Seven Stories


Book Description

A girl in a seven-story apartment building has trouble sleeping because of her disruptive neighbors, who all seem to be characters from fairy tales.




Seven Stories


Book Description

Seven Stories gives us the Bible as revelation of a nonviolent God. It identifies seven major themes or movements of transformation working through the text and the experiences from which it arose. Together these dynamic themes produce an overall movement of human change. They create a thrilling inversion of human meaning, from oppression to justice, from wrath to compassion, from violence to forgiveness. Seven Stories shows us a method of Bible interpretation that does not rely on a flat literal reading, but is something much more powerful and compelling. It shows a God working against the grain of violent human culture to bring about what has been intended all along: a creation birthed to peace and life by the revelation of a nonviolent God in the midst of history. The engine of human change as demonstrated in the stories is itself the divine self-revelation, and the measure, by which the truth of everything else is to be judged. Each of the seven stories contains three sub-stories or lessons, moving from the emergence of a theme in the Old Testament to its radical conclusion in Jesus. Together with introductory cycle the pattern produces a course of twenty four sessions, roughly a six month program. The way in which each motif builds on the other, both through history and the slow knitting together of new human meaning for the student, creates a teaching that is as urgently needed as it is transformative.




Live Through This


Book Description

“The 21 artists, who share their stories of madness, trauma, addiction, abuse and self-destruction, and their relationship to art, leave no vulnerable detail unwritten.”—Shameless A visceral look at the bizarre entanglement of destructive and creative forces, Live Through This is a collection of original stories, essays, artwork, and photography. It explores the use of art to survive abuse, incest, madness and depression, and the often deep-seated impulse toward self-destruction including cutting, eating disorders, and addiction. Here, some of our most compelling cartoonists, novelists, poets, dancers, playwrights, and burlesque performers traverse the pains and passions that can both motivate and destroy women artists, and mark a path for survival. Taken together, these artful reflections offer an honest and hopeful journey through a woman's silent rage, through the power inherent in struggles with destruction, and the ensuing possibilities of transforming that burning force into the external release of art. With contributions by Nan Goldin, bell hooks, Patricia Smith, Cristy C. Road, Carol Queen, Annie Sprinkle, Elizabeth Stephens, Carolyn Gage, Eileen Myles, Fly, Diane DiMassa, Bonfire Madigan Shive, Inga Muscio, Kate Bornstein, Toni Blackman, Nicole Blackman, Silas Howard, Daphne Gottleib, and Stephanie Howell.




Crossing the River


Book Description

A powerful exploration of grief and resilience following the death of the author's son that combines memoir, reportage, and lessons in how to heal Everyone deals with grief in their own way. Helen Macdonald found solace in training a wild gos­hawk. Cheryl Strayed found strength in hiking the Pacific Crest Trail. For Carol Smith, a Pulitzer Prize­ nominated journalist struggling with the sudden death of her seven-year-old son, Christopher, the way to cross the river of sorrow was through work. In Crossing the River, Smith recounts how she faced down her crippling loss through reporting a series of profiles of people coping with their own intense chal­lenges, whether a life-altering accident, injury, or diag­nosis. These were stories of survival and transformation, of people facing devastating situations that changed them in unexpected ways. Smith deftly mixes the stories of these individuals and their families with her own account of how they helped her heal. General John Shalikashvili, once the most powerful member of the American military, taught Carol how to face fear with discipline and endurance. Seth, a young boy with a rare and incurable illness, shed light on the totality of her son's experiences, and in turn helps readers see that the value of a life is not measured in days. Crossing the River is a beautiful and profoundly moving book, an unforgettable journey through grief toward hope, and a valuable, illuminating read for anyone coping with loss.




Everyday Enlightenment


Book Description

Peace. Calm. Mindfulness. Enlightenment. These are appealing concepts, but they never seem like they're within grasp of the everyday person. With all our responsibilities in life, most of us are doing our best just to keep up, let alone have time to find that elusive 'inner calm'. Luke McLeod knows all about this. He's an everyday person. He's a son, a husband and a friend, trying to find some balance in his everyday life just like everyone else. There is one thing, though, he knows for sure has improved his quality of life every single day. Meditation. Luke used to believe meditation wasn't for him but has now become one of Australia's leading meditation experts helping thousands of 'everyday' people, just like himself, enjoy meditation in an easy, down-to-earth way. Everyday Enlightenment contains encouragement, support, guidance, advice and short meditations to help you start, enjoy and embrace your meditation journey. Let Luke help you find some of that inner peace and calmness without having to move to the mountains and become a monk. Let him show you how the secret to living an enlightened life is hidden within the ordinary and the everyday - it will be one of the best things you ever do.




