The North has always had, and still has, an irresistible attraction. This fascination is made up of a mixture of perspectives, among these, the various explorations of the Arctic itself and the Inuk cultural heritage found in the elders' and contemporary stories. This book discusses the different generations of explorers and writers and illustrates how the sounds of a landscape are inseparable from the stories of its inhabitants. Published in English.

When Thomas Merton entered a Trappist monastery in December 1941, he turned his back on secular life—including a very promising literary career. He sent his journals, a novel-in-progess, and copies of all his poems to his mentor, Columbia professor Mark Van Doren, for safe keeping, fully expecting to write little, if anything, ever again. It was a relatively short-lived resolution, for Merton almost immediately found himself being assigned writing tasks by his Abbot—one of which was the autobiographical essay that blossomed into his international best-seller The Seven Storey Mountain. That book made him famous overnight, and for a time he struggled with the notion that the vocation of the monk and the vocation of the writer were incompatible. Monasticism called for complete surrender to the absolute, whereas writing demanded a tactical withdrawal from experience in order to record it. He eventually came to accept his dual vocation as two sides of the same spiritual coin and used it as a source of creative tension the rest of his life. Merton’s thoughts on writing have never been compiled into a single volume until now. Robert Inchausti has mined the vast Merton literature to discover what he had to say on a whole spectrum of literary topics, including writing as a spiritual calling, the role of the Christian writer in a secular society, the joys and mysteries of poetry, and evaluations of his own literary work. Also included are fascinating glimpses of his take on a range of other writers, including Henry David Thoreau, Flannery O’Connor, Dylan Thomas, Albert Camus, James Joyce, and even Henry Miller, along with many others.

In this short poetic novel Alexander Kanengoni relates the traumatic history of those who fought to create the modern Zimbabwe.

Harold Pinter's Politics examines the expression of Pinter's political beliefs across every aspect and era of his artistic career. The fierce political stances of this important dramatist have been embodied in plays, screenplays, and his career as a theatrical director. Traditionally associated with absurdism, minimalism, and the dramatization of uncertainty, Pinter's name is now a byword for anti-authoritarian and anti-American politics. This transition has been in evidence from the earliest phases of his writing; all of Pinter's work emerges from his political views. His uniqueness as a political artist is that he is pessimistic about changing his audience or making it see its complicity in the horrors of the modern world. These horrors are dramatized through images of torture and oppression culminating in moments of silence that index the full extent of the destruction unleashed by the forces of power against dissidence.

Identical blue eyes stared determinably into mine. We looked identical in every way, except that Devin had recently dyed her normally black hair to platinum blond as her declaration of independence on the hold our mother had on her. But in that moment the blonde hair, or any other defining difference between us, faded away as we looked deep into each other's eyes. Behind both sets of eyes was one motherless similarity that echoed an ocean's worth of pain that had been accumulating for years with no relief. An ocean of pain could easily be hidden from the world, but not from a twin sister. As much as both of us wanted so badly to ease some of that pain for the other, we accepted that we had tried and failed for years and that we were both just incapable. The eye contact and the reminder of all the pain we had endured became too overpowering for both of us, and in a rare moment Devin accepted defeat by turning away from me. You won't find her was now one more stone in our carefully sculpted dam that held back a flood of unspeakable topics. When Drea and Devin were ten, Anna ... Left them. Vanished. No explanation. Their mother just no longer wanted to be their mother, and this started an avalanche of unending mistakes that unguided children make. Now they're twenty-five, and she reenters their life. Yes, their life, not lives, they're identical twins who'd spent their life trying to heal each other from the pain her abandonment inflicted. Yet as much as they both should hate her, want to burn her to the ground, she may be the one person who can save them both, separately for the first time, and build them all back to ... Whole.