The more than two dozen islands that make up southern Chile’s Chiloé Archipelago present a unique case of culture change and rapid industrialization in the twentieth century. Since the arrival of the first European settlers in the late 1500s, Chiloé was given scant attention by colonial and national governments on mainland Chile. Islanders developed a way of life heavily dependent on marine resources, native crops like the potato, and the cooperative labor practice known as the minga. Starting in the 1980s, Chiloé emerged as a key player in the global seafood market as major companies moved into the region to extract wild stocks of fish and to grow salmon and shellfish for export. The region’s economy shifted abruptly from one of subsistence farming and fishing to wage labor in export industries. Local knowledge, traditions, memories, and identities similarly shifted, with younger islanders expressing a more critical view of the rural past than their elders. This book recounts the unique history of this region, emphasizing the generational tensions, disconnects, and continuities of the last half century. Drawing on interviews, field observations, and historical documents, Anton Daughters brings to life one of the most culturally distinct regions of South America.

At once startling and gently loving, Truth sprays from the author's soul via these poems as though from an immanent spiritual geyser. Nature and science resolve one another in peace, and cosmic mysteries such as reincarnation, life after death, and the path to the Creator find solutions, not as second hand recollections but as actual experiences. Never again need the reader wonder if the Divine is deaf and blind to mortal suffering and the plight of the human condition. Rest assured in this poetry that one of the many hands of God is reaching out to you, beckoning to you to recall your infinite nature as Spirit: "The sea, the metaphor of the Formless Force, the hint dropper of entropy’s death to come, carried with the child upon the land, wielded as the sword of light, witnesses the Observer on the cliff the emergence of intropy, lifelong friend of Life, heralding victory over matter—the anti-attenuation mechanism, the negation of heat loss, and savior of the children of the earth, born of the sea—where all space present in the salt sea drop; all time contained in the moment—intropy, the great winding up of the universe. Born this day upon the crystal white sands, serenaded kindly goodbye, and sent tottering away in tearful happiness by the lapping, waving, watery Father; all as witnessed and recorded, according to plan, by the Observer."

From the author of Refuge, a magical novel about a young Iranian woman lifted from grief by her powerful imagination and love of Western culture. Growing up in a small rice-farming village in 1980s Iran, eleven-year-old Saba Hafezi and her twin sister, Mahtab, are captivated by America. They keep lists of English words and collect illegal Life magazines, television shows, and rock music. So when her mother and sister disappear, leaving Saba and her father alone in Iran, Saba is certain that they have moved to America without her. But her parents have taught her that “all fate is written in the blood,” and that twins will live the same life, even if separated by land and sea. As she grows up in the warmth and community of her local village, falls in and out of love, and struggles with the limited possibilities in post-revolutionary Iran, Saba envisions that there is another way for her story to unfold. Somewhere, it must be that her sister is living the Western version of this life. And where Saba’s world has all the grit and brutality of real life under the new Islamic regime, her sister’s experience gives her a freedom and control that Saba can only dream of. Filled with a colorful cast of characters and presented in a bewitching voice that mingles the rhythms of Eastern storytelling with modern Western prose, A Teaspoon of Earth and Sea is a tale about memory and the importance of controlling one’s own fate.

Earth Memories is a wonderful collection of essays by the English writer Llewelyn Powys. These ‘love letters to the English Countryside’ manifest throughout great depth of nature lore and observation hand in hand with the author’s own personal pagan creed and commentary on places, people and things. This edition, which was first published in 1938, includes an Introduction by the American literary critic and Pulitzer Prize-winning author Van Wyck Brooks. “Wherever Llewelyn Powys has lived, his mind has always turned towards England, the homeland that haunts him like a passion. Under the stars in the African jungle, poring over Robert Burton, whose rhythms have left long traces in his style—a style that is often archaic and always rare in texture—he dreamed of English gardens. In New York, in the clattering streets, he would see the cuckoo perched singing on the top of Sandsfoot Castle. He can always regain serenity, he says in one of his essays, by thinking of the playground of his childhood, the pear trees of Montacute Vicarage. High as his fever may be, the memory of this enchanted ground quiets his pulse in a moment; and his pictures of England suggest the eye of the convalescent, as if the world had been reborn for him. They are full of an all but miraculous freshness.”—Van Wyck Brooks, Introduction

This book is an analysis of thinking, remembering and reminiscing according to ancient authors, and their medieval readers. The author argues that behind the various medieval methods in interpreting texts of the past lie two apparently incompatible theories of human knowledge and remembering, as well as two differing attitudes to matter and intellect. The book comprises a series of studies which take ancient texts as evidence of the past, and show how medieval readers and writers understood them. The studies confirm that medieval and renaissance interpretations and uses of the past differ greatly from modern interpretation and yet betray many startling continuities between modern and ancient and medieval theories.