Seven Stories Every Salesperson Must Tell


Book Description

How do the best salespeople connect, influence and persuade? With stories. 'Seven Stories Every Salesperson Must Tell' takes you on a high-stakes sales journey, using stories to establish rapport and trust, deliver insight, inspire action and close the deal, and in doing so win new friends and collaborators. When you share purposeful stories in your client conversations, you'll create more new business than you thought possible. Sharing more than 50 stories from around the world, Mike draws on his diverse international sales career to teach and demonstrate the power of storytelling -- from first hello to signed contract. You'll learn stories to help you: Establish rapport and trust Present challenging insights Differentiate your solution Share your company values Unstick negotiation stand-offs Create better business outcomes. This book will change the way you think about selling. Rather than seeing your role as that of a transactional deal closer, you'll become a story master, creating new stories for your clients.




A Place to Live


Book Description

Arguably one of Italy’s greatest contemporary writers, Natalia Ginzburg has been best known in America as a writer’s writer, quiet beloved of her fellow wordsmiths. This collection of personal essays chosen by the eminent American writer Lynne Sharon Schwartz from four of Ginzburg’s books written over the course of Ginzburg’s lifetime was a many-years long project for Schwartz. These essays are deeply felt, but also disarmingly accessible. Full of self-doubt and searing insight, Ginzburg is merciless in her attempts to describe herself and her world—and yet paradoxically, her self-deprecating remarks reveal her deeper confidence in her own eye and writing ability, as well as the weight and nuance of her exploration of the conflict between humane values and bureaucratic rigidity.




7 Stories


Book Description

A man's contemplation of suicide leads to a charming and surprising ending. Cast of 2 women and 3 men.




Farewell, Ghosts


Book Description

This award-winning novel about a woman facing her past introduces Terranova to English-speaking audiences. Translated by Ann Goldstein, translator of Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan quartet. Finalist, Premio Strega, 2019 | Winner, Premio Alassio Centolibri | Selected among the 10 Best Italian Books of 2018 by Corriere della Sera Ida is a married woman in her late thirties, who lives in Rome and works at a radio station. Her mother wants to renovate the family apartment in Messina, to put it up for sale and asks her daughter to sort through her things--to decide what to keep and what to throw away. Surrounded by the objects of her past, Ida is forced to deal with the trauma she experienced as a girl, twenty-three years earlier, when her father left one morning, never to return. The fierce silences between mother and daughter, the unbalanced friendships that leave her emotionally drained, the sense of an identity based on anomaly, even the relationship with her husband, everything revolves around the figure of her absent father. Mirroring herself in that absence, Ida has grown up into a woman dominated by fear, suspicious of any form of desire. However, as her childhood home besieges her with its ghosts, Ida will have to find a way to break the spiral and let go of her father finally. Beautifully translated by Ann Goldstein, who also translated Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan quartet, Farewell, Ghosts is a poetic and intimate novel about what it means to build one's own identity.




Grand Central Winter


Book Description

A New York Times Notable Book Whether Lee Stringer is describing "God's corner" as he calls 42nd Street, or his friend Suzy, a hooker and "past due tourist" whose infant child he sometimes babysits, whether he is recounting his experiences at Street News, where he began hawking the newspaper for a living wage, then wrote articles, and served for a time as muckraking senior editor, whether it is his adventures in New York's infamous Tombs jail, or performing community service, or sleeping in the tunnels below Grand Central Station by night and collecting cans by day, this is a book rich with small acts of kindness, humor and even heroism alongside the expected violence and desperation of life on the street. There is always room, Stringer writes, "amid the costume" jewel glitter...for one more diamond in the rough." Two events rise over Grand Central Winter like sentinels: Stringer's discovery of crack cocaine and his catching the writing bug. Between these two very different yet oddly similar activities, Lee's life unwound itself, during the 1980s, and took the shape of an odyssey, an epic struggle to find meaning and happiness in arid times. He eventually beat the first addiction with help from a treatment program. The second addiction, writing, has hold of him still. Among the many accomplishments of this book is that Stringer is able to convey something of the vitality and complexity of a down—and—out life. The reader walks away from it humming its melody, one that is more wise than despairing, less about the shame we feel when confronted with a picture of those less fortunate, and more about the joy we feel when we experience our shared humanity.