I Am the Beggar of the World presents an eye-opening collection of clandestine poems by Afghan women. Because my love's American, blisters blossom on my heart. Afghans revere poetry, particularly the high literary forms that derive from Persian or Arabic. But the poem above is a folk couplet—a landay, an ancient oral and anonymous form created by and for mostly illiterate people: the more than 20 million Pashtun women who span the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. War, separation, homeland, love—these are the subjects of landays, which are brutal and spare, can be remixed like rap, and are powerful in that they make no attempts to be literary. From Facebook to drone strikes to the songs of the ancient caravans that first brought these poems to Afghanistan thousands of years ago, landays reflect contemporary Pashtun life and the impact of three decades of war. With the U.S. withdrawal in 2014 looming, these are the voices of protest most at risk of being lost when the Americans leave. After learning the story of a teenage girl who was forbidden to write poems and set herself on fire in protest, the poet Eliza Griswold and the photographer Seamus Murphy journeyed to Afghanistan to learn about these women and to collect their landays. The poems gathered in I Am the Beggar of the World express a collective rage, a lament, a filthy joke, a love of homeland, an aching longing, a call to arms, all of which belie any facile image of a Pashtun woman as nothing but a mute ghost beneath a blue burqa.

Contents include biographical notes about the author and the illustrator.

The Beggar and the Bluebirdis a modern-day fairytale in the tradition of Hans Christian Anderson and the Grimm Brothers. It tells the moving story of a little bird whose flight southward for the winter keeps getting delayed because of the strange requests of a local street beggar. The beggar asks the bird to deliver bread to a homeless man, money to a widow with children, and a gold cross to a sick boy in the hospital. As a result of performing these acts of mercy, the kind bird gets caught in a massive winter snowstorm. All seems lost, until an astonishing turn of events reveals the true identity of the street beggar. An inspiring story of risk and sacrifice, The Beggar and the Bluebird teaches children the true meaning of gift-giving and demonstrates that great love is always rewarded by God--though often not in ways we can predict.

“An exhilarating collection” (The New York Times Book Review) of ten blended stories from Nobel Prize–winning author Alice Munro “The rich texture of its narrative and the author’s graceful style make [The Beggar Maid] a considerable accomplishment.”—Joyce Carol Oates, Ms. In this vibrant series of interweaving stories, Alice Munro recreates the evolving bond—one that is both constricting and empowering—between two women in the course of almost forty years. One is Flo, practical, suspicious of other people’s airs, at times dismayingly vulgar. The other is Rose, Flo’s stepdaughter, a clumsy, shy girl who somehow—in spite of Flo’s ridicule and ghastly warnings—leaves the small town she grew up in to achieve her own equivocal success in the larger world.

"Wonderful!” (Grace Paley). “Heartwarming and smart and wonderfully written” (Detroit Free Press). “Provides edifying advice, intimately given, like the best-selling Tuesdays with Morrie” (the Dallas Morning News). “Altogether original” (Dr. Laura Schlessinger). “This story will speak to the humanity of the reader” (Jewish Book World). The Beggar King and the Secret of Happiness is that rare, magical book—a book that tells a good story but also shows us how the tales we learned when we were children shed light on our adult lives. Joel ben Izzy had the unusual opportunity to relive those lessons when he lost his voice and reconnected with his old teacher, Lenny, a retired storyteller. Through his meetings with Lenny, Joel rediscovers the wisdom of ancient tales and takes us on a journey into a world of beggars and kings, monks and tigers, lost horses and buried treasures—and in the end tells us the secret of happiness.