From about the age of 14, I have been exploring how unusual ideas and experiences might change a person’s life. This led me to become an author and experimental psychologist studying the effects of religious beliefs, rituals, and meditation exercises on our minds and bodies. I have spent a good part of the last 4 years putting together a book which tries to answer many of my questions on the varieties of meditation practices around the world.
Tolstoy describes and plays with religious experiences across various of his novels. He doesn’t take them for granted: the initial enthusiasm and prospect of personal change seldom leads to real transformation. Here, though, in one of his last writings, we follow the contagious spell of true conversion of heart. When a serial murderer meets a pure soul his self is transformed and goes on to change the life of others.
Leo Tolstoy (September 9, 1828 – November 20, 1910) was a Russian writer who earned fame and global renown for his novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina. Writing during the late 19th century, Tolstoy lived during a literary period in which Realism flourished, and today his two novels are considered the apex of realist fiction. Tolstoy is also known for his complex and somewhat paradoxical persona, holding both moralistic and ascetic views during the final decades of his life.
I’ve always loved historical romance, ever since my mother gave me my first Georgette Heyer when I was eight, and my grandmother gave me my first Barbara Cartland shortly after. The fascination has never waned, which is a good thing because I grew up to become a historical romance author myself. Since publishing my first romance in 2006, I’ve written nearly 50 books, mainly set during the Regency period (first quarter of the 19th century). I’ve always adored how a good historical romance whisks me away to a larger-than-life world replete with dashing rakes, smart-mouthed ladies, and glittering high society, not to mention witty banter, glamour, and heart-stopping romance.
Georgette Heyer is the queen of Regency romance. My mother gave me my first Heyer when I was about eight and I’ve loved her work ever since. Witty, beautifully written, romantic, glamorous, her books were the perfect introduction to historical romance. I’m currently in the middle of my fifth re-read of all her books and this time 'round, I think my favorite is Faro’s Daughter. This pairs the very rude and unromantic (but irresistible!) Max Ravenscar with clever, independent Deborah Grantham, a well-bred lady brought low by financial trouble who now runs her aunt’s gambling house. When Max sets out to rescue his beef-witted cousin from Deb’s clutches, the stage is set for a clash of titanic proportions. This book sparkles like good champagne, and it always makes me laugh.
If you love Bridgerton, you'll love Georgette Heyer!
'The greatest writer who ever lived' Antonia Fraser 'One of my perennial comfort authors' Joanne Harris 'I could mainline Heyer's Regency romances until the end of time and still not get bored' India Knight ____________
Max Ravenscar is a renowned gamester.
The first to admit he is entirely void of a romantic disposition, he regards all eligible females with indifference and unconcern.
But then he meets the woman his young cousin is bent on marrying - the beautiful Deborah Grantham who also happens to be the mistress of her aunt's gaming establishment.…
I was a computer programmer (BA and MA in math) for several organizations, including NASA and the Savannah River Ecology Lab before retirement, went to the Clarion and Tulane SF&F Workshops, and read the slush pile for Amazing/Fantastic. I’ve done a lot of theatre as actor and lighting tech, have always liked to hike in the woods, have written 11 novels (including 3 published SF novels), had 5 plays given full production, and have 2 CDs of my original songs. In my copious spare time, I sleep.
Being a New Englander, I don’t care much about Southern literature but Wolfe transcends it and also influenced Jack Kerouac, who would be my sixth choice. It was recommended to me by Joe Fineman, son of novelist Irving Fineman, after I flunked out of Caltech (Joe didn’t), saying “This is your book.” I have no idea who my influences are but I wouldn’t be surprised if someone told me that they thought Thomas Wolfe was one of them. He probably is.
You Can't Go Home Again is a novel by Thomas Wolfe published posthumously in 1940. The novel tells the story of George Webber, a fledgling author, who writes a book that makes frequent references to his home town of Libya Hill. The book is a national success but the residents of the town, unhappy with what they view as Webber's distorted depiction of them, send the author menacing letters and death threats. (Wikipedia)
Although published posthumously in 2021,Silverview was substantially written, then set aside, some time before John le Carré died. His son Nick Cornwell (aka novelist Nick Harkaway), who edited the book for publication, speculates in an afterword that this was because its view of British Intelligence was more disenchanted than any of Le Carré’s previous novels.
