A beat movement icon and visionary poet, Allen Ginsberg broke boundaries with his fearless, pyrotechnic verse. The apocalyptic "Howl" became the subject of an obscenity trial when it was first published in 1956 -- its vindication was a watershed moment in twentieth-century history. Dark, ecstatic and rhapsodic, "Howl" shows why Ginsberg was one of the most influential poets of the twentieth century. Howl and Other Poems is a collection of Ginsberg's finest work, including "Howl," one of the principal works of the Beat Generation as well as "A Supermarket in California," "Transcription of Organ Music," "Sunflower Sutra," "America," "In the Baggage Room at Greyhound," and some of his earlier works. 

A beloved Japanese modern classic that chronicles the author’s twenty-year bond with her cat, meditating on solitude, independence, and the writing life. On a cool summer evening in 1977, Mayumi Inaba hears a forlorn cry carried by the breeze of Tokyo’s Tamagawa River. She follows the sound to find a newborn kitten, just the size of her palm, dangling from a fence, abandoned. Overcome by tender affection, she takes the cat back to the small apartment she shares with her husband and christens her Mii, and so begins an ineffable bond. Over the next twenty years, we follow Inaba, a poet and novelist by moonlight, through a lifetime of choices and compromises made in pursuit of quiet, solitude, and a space to create. Through it all, her cat, a formidably independent creature in her own right, is her confidante and muse. From the late Mayumi Inaba, the winner of the Kawabata Yasunari Prize and the Tanizaki Prize, Mornings Without Mii is more than a love letter to feline companionship—it is a probing, stirring meditation on the forces that enable us to connect, to create, and to build a life.

A beloved Japanese modern classic that chronicles the author’s twenty-year bond with her cat, meditating on solitude, independence, and the writing life. On a cool summer evening in 1977, Mayumi Inaba hears a forlorn cry carried by the breeze of Tokyo’s Tamagawa River. She follows the sound to find a newborn kitten, just the size of her palm, dangling from a fence, abandoned. Overcome by tender affection, she takes the cat back to the small apartment she shares with her husband and christens her Mii, and so begins an ineffable bond. Over the next twenty years, we follow Inaba, a poet and novelist by moonlight, through a lifetime of choices and compromises made in pursuit of quiet, solitude, and a space to create. Through it all, her cat, a formidably independent creature in her own right, is her confidante and muse. From the late Mayumi Inaba, the winner of the Kawabata Yasunari Prize and the Tanizaki Prize, Mornings Without Mii is more than a love letter to feline companionship—it is a probing, stirring meditation on the forces that enable us to connect, to create, and to build a life.

When Mr. Earnshaw, master of Wuthering Heights, returns from a trip with an unkempt orphan in tow, he announces that the child, Heathcliff, is now a member of the family. While young Catherine Earnshaw becomes close with Heathcliff, her older brother, Hindley, sinks into bitter resentment. As Catherine and Heathcliff mature, and their affection blossoms into desire, Hindley’s resentment boils over into hatred, setting the stage for a tragic drama whose aftermath will shake the foundations of their world.

‘For a very long time, the days went by, each just like the day before, then I began to think, and everything changed’ Deep underground, thirty-nine women live imprisoned in a cage. Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there, no notion of time, and only vague recollection of their lives before. As the burn of electric light merges day into night and numberless years pass, a young girl - the fortieth prisoner - sits alone and outcast in the corner. Soon she will show herself to be the key to the others' escape and survival in the strange world that awaits them above ground. Jacqueline Harpman was born in Etterbeek, Belgium, in 1929, and fled to Casablanca with her family during WWII. Informed by her background as a psychoanalyst and her youth in exile, I Who Have Never Known Men is a haunting, heartbreaking post-apocalyptic novel of female friendship and intimacy, and the lengths people will go to maintain their humanity in the face of devastation. Back in print for the first time since 1997, Harpman’s modern classic is an important addition to the growing canon of feminist speculative literature.

