered nun with a vow of silence who adamantly refuses to show or sell the paintings she dedicates to God. Hoping to get to know her sister and research the potential story, Dorie poses as an aspiring nun at the convent where Catherine lives. Her growing relationship with Catherine helps Dorie come to terms with her adoption, but soon the sisters’ shared biological past and uncertain futures collide as they clash over the meaning and purpose of art. Will they remain side-by-side for the rest of their lives, or will their conflicts change the course of the future?

    The spectacular was never behind them.                         -from “The Troubadours etc.”  In Incarnadine, Mary Szybist restlessly seeks out places where meaning might take on new color. One poem is presented as a diagrammed sentence. Another is an abecedarium made of lines of dialogue spoken by girls overheard while assembling a puzzle. Several poems arrive as a series of Annunciations, while others purport to give an update on Mary, who must finish the dishes before she will open herself to God. One poem appears on the page as spokes radiating from a wheel, or as a sunburst, or as the cycle around which all times and all tenses are alive in this moment. Szybist’s formal innovations are matched by her musical lines, by her poetry’s insistence on singing as a lure toward the unknowable. Inside these poems is a deep yearning—for love, motherhood, the will to see things as they are and to speak. Beautiful and inventive, Incarnadine is the new collection by one of America’s most ambitious poets.

    They have no car, no mailbox, and no visitors-except for her mother's lifelong best friend. Every Sunday, Wren's father delivers winding sermons in an abandoned gas station, where he takes up serpents and praises the Lord for his blighted white eye, proof of his divinity and key to the hold he has over the community, over Wren and her mother.But over the course of one summer, a miracle performed by Wren's father quickly turns to tragedy. As the order of her world begins to shatter, Wren must uncover the truth of her father's mysterious legend and her mother's harrowing history and complex bond with her best friend. And with that newfound knowledge, Wren can imagine a different future for herself than she has been told to expect.Rich with epic love and epic loss, and diving deep into a world that is often forgotten but still part of America, Shiner reveals the hidden story behind two generations' worth of Appalachian heartbreak and resolve. Amy Jo Burns brings us a smoldering, taut debut novel about modern female myth-making in a land of men-and one young girl who must ultimately open her eyes.

    Though she doesn’t want to get married, her grandparents give her no choice. History is repeating itself: Deya’s mother, Isra, also had no choice when she left Palestine as a teenager to marry Adam. Though Deya was raised to believe her parents died in a car accident, a secret note from a mysterious, yet familiar-looking woman makes Deya question everything she was told about her past. As the narrative alternates between the lives of Deya and Isra, she begins to understand the dark, complex secrets behind her community.

    When Ella and her husband move to a small town in France, Ella hopes to brush up on her French, qualify to practice as a midwife, and start a family of her own. Village life turns out to be less idyllic than she expected, however, and a peculiar dream of the color blue propels her on a quest to uncover her family’s French ancestry. As the novel unfolds—alternating between Ella’s story and that of Isabelle du Moulin four hundred years earlier—a common thread emerges that unexpectedly links the two women. Part detective story, part historical fiction, The Virgin Blue is a novel of passion and intrigue that compels readers to the very last page.

    In Broken Into Beautiful, singer and songwriter Gwen Smith's first book, she tells the real-life stories of women with shattered dreams, shameful secrets, and damaged souls, and the God who makes them beautiful again. Each chapter features a compelling personal story coupled with relevant biblical teaching and application. Readers will meet women wounded by infidelity, abortion, widowhood, abuse, and other tragic events, only to discover the joy of being restored by a loving heavenly Father.The book will remind women of all ages of God's willingness to eternally forgive and forget and of His heart to transform broken lives. Readers will be empowered to believe truth, to remember grace, and to live for God's greater purposes. Broken into Beautiful is ultimately about a beautiful Savior who became broken for us so that all who are broken can be transformed to reflect His beauty.

    Throughout her celebrated career, Mary Oliver has touched countless readers with her brilliantly crafted verse, expounding on her love for the physical world and the powerful bonds between all living things. Identified as "far and away, this country's best selling poet" by Dwight Garner, she now returns with a stunning and definitive collection of her writing from the last fifty years. Carefully curated, these 200 plus poems feature Oliver's work from her very first book of poetry, No Voyage and Other Poems, published in 1963 at the age of 28, through her most recent collection, Felicity, published in 2015. This timeless volume, arranged by Oliver herself, showcases the beloved poet at her edifying best. Within these pages, she provides us with an extraordinary and invaluable collection of her passionate, perceptive, and much-treasured observations of the natural world.

    This collection offers for the first time hundreds of Craddock stories told in his own words and a glimpse of his life.

    It is 1875, and Ann Eliza Young has recently separated from her powerful husband, Brigham Young, prophet and leader of the Mormon Church. Expelled and an outcast, Ann Eliza embarks on a crusade to end polygamy in the United States. A rich account of a family’s polygamous history is revealed, including how a young woman became a plural wife.Soon after Ann Eliza’s story begins, a second exquisite narrative unfolds–a tale of murder involving a polygamist family in present-day Utah. Jordan Scott, a young man who was thrown out of his fundamentalist sect years earlier, must reenter the world that cast him aside in order to discover the truth behind his father’s death.And as Ann Eliza’s narrative intertwines with that of Jordan’s search, readers are pulled deeper into the mysteries of love and faith.