"Cries in the New Wilderness presents a completely new view of the spiritual life of Russian society...The book is full of tragicomic tension and brings to mind the multivoiced novels of Dostoevsky."--Ilya Kabakov Inside the disintegrating Soviet Union, a professor compiles "The New Sectarianism," a classified manual of manifestos, articles, and sermons by members of banned religious sects--from the mystical Thingwrights and the absurdist Folls to the messianic Khazarists and the doomsday Steppies. Cries in the New Wilderness is filled with the voices of these groups. As a counterpoint to this medley of comic, grotesque, poetic, banal, poignant, and harrowing voices is the voice of the commentator, Professor Gibaydulina, who struggles to maintain the objectivity of her scientific atheism in the face of an amazing variety of religious experiences. Epstein's depiction of the inner drama of Gibaydulina's response to the crumbling of the Soviet Union and her quest for a new, creative atheism adds a tragic note to his polyphonic work. Mikhail Epstein's Cries in the New Wilderness is a work of extraordinary artistic and philosophical imagination, begun in Moscow in the mid-1980s and now available for the first time in English translation in an expanded version. Drawing on his own participation in Moscow's intellectual associations and in expeditions to study popular religious beliefs in southern Russia and Ukraine, Epstein recreates the spiritual experience of a whole Russian generation. His is not a documentary book, however, but a "comedy of ideas," in which he constructs from the voices he hears in the culture around him the religious and philosophical worldviews of Foodniks and Domesticans, Arkists and Bloodbrothers, Atheans and Good-believers, Steppies and Pushkinians. An award-winning essayist and critic, Mikhail Epstein has been compared to Jorge Luis Borges for his literary inventiveness and to Walter Benjamin for his acute observation of cultural phenomena. Transcending genres and disciplines, Cries in the New Wilderness is a brilliantly original work, a "virtual document" that illuminates the spiritual condition of the Soviet Union as it reveals unsuspected affinities between Russian and American culture. In the mirror of Soviet society, we recognize our own enthusiasm for alternative spiritual experiences, our worship of technology, our doomsday cults. We may also recognize that we ourselves are participants in many of the sects Mikhail Epstein describes, sects that seem at first fantastic and outlandish, but prove to be the religious basis of our own lives. "The prolific, inexhaustibly inventive Mikhail Epstein has produced a novel--almost. Cries in the New Wildnerness is fiction, but (according to Epstein's own philosophy of 'possibilism') not untrue: it has merely realized some of the vital potentials of post-atheistic Russian culture, where people thirst for a faith that can sacralize everyday practices while at the same time endorse a transcendent Whole. Whether you do Russia for a living or simply love the spectacle of dullness broken up into a thousand crazy glittering points of light, you will recognize, in reading it, a passion of your own."--Caryl Emerson, Princeton University "Mikhail Epstein is probably the most important figure in Russian literary theory in the post-Bakhtin, post-Lotman era. What he has to say is of great interest to everyone interested in cultural studies."--Walter Laqueur, Chairman, Center for Strategic and International Studies "Borgesian in its design, Cries in the New Wilderness is the best example of that rare genre of theological fantasy that strikes a precise equilibrium between search for God and struggle against God."--Alexander Genis, author of Red Bread

A man that would not let any denomination decide for him what to believe; Charles Fox Parham was drawn by God at a young age. He began to read God's Word with no preconceived knowledge of doctrines or creeds. He maintained that childlike faith into his adult years. In 1900, he helped open a Bible school with the only textbook being the Bible. There was also no tuition charged, and the only requirement was the desire to be obedient to Jesus Christ. On a January night in 1901, the school was gathered in an upper room. They were praying and seeking God with one accord, when suddenly, God poured out the Holy Spirit. They began to speak in other tongues as the Spirit gave the ability. Read the story of how God transcended denominational lines giving birth to the modern Pentecostal movement. As well as many other teachings and beliefs of Charles Parham- A voice crying in the wilderness. Reprinted and Edited.

The never-before-published 1966 novel by legendary film director Frank Capra finally in print for the first time "If you, too, feel like wandering, come along and help me unravel this odd tale--a tale full of half-truths, whole-truths, and no-truths at all." So begins Frank Capra's never published, and often speculated about novel of his favorite place--Silver Lake, nestled in the jagged cliffs of the eastern Sierra Nevadas. Capra casts the fictional Frank Capra in the lead roll of this novel of environmental and humanitarian preservation. As tourism comes back to the decimated boom towns of the eastern Sierras, Frank Capra finds himself, along with a do-good cop named Lefty, at the center of a scandal. That scandal being that they provided food and protection to two men living off the grid in the wilderness, while the powers that be have been desperately trying to clear the men out of the area, being not the kind of folk they want in their towns. In a story that only Frank Capra can tell, the David and Goliath of small-town tourism politics comes to a head in the wilderness of the Sierra Nevadas.Cry Wilderness is a deeply humane novel about the ways in which people caring for one another ultimately triumphs over oppression.

Essays address such diverse topics as New York City, politics, human perfectability, sex, literature, and the environment

A Washington Post, NPR, and Buzzfeed Best Book of the Year • Shortlisted for the Booker Prize “More than timely, the novel feels timeless, solid, like a forgotten classic recently resurfaced — a brutal, beguiling fairy tale about humanity. But at its core, The New Wilderness is really about motherhood, and about the world we make (or unmake) for our children.” — Washington Post "5 of 5 stars. Gripping, fierce, terrifying examination of what people are capable of when they want to survive in both the best and worst ways. Loved this."— Roxane Gay via Twitter Margaret Atwood meets Miranda July in this wildly imaginative debut novel of a mother's battle to save her daughter in a world ravaged by climate change; A prescient and suspenseful book from the author of the acclaimed story collection, Man V. Nature. Bea’s five-year-old daughter, Agnes, is slowly wasting away, consumed by the smog and pollution of the overdeveloped metropolis that most of the population now calls home. If they stay in the city, Agnes will die. There is only one alternative: the Wilderness State, the last swath of untouched, protected land, where people have always been forbidden. Until now. Bea, Agnes, and eighteen others volunteer to live in the Wilderness State, guinea pigs in an experiment to see if humans can exist in nature without destroying it. Living as nomadic hunter-gatherers, they slowly and painfully learn to survive in an unpredictable, dangerous land, bickering and battling for power and control as they betray and save one another. But as Agnes embraces the wild freedom of this new existence, Bea realizes that saving her daughter’s life means losing her in a different way. The farther they get from civilization, the more their bond is tested in astonishing and heartbreaking ways. At once a blazing lament of our contempt for nature and a deeply humane portrayal of motherhood and what it means to be human, The New Wilderness is an extraordinary novel from a one-of-a-kind literary force.