THE STORIES: LAUGHTER IN THE SHADOW OF THE TREES. Martin, a brilliant, distinguished critic, is rapidly falling into a state of dementia. His wife, Felicia, remains the epitome of the supportive wife and loyal fan, even in the face of his insults and peev

For fans of Small Spaces, Coraline, A Series of Unfortunate Events, and James Howe's Bunnicula classics comes the first book in the award-winning, New York Times bestselling Books of Elsewhere series. This house is keeping secrets . . . When eleven-year-old Olive and her parents move into the crumbling mansion on Linden Street and find it filled with mysterious paintings, Olive knows the place is creepy—but it isn’t until she encounters its three talking cats that she realizes there’s something darkly magical afoot. Then Olive finds a pair of antique spectacles in a dusty drawer and discovers the most peculiar thing yet: She can travel inside the house’s spooky paintings to a world that’s strangely quiet . . . and eerily sinister. But in entering Elsewhere, Olive has been ensnared in a mystery darker and more dangerous than she could have imagined, confronting a power that wants to be rid of her by any means necessary. With only the cats and an unusual boy she meets in Elsewhere on her side, it’s up to Olive to save the house from the shadows, before the lights go out for good.

In A Natural History of the Senses Diane Ackerman revealed herself as a naturalist who writes with the sensuous immediately of a great poet. Now Jaguar of Sweet Laughter presents the work of a poet with the precise and wondering eye of a gifted naturalist. Ackermans's Olympian vision records and transforms landscapes from Amazonia to Antarctica, while her imaginative empathy penetrates the otherness of hummingbirds, deer, and trilobites. But even as they draw readers into the wild heart of nature, Ackerman's poems are indelible reminders of what it is to be a human being—the "jaguar of sweet laughter" that, according to Mayan mythology, astonished the world because it was the first animal to speak.

Rowdy, ecstatic, and sometimes stern, these teaching stories and fables reveal new and very human properties in Rumi's vision. Included here are the notorious “Latin parts” that Reynold Nicholson felt were too unseemly to appear in English in his 1920s translation. For Rumi, anything that human beings do—however compulsive—affords a glimpse into the inner life. Here are more than 40 fables or teaching stories that deal with love, laughter, death, betrayal, and the soul. The stories are exuberant, earthy, and bursting with vitality—much like a painting by Hieronymus Bosch or Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. The characters are guilty, lecherous, tricky, ribald, and finally possessors of opened souls. Barks writes: "These teaching stories are a kind of scrimshaw—intricately carved, busy figures, confused and threatening, and weirdly funny. This is an entertaining collection from one of the greatest spiritual poets of all time, rendered by his most popular translator. “The minute I heard my first love story, I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was. Lovers don't finally meet somewhere. They're in each other all along.”--Rumi

The Shadows of a Man is a glimpse into the mind of a troubled and damaged boy making decisions that are destined to have lasting consequences. This true story is about a boy abused and who was faced with all the haunting family issues he thought he could keep inside to channel his own demons, but the shadows in his life has exploded into a cycle of drugs crime prostitution and murder. The first part of this drama identifies with a child who is wise beyond his years a child who was put in a position in his young life to handle adult issues. Now James must confront his Shadows of an abused and tortured past and decide who and what he really is and deal with The Shadows of a Man. The Shadows are those hellacious levels of life. It changes as life rearranges. There is always hurt in the shadows as well as our unseen reflection. What we do in the Shadows come out into the light. This story is filled with bad choices, broken pieces, failures and a lot of pain. It is also filled with a major change, come back, and a freedom in life. Because there can be no after without a before. This book is based on lies, Love, hate and murder and what actually happened.