This book is a stunner in every way. The story of Matisse's siege on the US artworld is fascinating, full of great vignettes about MOMA, the Cohn sisters, Alfred Barr, Barnes, the American press. Equally impressive is the smart, whimsical design and the gorgeous color plates.

In this essay by Valery, sea shells serve as a catalyst to introspection and investigation. Valery, through the inspection of sea shells, poses some of the most basic metaphysical questions, but in an original way. By asking these questions regarding a concrete object, Valery achieves an immediate profundity rarely reached in most philosophical treatises. And, of course, the writing is translucid and precise, furthering the case for Valery as the French Walter Pater.

This important selecton of Michaux's writings is not out of print. It is currently in its third paperbook printing with New Directions.

I attended a week long retreat where we used this book as a guide. I am not a very religious person at all, but this book changed my life. Merton challenges us to die to our false selves, to open our hearts to God and to accept contemplation of the mystery of God and his creations as the center of our lives. As an introduction to Merton and as a daily spiritual guide, this book is priceless.

This book, and Giono's Joy of Man's Desiring, are the two of the most beautiful, wise, transformative works of fiction that I know -- even in translation. The translations are excellent, but Giono's writing, and his vision, are among the wisest and most eloquent in any language -- it is these books that gave me the impetus to be a writer. If you care for nature, and the prospect of humankind living in genuine participation and reciprocity with earthly nature, these are your books. An essential tonic for our collective ecological insanity...

This novel won the Goncourt Award in 1930 (This is the French equivalent of the Literature Pulitzer Award). It focus on the life of a former French Soldier of the First World War who after a conversation which one of his fellow comrades in arms feels the paradox inherent in everyone of life's conflicts. The conversation is broken to be retaken ten years afterwards when the meet in Malaya at a country club. Now his mate is the owner of a rubber plantation and he works in the administrative post with another company involved in the same type of business.

Helped by his friend, he will slowly but surely develop a wider perception of life, boosted by the fact that the customs of the locals allow him to relax his usual frame of mind. It is a novel of self discovery written at a time when such type of travel was not hype, so it feels very authentic.

I loved it! I was really happy to read it. Such pain and suffering for a girl who lives with her grand-parents while her widowed mother is trying to settle a better life in Paris. She misses her mother so much, will she be able to get enough love from her?

First written and translated posthumously from the French in the 1950's with a style and clarity saved for popular non-fiction, the late Doctor Maspero describes the various levels of Taoism, Chinese history and culture in amazing detail. Revised in the 1980's.

With great conviction, I believe Michaux is one of the unsung 20th Century poets in America. Tent Posts is a compass for the human experience. Michaux's tone is direct, conversational and guided by a quality of both insistence and studied reflection. There is a visceral impact to his lines: they are full of the immediacy of a man who has traveled far, and how he found his way. Tent Posts is a distilled work. The lines are terse arrows of intention: focused, they hit their mark. Michaux published this work three years before he died, and the reader is left with a strong feeling that the lines within were written as a goad for the author's personal interest in one topic: understanding the nature of change and the symbolic presentation of this understanding. Unencumbered by dogma and written in a direct, vernacular style, Michaux's lines constantly point to unknown territory. This "no-man's-land" of the heart is all he speaks to in this work, and we should be glad it is. Tent Posts makes clear that Michaux's earlier works are not nonsensical or fantastic musings of a chaotic world, as some have said. Instead, his works are glimpses into the ephemera of experience, which adhere to a logic we see reflected everywhere in the evanescence of the days.

My favorite book always seem to be the one I'm reading now. That being the case, the book I'm reading currently is "Thomas Merton: Contemplative Critic" by Henri Nouwen. The book has a double appeal for me because after Merton, Nouwen is one of my favorite spiritual writers. In this book Nouwen follows Merton's early inner struggle for meaning and how it lead him to the monastery and away from the world. He traces Merton's spiritual journey in the monastery as he moves toward greater depths of solitude. In the heart of this solitude Merton discovers the world he left behind, only this time he sees it with eyes of compassion rather than as an object of fear or rejection.

It is his compassionate rediscovery of the world that moves Merton to become an insightful and powerful critic of the social injustice he found, as well as a catalyst for the ferment of the sixties that resulted in the civil rights and anti-war movement. His perspective in all of this was not just on the immediate wrongs that were being done in the world but on the illusions that society was buying into that produced racial injustice and reliance on violence as a primary tool of social policy.

Nouwen is not writing about Merton just as a social critic. He was that and to deny that part of Merton is to miss a good part of who he was. Rather, Nouwen tries to understand the spiritual developments within Merton that produced the insightful social critic. He examines the influence of Taoist and Zen thought on Merton, as well as the dark night of the soul that Merton struggled through in the fifties. He sees the monastery itself as a primary factor in Merton's spiritual development. Nouwen observes, "Merton saw his monastery not only as a haven, where men sought to purify themselves so as to know God, but also as a center of spiritual action, from which he was to unmask the illusions of this world in a challenging way. The more he discovered the concrete demands of living, the less he emphasized living to purify himself."

The book was originally published in 1972 and reprinted in 1981. It is currently available through Liguori/Triumph Publications.