The guide of choice for anyone who plans to die someday--are YOU ready for the AFTERLIFE? To find out, take this simple quiz: 1. Like Earth, the Afterlife has celebrities, outcasts, deadheads, losers, and busybodies. True False 2. Is there an Afterlife after the Afterlife? Yes No 3. When you first arrive on "the Other Side," you will be given: a) a set of wings b) a toaster c) a copy of A Newcomer's Guide to the Afterlife Don't worry if you're not sure how to respond. A Newcomer's Guide to the Afterlife has answers to these questions and more--and if you're lucky, some of them may turn out to be right! An irreverent, one-of-a-kind compendium from the award-winning author of Ishmael, A Newcomer's Guide to the Afterlife can be read as a parable, an allegory, a work of fiction--or exactly what it claims to be: a helpful handbook for the recently deceased. It is filled with uncommon wisdom, bizarre imaginings, uncanny perceptions, and unexpected humor. Is it fantastic escapism or a seminal event in human history? Read it and find out.... Face it. The Afterlife is the ultimate test. You might as well study.

This collection of essays, with special reference to Asia, analyzes religion through lived experience and reveals how religious phenomena are inextricably linked to globalizing processes.

Russell H. Greenan's "It Happened in Boston?" is one of the most radical narratives to appear in the late 1960s ("this is a book that encompasses everything" as David L. Ulin noted in "Bookforum"). Yet due in large part to the difficulty of classifying Greenan's fiction, many readers are unaware of his other novels. In "The Birth of Death and Other Comedies: The Novels of Russell H. Greenan," Tom Whalen, drawing widely from the American literary tradition, locates Greenan's lineage in the work of Hawthorne and Poe "where allegory and dream mingle with and illuminate realism," as well as in the fiction of Twain, West, Hammett, Cain, and Thompson. Examining Greenan's characteristic themes and strategies, Whalen provides perceptive readings of the dark comedies of this criminally neglected American master, and in a coda reflects on Greenan's career and the reception of his work.

Learn the magick of energy healing for those on their sacred journey into the land of the ancestors. A Guide of Spirits teaches us how to guide the dying to the land of the ancestors in a way that is balancing and healing. It teaches us how to help the person who is transitioning energetically and spiritually prepare for their final journey to the afterlife. Chris Allaun also shows the witch and healer how to escort earthbound spirits to the ancestral lands so they may find healing and rejuvenation. This is a step-by-step 'how to' book to help every witch, healer, and shaman lend comfort and compassion to the dying.

Richard Grayson has been keeping a daily diary compulsively since the summer of 1969, when he was an 18-year-old agoraphobic about to venture out into the world - or at least the world around him in Brooklyn. His diary, approximately 600 words a day without missing a day since August 1, 1969, now totals over 9 million words, rivaling the longest diaries ever written. But Grayson is not merely an eccentric with graphomania. His books of short stories have been praised in reviews by ROLLING STONE, THE LOS ANGELES TIMES, THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW, THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER, PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, LIBRARY JOURNAL and BEST SELLERS. Grayson's nineteenth compilation of diary entries, WANDERYEAR, takes place between mid-1997 and mid-1998, when he quits his job as a staff attorney in social policy at a University of Florida law school think tank to move from place to place - South Florida, Brooklyn, Silicon Valley, Wyoming, Long Island, New Orleans, and suburban Phoenix, Los Angeles, Chicago and Philadelphia.

From the author of the critically acclaimed, award-winning bestseller Ishmael and its sequel, My Ishmael, comes a powerful novel with one of the most profound spiritual testaments of our time “A compelling ‘humantale’ that will unglue, stun, shock, and rearrange everything you’ve learned and assume about Western civilization and our future.”—Paul Hawken, author of The Ecology of Commerce Father Jared Osborne has received an extraordinary assignment from his superiors: Investigate an itinerant preacher stirring up deep trouble in central Europe. His followers call him B, but his enemies say he’s something else: the Antichrist. However, the man Osborne tracks across a landscape of bars, cabarets, and seedy meeting halls is no blasphemous monster—though an earlier era would undoubtedly have rushed him to the burning stake. For B claims to be enunciating a gospel written not on any stone or parchment but in our very genes, opening up a spiritual direction for humanity that would have been unimaginable to any of the prophets or saviors of traditional religion. Pressed by his superiors for a judgement, Osborne is driven to penetrate B’s inner circle, where he soon finds himself an anguished collaborator in the dismantling of his own religious foundations. More than a masterful novel of adventure and suspense, The Story of B is a rich source of compelling ideas from an author who challenges us to rethink our most cherished beliefs. Explore Daniel Quinn’s spiritual Ishmael trilogy: ISHMAEL • MY ISHMAEL • THE STORY OF B

We members of settler colonial culture—the latest form of what novelist and cultural critic Daniel Quinn calls Taker culture—are constrained by myriad institutions that leave us with little choice but to engage in practices that are profoundly damaging to the planet, to others, and to ourselves. Our path to living otherwise, Andrew Frederick Smith argues, lies in the threefold struggle, which is inspired by Quinn's focus on the interweaving roots of ecological, social, and personal wellbeing. These three forms of wellbeing are co-implicated. We cannot enjoy one without equally enjoying the others; they are a package deal. As such, what works for people individually and collectively works for the planet, and vice versa. Reclaiming our lives and revitalizing our human and more-than-human communities are salient acts of resistance against Taker culture. They offer means of escape from our cultural captivity and an opportunity for full-spectrum wellbeing.

A prose poem is a poem written in prose rather than verse. But what does that really mean? Is it an indefinable hybrid? An anomaly in the history of poetry? Are the very words "prose poem" an oxymoron? This groundbreaking anthology edited by celebrated poet David Lehman, editor of The Best American Poetry series, traces the form in all its dazzling variety from Poe and Emerson to Auden and Ashbery and on, right up to the present. In his brilliant and lucid introduction, Lehman explains that a prose poem can make use of all the strategies and tactics of poetry, but works in sentences rather than lines. He also summarizes the prose poem's French heritage, its history in the United States, and the salient differences between verse and prose. Arranged chronologically to allow readers to trace the gradual development of this hybrid genre, the poems anthologized here include important works from such masters of American literature as Gertrude Stein, William Carlos Williams, e. e. cummings, Hart Crane, Ernest Hemingway, James Schuyler, Allen Ginsberg, Frank O'Hara, and Elizabeth Bishop. Contemporary mainstays and emerging poets -- Robert Bly, John Ashbery, Charles Simic, Billy Collins, Russell Edson, James Tate, Anne Carson, Yusef Komunyakaa, and Lydia Davis, among them -- are represented with their best work in the field. The prose poem is beginning to enjoy a tremendous upswing in popularity. Readers of this marvelous collection, a must-have for anyone interested in the current state of the art, will learn why.

Providence is Quinn's fascinating memoir of his life-long spiritual voyage. His journey takes him from a childhood dream in Omaha setting him on a search for fulfillment, to his time as a postulant in the Trappist order under the guidance of eminent theologian Thomas Merton. Later, his quest took him through the deep self-discovery of psychoanalysis, through a failed marriage during the turbulent and exciting 60s, to finding fulfillment with his wife Rennie and a career as a writer. In Providence Quinn also details his rejection of organized religion and his personal rediscovery of what he says is humankind's first and only universal religion, the theology that forms the basis for Ishmael. Providence is an insightful book that address issues of education, psychology, religion, science, marriage, and self-understanding, and will give insight to anyone who has ever struggled to forge and enact a personal spirituality.