I wonder whether there were two further reasons, one profound and one prosaic: that the novel is suffused with death and would therefore make an appropriately elegiac swansong, and that as his shortest novel in nearly 40 years, it would better bookend his 1961 debut, Call for the Dead.
Whatever the reason, it’s a classic Le Carré tale of loyalty and betrayal - and a book that will always be one of my favorite reads in any given year.
Korean edition of [Silverview] by John Le Carre. An instant New York Times bestseller. In his last completed novel, John le Carré turns his focus to the world that occupied his writing for the past sixty years--the secret world itself. A mesmerizing story of an encounter between innocence and experience and between public duty and private morals. Korean edition translated by Jo Yeong Hak.
I’ve written dozens of plays and books, always with heart and humor. If you love Christmas, you know that it can also be a frenzied time, so we all need to curl up on a cozy night and read Christmas stories to bring back the magic and generosity of this special holiday. I like well-told tales that reaffirm the love we know is so important, stories that will mean just as much a hundred years from now. And surprise endings are always a delight!
This heart-warming tale is a true Christmas classic. A lonely old shoemaker dreams that Jesus will come and visit him, so he eagerly anticipates the event, hoping to make him a special pair of shoes. Instead, his heart is tugged by others in need, and he helps three different people, from a street sweeper to a beggar. Finally, he gives up waiting for Christ to visit and realizes it was only a dream. But then he hears the voice of Jesus and learns that Jesus came to him in every person he helped that day.
Originally written by French author Reuben Saillens and later retold by Leo Tolstoy, this endearing story has now acquired the status of a folk-tale. The heart-warming story of Papa Panov's generosity reflects the true spirit of Christmas. It is Christmas Day, and Papa Panov, the lonely old shoemaker, is expecting a special visitor. Things do not turn out at all as he thought, but by the end of the day the sparkle is back behind his little spectacles. A beautiful gift edition of a much-loved classic.
“And what do you do?” someone asked at a crowded reception at the NY Academy of Science. “Write—comparative religion.” Startled, he backed away, asking suspiciously, “Why religion? Are you religious?” Yes, incorrigibly—although I grew up among people who regarded religion as obsolete as an outgrown bicycle stashed in a back closet. While many of us leave institutions behind, identifying as “spiritual, not religious,” I’ve done both—had faith, lost it; then began exploring recent discoveries from Israel and Egypt—Dead Sea Scrolls, Christian “secret gospels,” Buddhist practices, asking, Why is religion still around in the twenty-first century? What I love is how such stories, art, music, and rituals engage our imagination and illuminate our experience.
This is a riveting read for people (like me, maybe you) impatient with second-hand dogma, driven to search for what resonates as authentic. Here the famous author of War and Peace and Anna Karenina tells his own story: how even enormous creative success, wealth, family, and worldwide fame, could not prevent a midlife crisis. Tolstoy tells how he narrowly escaped his inclination toward suicide, then began to discover a spiritual dimension in his own life. After first resolving to rejoin the Orthodox Christian church, he rejected that option, “since I couldn’t believe all they said,” then engaged in his own—unconventional—process of spiritual discovery.
Despite having written War and Peace and Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy, at the age of 51, looked back on his life and considered it a meaningless, regrettable failure. A Confession provides insight into the great Russian writer's movement from the pursuit of aesthetic ideals toward matters of religious and philosophical consequence. Authentic and genuinely moving, this memoir of midlife spiritual crisis was first distributed in 1872 and marked a turning point in the author's career as a writer: in subsequent years, Tolstoy would write almost exclusively about religious life, especially devotion among the peasantry. Generations of readers have been inspired…
I lost my marriage. I lost my dad to cancer, and my mom to Alzheimer’s Disease (and wrote a memoir about it). Along the way, I lost my sense of superiority and entitlement. I gained the ability to laugh at myself and trust God for everything. I found that I was not as important as I had tacitly assumed. I’ve learned Jesus’s words are true: “Whoever loses his life for My sake will find it.” When I see this depicted well in a book, I think, “Thank God for writers who will tell me the truth.” Today, I’m a fiction book coach with a goal of helping writers tell the whole awful, glorious truth.
It’s not possible that Tolstoy died and lived to tell about it, but that's what this book feels like.
As Ivan Ilych’s illness progresses, the reader sees how shallow his relationships are, and how fruitless is his striving to “get ahead.” As I read this book, I felt the vast chasm between the living and the dying, how alone Ivan is in his suffering. Ivan Ilych is no hero: he is an everyman. He squarely faces the pointlessness of his life, and ultimately throws off the things of no importance.
