Daisaku Ikeda's well-known passion for reading leaps from the pages of The Books of My Youth. This tour of world-class literature he read as a young man—books, he says, that helped form his life's “spiritual framework”—will delight and inspire.Here we meet heroes and heroines, revolutionaries and villains. We hear poets singing their praises of the human spirit. We engage with philosophers who challenge the status quo as they illuminate a new way forward.Come, thrill to the discovery of how great literature can inform and bolster our Buddhist practice to bring peace and justice to the world today.

A writer arrives in Bombay on a book-related visit, and finds himself in search of the city he grew up in and barely knows, a city shaken to its core not long ago by the 2008 terrorist strikes-even as he takes for granted his errant local friend, Ramu. A six-foot-tall Kannadiga and one-time junkie who cannot reconcile himself to modern-day adult life, Ramu is an unlikely hero, Bombay incarnate; the writer is his mirrored counterpart in an extraordinary narrative about this city by the sea. Friend of My Youth is at once an unexpected exploration and a concentrated reminiscence woven around a series of visits to a city that was never really home; a commentary on the power of memory and the stubborn interference of childhood with adult life; a paean to the transformative power of friendship by one of our greatest living writers.

A “wickedly funny” (Newsweek) collection of ten short stories from Nobel Prize–winning author Alice Munro, “one of the most eloquent and gifted writers of contemporary fiction” (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times). “Each of her collections demonstrates such linguistic skill, delicacy of vision, and . . . moral strength and clarity.”—Chicago Tribune A woman haunted by dreams of her dead mother. An adulterous couple stepping over the line where the initial excitement ends and the pain begins. A widow visiting a Scottish village in search of her husband’s past—and instead discovering unsetting truths about a total stranger. The miraculously accomplished stories in this collection not only astonish and delight, but also convey the unspoken mysteries at the heart of all human experience. The mastery—the almost numinous ability to say the unsayable—makes Friend of My Youth a genuine literary event.

The "utterly compelling, uncommonly beautiful" collection of personal essays (Newsweek) that established Jo Ann Beard as one of the leading writers of her generation. Cousins, mothers, sisters, dolls, dogs, best friends: these are the fixed points in Jo Ann Beard's universe, the constants that remain when the boys of her youth -- and then men who replace them -- are gone. This widely praised collection of autobiographical essays summons back, with astonishing grace and power, moments of childhood epiphany as well as the cataclysms of adult life: betrayal, divorce, death. The Boys of My Youth heralded the arrival of an immensely gifted and influential writer and its essays remain surprising, original, and affecting today. "A luminous, funny, heartbreaking book of essays about life and its defining moments." --Harper's Bazaar

From the acclaimed author of Pearl and Final Payments comes a beautifully choreographed novel about first lovers meeting again after more than thirty years and reimmersing themselves in their shared past. Miranda and Adam, high-school sweethearts now in their late fifties, arrive by chance at the same time in Rome, a city where they once spent a summer deeply in love, living together blissfully. At an awkward reunion, the two—who parted in an atmosphere of passionate betrayal in the 1960s and haven’t seen each other since—are surprised to discover that they may have something to talk about. Both have their own guilt, their sense of who betrayed whom, and their long-held interpretation of the events that caused them not to marry and to split apart into the lives they’ve led since—both are married to others, with grown children. For the few weeks they are in Rome, Adam suggests that they meet for daily walks and get to know each other again. Gradually, as they take in the pleasures of the city and the drama of its streets, they discover not only what matters to them now but also more about what happened to them long ago. Miranda and Adam are masterfully portrayed characters, intent upon understanding who they are in relation to who they were. A story about what first love means and how it is shattered, and the lessons old lovers may still have to share with each other many years later, The Love of My Youth is also a poignant look back at the hopes and dreams of a generation and what became of them.

The stories of the Michigan childhood of a girl of both Anishinaabeg and English descent