The Bedside Book of Beasts


Book Description

A lavishly illustrated companion to The Bedside Book of Birds explores the relationships between predators and prey, drawing on mythology, nature writings, and other sources to provide coverage of both real and fictional creatures.




The Bedside Book of Birds


Book Description

WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY MARGARET ATWOOD Featured in the vast majority of mythologies and religions, birds are generally associated with creativity and the human spirit. From the Christian dove to Quetzalcoatl (the Aztec plumed serpent), and from Raven Man to Plato's description of the soul growing wings and feathers, birds have represented the soul in contrast to the body, the spiritual as opposed to the earthly. The Bedside Book of Birds is an unexpected and fascinating treasure trove of paintings, drawings, essays and scientific observations: it marvellously conveys the hope, the longing and the enchantment that birds have evoked in humans in all cultures and all times. Beautifully produced, the book contains more than one hundred illustrations, ranging from early cave paintings through works by Audubon, Morris and Gould, to Inuit and other works created in the twentieth century. There are writings by naturalists like W.H. Hudson, Laurens van der Post, Peter Matthiessen and Barry Lopez, and by classical authors such as Shakespeare, Coleridge, Melville and Poe. There is also a rich seam of contemporary work by Jorge Luis Borges, Ted Hughes, Italo Calvino, Bruce Chatwin and Haruki Murakami, among many others. The Bedside Book of Birds is a book to explore, to savour, and to learn from - a book for the winged soul in all of us.




Beasts!


Book Description

Beasts! is a classic mythological menagerie, comprised only of creatures that were thought at one time to actually exist, depicted by about a hundred of the most acclaimed artists and cartoonists coming from the most avant-garde ambits of the art world. The Beasts project has fired the imaginations of luminaries such as Craig Thompson, Souther Salazar, Jeff Soto, Glenn Barr, Dave Cooper, Tim Biskup, Seonna Hong, Jeremy Fish and Jay Ryan, who will present never-before-seen art completely original to this book, superbly laid out in breathtaking, full-color two-page spreads. p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 13.9px Arial; color: #424242}




Things That Are


Book Description

Essays by a Whiting Award winner: “Like a descendant of Lewis Carroll and Emily Dickinson . . . one of the most exciting and original writers in America.” —Yiyun Li, author of Must I Go Things That Are takes jellyfish, fainting goats, and imperturbable caterpillars as just a few of its many inspirations. In a series of essays that progress from the tiniest earth dwellers to the most far-flung celestial bodies—considering the similarity of gods to donkeys, the inexorability of love and vines, the relations of exploding stars to exploding sea cucumbers—Amy Leach rekindles a vital communion with the wild world, dormant for far too long. Things That Are is not specifically of the animal, the human, or the phenomenal; it is a book of wonder, one the reader cannot help but leave with their perceptions both expanded and confounded in delightful ways. This debut collection comes from a writer whose accolades precede her: a Whiting Award, a Rona Jaffe Award, a Best American Essays selection, and a Pushcart Prize, all received before her first book-length publication. Things That Are marks the debut of an entirely new brand of nonfiction writer, in a mode like that of Ander Monson, John D’Agata, and Eula Biss, but a new sort of beast entirely its own. “Explores fantastical and curious subjects pertaining to natural phenomena . . . for those interested in looking at the natural world through the lens of a fairy tale, this is a bonbon of a book.” —Kirkus Reviews




Bringer of Light


Book Description

For generations, the kingdom of Arten has stood alone against the ancient dark mage Mercer, a man no longer bound by time. But when King Wern is kidnapped, Queen Arin will risk everything to get him back. Lynden Trenadin is chosen to join the ranks of the elite Queen's Champions both for her prowess as a warrior and her remarkable resemblance to the queen. She has spent her life battling at Arten's borders, but now she must defend the queen with her life as they journey to their enemy's castle. When the tide of battle goes against them, Lynden unleashes a magical power she didn't know she possessed. Even though she saved hundreds of warriors, Lynden is forced to flee in shame for her use of forbidden magic. Now on the run, Lynden must raise a rebellion to free her country from the tyranny of the enemy she thought she'd destroyed. A band of loyalists and an enclave of ancient mages aid her in her efforts, but with a dark mage bent on her destruction, Lynden must discover a way to harness her new magic before it is too late.







Perpetual Motion


Book Description

Set in southern Ontario in the late nineteenth century, at a time when the machine age was coming into its own, Perpetual Motion chronicles the fortunes of settler Robert Fraser, a man obsessed with power and control. Driven by the idea of inventing a perpetual motion machine which will utilize natural energy, he neglects and destroys not only the nature around him but his own family too, as his overbearing rationality becomes a kind of tragic lunacy. First published in 1982, Perpetual Motion is Graeme Gibson’s superb evocation of a time when faith in material progress is still challenged by superstition and a lingering belief in magic. It is an ironic yet compassionate examination of the painful consequences of human folly.