Through his experience I anticipated my own death, and felt how important it must be to live my life remembering that all the stupid stuff doesn’t matter. What does matter is my relationships with God and with other humans. Everyone who expects to die someday should read this book.
The Death of Ivan Ilyich, first published in 1886, is a novella by Leo Tolstoy, one of the masterpieces of his late fiction, written shortly after his religious conversion of the late 1870s. "Usually classed among the best examples of the novella", The Death of Ivan Ilyich tells the story of the sufferings and death of a high-court judge from a terminal illness in 19th-century Russia.
I first read Swann’s Way when I was seventeen. Throughout the following five decades, In Search of Lost Time has always remained within reach, a parallel universe more enriching than words can express. As a painter, I’m drawn to Proust’s subtle use of paintings to reveal and mystify the relationship between what we see and what we know. I’ve spoken on Proust at Berkeley, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and Houston, and was invited to give the annual Proust lecture at the Center for Fiction in New York as well as the Amon Carter Lecture on the Arts at the Harry Ransom Center in Austin.
"Like the Bible, In Search of Lost Time embodies its own sources, myths, and criticism. Like an archaeological site, the novel has come to stand for a state of civilization.” Roger Shattuck is masterful in reach and insight; his “field guide” is aptly named. The reader journeys alongside him to traverse the vast and incomparable terrain of a seven-volume novel. Full of wit and provocation, he leads us through thick and thin, and best of all, he allows our own reading of the great work to revive within us, illuminating the very experience of reading that Proust so brilliantly mined.
For any reader who has been humbled by the language, the density, or the sheer weight of Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time, Roger Shattuck is a godsend. Winner of the National Book Award for Marcel Proust, a sweeping examination of Proust's life and works, Shattuck now offers a useful and eminently readable guidebook to Proust's epic masterpiece, and a contemplation of memory and consciousness throughout great literature. Here, Shattuck laments Proust's defenselessness against zealous editors, praises some translations, and presents Proust as a novelist whose philosophical gifts were matched only by his irrepressible comic sense. Proust's Way, the…
I am a writer and educator, originally from the British Isles. Perhaps because of this, I am more than usually aware of the distraction and speed of contemporary American life. As a long-time meditator, and the author of World Enough & Time: On Creativity and Slowing Down, I am encouraged and inspired by any book that draws attention to our “hurry sickness” and offers practices or suggestions to help us to slow down.
Ursula K.Le Guin is perhaps best known as a novelist and science fiction writer. But her non-fiction is very much worth reading too. I love her values, her courage, her clarity, her persistence. Right to the end of her very long life (she died in 2018 at the age of 88), she was thinking about the art and craft of writing. I find myself deeply inspired and encouraged by Le Guin, and in particular, this book.
Join Ursula K. Le Guin as she explores a broad array of subjects, ranging from Tolstoy, Twain, and Tolkien to women's shoes, beauty, and family life. With her customary wit, intelligence, and literary craftsmanship, she offers a diverse and highly engaging set of readings. The Wave in the Mind includes some of Le Guin's finest literary criticism, rare autobiographical writings, performance art pieces, and, most centrally, her reflections on the arts of writing and reading.
In truth, I have been reading the works of Guy de Maupassant for years.
However, this is the first time I have had the opportunity to read all his works. Maupassant was the master of the short story, and a most descriptive writer. Reading his stories transports one back in time to the late 1800s in France (my favorite era in history).
England may have been the greatest world power during that epoch, but it was France, especially Paris, which set the cultural standards. Maupassant influenced a number of later authors, including Leo Tolstoy, O. Henry, Somerset Mongham, and Henry James.
Frederick Nietzsche praised him, saying, “I cannot at all conceive in which century of history one could haul together such inquisitive and at the same time delicate psychologists as one can in contemporary Paris: I can name as a sample – for their number is by no means small,…
Guy de Maupassant's strangely beautiful stories vary from uplifting explorations of moralistic living, through humorous parodies of the middle classes of 19th century France and their foolish attempts to better themselves, right through to the most critical revelations of the baseness of human existence, often revealed in the self-same stories. They are at once depressing and uplifting, cynical and idealistic, humorous and thought-provoking. The one thing that each story has in common is that it leaves the reader with a new insight into the human condition. Check out our other books at www.dogstailbooks.co.uk