‘For a very long time, the days went by, each just like the day before, then I began to think, and everything changed’ Deep underground, thirty-nine women live imprisoned in a cage. Watched over by guards, the women have no memory of how they got there, no notion of time, and only vague recollection of their lives before. As the burn of electric light merges day into night and numberless years pass, a young girl - the fortieth prisoner - sits alone and outcast in the corner. Soon she will show herself to be the key to the others' escape and survival in the strange world that awaits them above ground. Jacqueline Harpman was born in Etterbeek, Belgium, in 1929, and fled to Casablanca with her family during WWII. Informed by her background as a psychoanalyst and her youth in exile, I Who Have Never Known Men is a haunting, heartbreaking post-apocalyptic novel of female friendship and intimacy, and the lengths people will go to maintain their humanity in the face of devastation. Back in print for the first time since 1997, Harpman’s modern classic is an important addition to the growing canon of feminist speculative literature.

Ever since Harry Potter had come home for the summer, the Dursleys had been so mean and hideous that all Harry wanted was to get back to the Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry. But just as he’s packing his bags, Harry receives a warning from a strange impish creature who says that if Harry returns to Hogwarts, disaster will strike.And strike it does. For in Harry’s second year at Hogwarts, fresh torments and horrors arise, including an outrageously stuck-up new professor and a spirit who haunts the girls’ bathroom. But then the real trouble begins – someone is turning Hogwarts students to stone. Could it be Draco Malfoy, a more poisonous rival than ever? Could it possibly be Hagrid, whose mysterious past is finally told? Or could it be the one everyone at Hogwarts most suspects… Harry Potter himself!

Eleven-year-old Owen Meany, playing in a Little League baseball game in Gravesend, New Hampshire, hits a foul ball and kills his best friend's mother. Owen doesn't believe in accidents; he believes he is God's instrument. What happens to Owen after that 1953 foul is both extraordinary and terrifying. At moments a comic, self-deluded victim, but in the end the principal, tragic actor in a divine plan, Owen Meany is the most heartbreaking hero John Irving has yet created.

The long-awaited memoir by Cameron Crowe—one of America’s most iconic journalists and filmmakers—revealing his formative years in rock and roll and bringing to life stories that shaped a generation, in the bestselling tradition of Patti Smith’s Just Kids with a dash of Moss Hart’s Act One. The Uncool is a joyful dispatch from a lost world, the real-life events that became Almost Famous, and a coming-of-age journey filled with characters you won’t soon forget. Cameron Crowe was an unlikely rock and roll insider. Born in 1957 to parents who strictly banned the genre from their house, he dove headfirst into the world of music. By the time he graduated high school at fifteen, Crowe was contributing to Rolling Stone. His parents became believers, uneasily allowing him to interview and tour with legends like Led Zeppelin; Lynyrd Skynyrd; Bob Dylan; Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young; and Fleetwood Mac. The Uncool offers a front-row ticket to the 1970s, a golden era for music and art when rock was young. There’s no such thing as a media junket—just a rare chance a young writer might be invited along for an adventure. Crowe spends his teens politely turning down the drugs and turning on his tape recorder. He talks his journalism teacher into giving him class credit for his road trip covering Led Zeppelin’s 1975 tour, which lands him—and the band—on the cover of Rolling Stone. He embeds with David Bowie as the sequestered genius transforms himself into a new persona: The Thin White Duke. Why did Bowie give Crowe such unprecedented access? “Because you’re young enough to be honest,” Bowie tells him. Youth and humility are Crowe’s ticket into the Eagles’ dressing room in 1972, where Glenn Frey vows to keep the band together forever; to his first major interview with Kris Kristofferson; to earning the trust of icons like Gregg Allman and Joni Mitchell who had sworn to never again speak to Rolling Stone. It’s a magical odyssey, the journey of a teenage writer waved through the door to find his fellow dreamers, music geeks, and lifelong community. It’s a path that leads him to writing and directing some of the most beloved films of the past forty years, from Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Say Anything to Jerry Maguire and Almost Famous. His movies often resonate with the music of the artists he first met as a journalist, including Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers, The Who, and Pearl Jam. The Uncool is also a surprisingly intimate family drama. If you’ve seen Almost Famous, you may think you know this story—but you don’t. For the first time, Crowe opens up about his early formative years in Palm Springs, and pays tribute to his father, a decorated Army officer who taught him the irreplaceable value of the human voice. Crowe also offers a full portrait of his mother, whose singular spirit helped shape him into an unconventional visionary. With its vivid snapshots of a bygone era and a celebration of creativity and connection, this memoir is an essential read for music lovers or anyone chasing their wildest dreams. At the end of that roller-coaster journey, you might just find what you were looking for: Your place in the world.

