When Essa meets Oliver - a brainy indoor type, in Boulder, Colorado for the summer - she is cautious at first, distrustful of the tourist crowd and suspicious of Oliver's mysterious past in Chicago. But her nine-year old sister Puck is charmed and pushes Essa toward him. Soon Essa finds herself showing Oliver the Boulder she has forgotten. After spending a night stuck in a mountain storm, Essa wakes to find Puck missing. Now Essa must rely on her newfound spiritual strength if she is to save her sister's life, and ultimately her own.
Sixteen-year-old Riley copes with the loss of her mother two years earlier with the help of a support group, which gets involved in a mystery surrounding a relic of St. Ignatius.
With another aching deep dive into human spirituality, Emily France mines her home state of Colorado in a novel of a teen girl's harrowing search for her missing younger sister—and her own search for self. Born and raised in Boulder, Colorado, Essence McKree feels older than any seventeen-year-old she knows. Ever since weed was legalized, her mother has been working in a pot shop, high more often than not. Lately it’s been up to Essa to care for her nine-year-old sister, Puck. When Essa meets Oliver—a brainy indoor type who’s in town for the summer—she is cautious at first, distrustful of the tourist crowd and suspicious of Oliver’s mysterious past in Chicago. But Puck is charmed and pushes Essa toward him. Soon Essa finds herself showing Oliver the Boulder she has forgotten: the mountain parties, the long hikes . . . and at Oliver’s urging, the exploration of Buddhism at the local zendo. When Oliver agrees to accompany Essa on a three-day survival game in the Rocky Mountains, she feels a lightness she hasn’t known in a long time. Then she discovers that Puck has stowed away and followed them into the wilderness. After spending a night stuck in a mountain storm, Essa wakes to find Puck missing. Now Essa must rely on her newfound spiritual strength if she is to save her sister’s life, and ultimately her own.
Zen is essentially a practice and not a dogma; no amount of theory or discussion will ever take the place of a few minutes of practice. Among the many books about Zen, there are few that explain simply, to the interested beginner, how to do Zen—how to just sit down and begin to work toward fulfillment of the promises offered by Zen. Zen Meditation Plain and Simple answers this need with concise, easily understood instructions on how to incorporate Zen into your daily life. Albert Low makes no glib claims or promises. He admits that the way of Zen is not an easy one to follow. But, for those willing to stop talking about Zen, stop thinking about Zen, and start working to be and do in the manner of Zen, Zen Meditation Plain and Simple offers just the right tool to get the job done.
“Carrie Fountain’s YA novel is part-plot-twisty thriller, part-sweet romance, and perfect for summer reading!” —Bustle, Best YA Book of July, on I'm Not Missing It’s senior year, and Miranda Black’s best friend, Syd, has run away—suddenly and inexplicably, leaving behind nothing but a pink leopard print cell phone with a text message from the mysterious HIM. Everyone wants to know why Syd left, but the truth is, Miranda has no idea. When Miranda’s mother abandoned her as a child, Miranda had found shelter in her friendship with Syd, who wore her own motherlessness like a badge of honor. Now Miranda’s been left behind again, left to untangle the questions of why Syd left, where she is—and if she’s even a friend worth saving, all while stumbling into first love with the most unlikely boy in school. How do you take on the future when it feels like so much of your past wasn’t even real?
On the Trail of Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Zen and Now is the story of a story that will appeal to the 5 million readers of the original and serve as an initiation to a whole new generation. Since its original publication in 1968, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry into Values has touched whole generations of readers with its serious attempt to define “quality” in a world that seems indifferent to the responsibilities that quality brings. Mark Richardson expands that journey with an investigation of his own – to find the enigmatic author of Zen and the Art, ask him a few questions, and place his classic book in context. The result manages to be a biography of Pirsig himself – in the discovery of an unknown life of madness, murder and eventual resolution – and a splendid meditation on creativity and problem-solving, sanity and insanity.
Saul Summerblend has a bizarre memory problem. And his Zen master, Bodhee, says he should travel to the dwarf planet Ceres to fix it. Along the way Saul meets a thirty-foot magic square whose diagonals and rows sum to 666, encounters a group of drunken Vikings and evil dwarves, works some campy mathematics and overhears amusing CB radio conversations, fights a visionary with a penchant for wrestling masks and flipping off cars all day on main street, invents neologisms like deemkrite and freeganidge. He also learns of a mystical book called 'Red Zen: Way of the Butterfly' and attempts to solve a few koans about kangaroos, split toe nails, and carts filled with hatchets. Will Saul fix his strange memory problem? Will he even make it back to Earth alive?
The world of ZEN CITY is a world of passionate desires: the desire for power, the desire for order, and the desire for self-transcendence. ZEN CITY is a story about the struggle and violence of people who see themselves as striving for the ultimate. Along the way, ZEN CITY presents a sly critique of the practice and perversions of imported spirituality in twentieth-century America.
"Effervescent and sparkling like Champagne ... " - DearAuthor.com For writer Jade Yeo, the Roaring Twenties are coming in with more of a purr -- until she pillories London's best-known author in a scathing review. Sebastian Hardie is tall, dark and handsome -- and more intrigued than annoyed. Jade is irresistibly drawn to the prospect of adventure he offers. But if she succumbs to temptation, she risks losing her hard-won freedom -- and her best chance for love. The Perilous Life of Jade Yeo is a 23,000-word historical romance novella.
Merton, one of the rare Western thinkers able to feel at home in the philosophies of the East, made the wisdom of Asia available to Westerners. "Zen enriches no one," Thomas Merton provocatively writes in his opening statement to Zen and the Birds of Appetite—one of the last books to be published before his death in 1968. "There is no body to be found. The birds may come and circle for a while... but they soon go elsewhere. When they are gone, the 'nothing,' the 'no-body' that was there, suddenly appears. That is Zen. It was there all the time but the scavengers missed it, because it was not their kind of prey." This gets at the humor, paradox, and joy that one feels in Merton's discoveries of Zen during the last years of his life, a joy very much present in this collection of essays. Exploring the relationship between Christianity and Zen, especially through his dialogue with the great Zen teacher D.T. Suzuki, the book makes an excellent introduction to a comparative study of these two traditions, as well as giving the reader a strong taste of the mature Merton. Never does one feel him losing his own faith in these pages; rather one feels that faith getting deeply clarified and affirmed. Just as the body of "Zen" cannot be found by the scavengers, so too, Merton suggests, with the eternal truth of Christ.