Bell Mountain (Bell Mountain, 1)


Book Description

Finally… Faithful Fiction that Reveals the Kingdom of God!

Introducing Bell Mountain, by Lee Duigon, the first novel from Chalcedon’s new label, Storehouse Press!

The world is going to end as soon as Jack and Ellayne ring the bell on top of Bell Mountain. No one has ever climbed the mountain, and no one has ever seen the bell. But the children have a divine calling to carry out the mission, and it sweeps them into high adventure.

For the world is already changing, and fast: legends come to life, strange beasts emerge from the forest, bandits and slave traders hunt the helpless, and war rumbles on the borderlands.

The children must make their way through all these perilsnot knowing that a professional killer has been sent to stop them.

For there are others who know the secret of the bell a terrible secret, only hinted at in the sacred writings. But do they understand Gods plan any better than the children?

The world has been shaken to its foundations before. Will this be the final shaking?

Great for young adults.




Barefoot-Hearted


Book Description

"The Wyoming Centennial Wagon Train ended in Cody in a dismal, torn-down drive-in movie theater. Before setting up the corral, we were forced to clear away shards of glass, bent nails, broken lumber. My prairie skirt and petticoats hung ragged and clay-caked, and under a droopy Stetson my frizzled hair appeared at once greased and starched beyond human recognition. A cloud, a sort of vaporousness, redolent with fresh acrid sweat on top of powerful stale sweat, hung thickly about me. Laced, as it was, with a woman's sweet musky secretions, and all gone past ripe, oddly it was a pungency I savored. Such goaty piquance, though, was cause to be shunned in any town setting. The look of my world had changed. Gone were the high-dollar designer clothes and the zipping around fabled Marin County in a candy-apple-red 1966 Mustang convertible. It was true that I unfailingly sought the ironies in life and, with a kind of dual personality, shifted easily through incongruencies such as town strolls in high heels and backcountry hiking in bare feet; the bucket seats of a classic automobile and the broken-down bench of a beater truck. It was only during the years that Iíd worn white overalls, taped drywall, and come home every night much like Charles Schulz's Pig Pen, flaking a cloud of dried white mud bits onto the rug, that I'd felt moved to keep my fingernails painted red. Now I was to slip farther than ever planned toward one end of my seesaw and then, incredibly, by conscious design, inch out even farther." --from Barefoot-Hearted With more than 1.5 million copies in print, Kathleen Meyer's groundbreaking international bestseller, How to Shit in the Woods: An Environmentally Sound Approach to a Lost Art, has been widely embraced by the outdoor community and has found its way into myriad places: national parks, outdoor leadership schools and scout-troop headquarters, the camp tents of those who have discovered that it is amusing out-loud reading, and the bathroom-literature baskets of households around the world. Now, from the Rocky Mountain West, Meyer brings us Barefoot-Hearted: A Wild Life Among Wildlife, a coming-into-the-country story told with the frank, dry humor and sharp research of her first book. The country, in this case, is Montana's tall, reaching landscape with its ever underfoot wild critters; the on-tenterhooks territory of a new romantic relationship; and the pressure cooker that is our precarious global imbalance. Meyer finds herself in midlife standing out under yawning skies, surrounded by sagebrush and cactus, having fallen for the Irish charm of itinerant farrier Patrick McCarron. As partners, they travel across three mountain states with draft horses and a covered wagon and then set up housekeeping in a seventy-five-year-old dairy barn. In this primitive structure, the author rapidly discovers she's living with troops of mice, a nursery colony of seventy-five bats, sexually fired-up skunks, and more flies than in a pig shed. She tells of a freakish season that or-phaned seventy-seven bear cubs, an unusual fly-fishing trip on a famed blue-ribbon trout stream, the visitations of moose, and the discovery of a den of wolves. Meyer's prose is original and inspired, playful yet provocative. She carries us vividly back to the settlers' old West while pondering modern-day dilemmas, those of fitting into this fast hurtling world, of determining amid the earth's rising extinctions of species, whose planet it is, and of managing to stay empowered residing with a man who "stands six feet six and beats steel on an anvil for a living." A personal chronicle of conscience and a love story of rare and quirky dimension, Barefoot-Hearted catapults readers into new realms of thought, deftly guided there by Meyer's sense of the ironic, the randy, and the humorous.




The Faber Book of Beasts


Book Description

The Faber Book of Beasts is a collection of many of the best poems in English about the creatures who share our planet. The animal kingdom has prompted some of the liveliest and most enjoyable writing by poets, from Homer to our contemporaries. Among the creatures gathered here, tame or wild; common or exotic, are mammals, reptiles, birds, insects, and others perhaps more fanciful than real. A zoologist's delight.There is, too, a moral or philosophical purpose. As Paul Muldoon says in his introduction: 'We are most human in the presence of animals.' And it is just this sense of how our humanity is illuminated by the contemplation of bestial life that he has set out to celebrate. The results are wonderfully rich and thought-provoking.