Under the influence of a charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at a New England college discover a way of thought and life a world away from their banal contemporaries. But their search for the transcendent leads them down a dangerous path, beyond human constructs of morality.

Great strange visionary poems by the author of Howl, “in the midst of the broken consciousness of mid-twentieth century . . .” In the midst of the broken consciousness of mid-twentieth century suffering anguish of separation from my own body and its natural infinity of feeling its own self one with all self, I instinctively seeking to reconstitute that blissful union which I experience so rarely. I took it to be supernatural an gave it holy Name thus made hymn laments of longing and litanies of triumphancy of Self over mind-illusion mechano-universe of un-feeling Time in which I saw my self my own mother and my very nation trapped desolate our worlds of consciousness homeless and at war except for the original trembling of bliss in breast and belly of every body that nakedness rejected in suits of fear that familiar defenseless living hurt self which is myself same as all others abandoned scared to own unchanging desire for each other. These poems almost unconscious to confess the beatific human fact, the language intuitively chosen as in trance & dream, the rhythms rising on breath from belly thru breast, the hymn completed in tears, the movement of the physical poetry demanding and receiving decades of life while chanting Kaddish the names of Death in many worlds the self seeking the Key to life found at last in our self.

Great strange visionary poems by the author of Howl, “in the midst of the broken consciousness of mid-twentieth century . . .” In the midst of the broken consciousness of mid-twentieth century suffering anguish of separation from my own body and its natural infinity of feeling its own self one with all self, I instinctively seeking to reconstitute that blissful union which I experience so rarely. I took it to be supernatural an gave it holy Name thus made hymn laments of longing and litanies of triumphancy of Self over mind-illusion mechano-universe of un-feeling Time in which I saw my self my own mother and my very nation trapped desolate our worlds of consciousness homeless and at war except for the original trembling of bliss in breast and belly of every body that nakedness rejected in suits of fear that familiar defenseless living hurt self which is myself same as all others abandoned scared to own unchanging desire for each other. These poems almost unconscious to confess the beatific human fact, the language intuitively chosen as in trance & dream, the rhythms rising on breath from belly thru breast, the hymn completed in tears, the movement of the physical poetry demanding and receiving decades of life while chanting Kaddish the names of Death in many worlds the self seeking the Key to life found at last in our self.

The gateways to wonder and delight are flung open wide for all to enter. At once a beautiful love song and an encyclopedia of yogic techniques, the cherished text known as the Vijnana Bhairava Tantra shimmers with new effulgence in Lorin Roche's The Radiance Sutras. Lorin brings us his unique perspective on each of 112 Sanskrit teachings, along with his one-of-a-kind guidance in how to meditate with, embody, and practice them—what he describes as "answering the call of the sutras you love."Here is an invitation to experience directly the ecstatic depths of yoga as revealed by the divine partners Shiva and Shakti, through an intimate exploration of:The divinity that is permeating your body at this very moment• The alchemical power of Sanskrit• Yoga meditation—harmonizing all the elements and levels of your being• The depths of your connection to the energies of lifeTaken as a whole, this teaching is startling in its breadth and the huge range of human experience that it encompasses. This is a book to savor one phrase at a time, over a period of days or years or a lifetime. With The Radiance Sutras, yoga and meditation students everywhere can nurture their own relationship with these living wisdom teachings.