the author believes that within each of us, there lies an inner poet. this book of poetry seeks to inspire the reader to examine their lives, to seek their inner poet, to put pen to paper and begin. this collection of poems continues to look back into the author's life experiences, including love and loss, death, inspiration, family and our place in our increasingly challenging world and cosmos.
the author believes that within each of us, there lies an inner poet. this book of poetry seeks to inspire the reader to examine their lives, to seek their inner poet, to put pen to paper and begin. this collection of poems continues to look back into the author's life experiences, including love and loss, death, inspiration, family and our place in our increasingly challenging world and cosmos.
Living, Loving, Letting Go is a collection of poetry, is compiled the through the prism of life's three major movements. This collection is an intimate look at moments in the life of Journalist and Thought-Leader Rahman Johnson. His poems solicit introspection, self-reflection and joy.
Love has, quite unfairly, come to be associated in some quarters with being happy. But it is, naturally, one of the most reliable routes to misery. We tend to treat our sadness as if it were highly unique and shameful. But as this book explains, there are some solidly founded reasons why love should be at times highly sorrowful. The good news is that by understanding our romantic troubles and griefs, seeing them in their proper context and appreciating their prevalence, we will cease to feel so alone and so cursed. The essay is not a study in despair, it is a guide to a more consoling, humane and in its own way joyful perspective on the complexities of love.
“An engrossing tale [that] provides plenty of food for thought” (People, Best New Books pick), this playful, wise, and profoundly moving second novel from the internationally bestselling author of How Proust Can Change Your Life tracks the beautifully complicated arc of a romantic partnership. We all know the headiness and excitement of the early days of love. But what comes after? In Edinburgh, a couple, Rabih and Kirsten, fall in love. They get married, they have children—but no long-term relationship is as simple as “happily ever after.” The Course of Love explores what happens after the birth of love, what it takes to maintain, and what happens to our original ideals under the pressures of an average existence. We see, along with Rabih and Kirsten, the first flush of infatuation, the effortlessness of falling into romantic love, and the course of life thereafter. Interwoven with their story and its challenges is an overlay of philosophy—an annotation and a guide to what we are reading. As The New York Times says, “The Course of Love is a return to the form that made Mr. de Botton’s name in the mid-1990s….love is the subject best suited to his obsessive aphorizing, and in this novel he again shows off his ability to pin our hopes, methods, and insecurities to the page.” This is a Romantic novel in the true sense, one interested in exploring how love can survive and thrive in the long term. The result is a sensory experience—fictional, philosophical, psychological—that urges us to identify deeply with these characters and to reflect on his and her own experiences in love. Fresh, visceral, and utterly compelling, The Course of Love is a provocative and life-affirming novel for everyone who believes in love. “There’s no writer alive like de Botton, and his latest ambitious undertaking is as enlightening and humanizing as his previous works” (Chicago Tribune).
This poignant and heartwarming story explores the many faces of sadness and addresses the importance of mental health in a child-friendly way. A small boy creates a shelter for his sadness so that he can visit it whenever he needs to, and the two of them can cry, talk, or just sit. The boy knows that one day his sadness may come out of the shelter, and together they will look out at the world and see how beautiful it is. In this timely consideration of emotional wellbeing, Anne Booth has created a beautiful depiction of allowing time and attention for difficult feelings. Stunningly atmospheric illustrations by David Litchfield personify sadness as a living being, allowing young readers to more easily connect with the story's themes of emotional literacy.
With the breadth and cumulative force of a novel, Mother of Sorrows presents ten interwoven stories of an American family starting out in the post—World War II suburbs of Washington, D.C., a world of identical brick houses and sunstruck, treeless lawns, a world of initial hopefulness from which shame and loss have seemingly been banished. This is the story of two adolescent brothers whose father has suddenly died, and of their beautiful and complicated mother, a mother whom the younger son worshipfully imagines as “Our Mother of the Sighs and Heartaches . . . Our Mother of the Gorgeous Gypsy Earrings . . . Our Mother of the Late Movies and the Cigarettes . . . Our Mother of Sudden Attentiveness . . . Our Mother of Sudden Anger.” This is the brother who narrates these tales as he looks back thirty years later, the only remaining survivor of a world he seeks both to leave behind and to preserve in words forever, a world of sorrow that has held him spellbound even as he has attempted to create a life of his own. Suffused with the beauty of Richard McCann’s extraordinary language, Mother of Sorrows introduces us to a voice that is urgent, contemplative, elegant, angry, revelatory, and like no other in contemporary fiction.
“Little did I know at the time that I’d one day look back and remember it as the beginning of what I call our ‘weeping years.’” — Ashleigh Slater We all have “weeping years,” seasons where the trials seem to come one after another. For Ashleigh and her husband, their weeping years included miscarriage, multiple job losses, feelings of betrayal, panic attacks, anti-depressants, cross-country moves, and even suicidal thoughts. Loss is a constant of life, but the intensity of those years changed Ashleigh, altering how she understood and responded to grief. This book tells her story. Braving Sorrow Together: The Transformative Power of Faith and Community When Life is Hard explores loss and trial in a conversational, storytelling manner. It gently encourages those experiencing grief of any kind to seek comfort in God and in the “me too” of community. Ashleigh gives an honest and vulnerable account of her personal stories of loss, as well as those of her friends, with reflections from literature and Scripture sprinkled throughout. She examines the nature of grief and loss in several universal arenas, such as relationships, health, career, and the home. Anyone who ever struggles (and that’s all of us) will be able to move through trial with more wisdom, releasing anxiety and receiving the help and comfort God so bountifully provides. Readers of Braving Sorrow Together will be encouraged that they are not alone, inspired to reach out to close friends, and reminded that God—the Author of all of our stories— can be trusted through the tears. Includes an appendix with further reflections on leaning into community in difficult seasons.
