THE STORY: Freely adapted from Matthew Lewis' eighteenth-century gothic novel, The Monk , AMBROSIO, the play, deftly transposes our own contemporary concerns about sexuality, desire and abstinence on to the original novel's voluptuous setting

Filmed on location in the Holy Land, Jesus: the Way, the Truth, and the Life is a new and fresh look at Jesus -- who he is, what he is really like, what he taught, and what he did for our salvation. This encounter with Christ will inspire and empower you to center your entire life around him as you come to know and love him in an ever-deeper and more intimate way.

A Heartbeat and a Guitar tells of the collaboration of two distinct yet connected musicians--iconoclast Johnny Cash and pioneering folk artist Peter La Farge-- Bitter Tears: Ballads of the American Indian, the album that influenced the likes of Bruce Springsteen and Bob Dylan. In this intimate portrayal of the two musicians, D'Ambrosio interviewed surviving members of Cash's band, his producers, and admirers Pete Seeger and Kris Kristofferson. He renders a dramatic picture of both an era of radical protest and the making of one of the most controversial and enduring works of political pop art of the 1960s. A Heartbeat and a Guitar is the inspiration for the new album "Look Again to the Wind: Johnny Cash's Bitter Tears revisited" featuring a collective of top Americana artists including Emmylou Harris, Steve Earle, Gillian Welch, and Kris Kristofferson.

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book. Sample Book Insights: #1 There is no official list of Fathers of the Church. The term Father of the Church is a family term, informally coined by somebody in the early Church to refer to other people in an even earlier era of the Church. When I think about the Fathers of the Church, I think about St. Ignatius of Antioch (c. 35–107), and his letters. In them, he writes: Do you wish to be perfect. Then be like Philip, who took his master Paul the Apostle as his pattern (to resemble), and guard Jesus as the apple of your eye. And when he who is your head and the apple of your eye sees that you have given attention to the apple, he will straightway part with you; but if you persist in keeping him with you, he will not depart from you. For this cause I have desired you to take me as an example; behold I also am a man; thou seest how greatly I am pressed upon by old age, nevertheless I do not consider it a misery, for as my master said, Thou shalt call thy old man father; for so it is. #2 The Church Fathers are those great Christian writers who passed on and clarified the teaching of the apostles from approximately the second through the eighth centuries. #3 The Church Fathers are those great Christian writers who passed on and clarified the teaching of the apostles from approximately the second through the eighth centuries. #4 The Church Fathers are those great Christian writers who passed on and clarified the teaching of the apostles from approximately the second through the eighth centuries.

“In the fall, I went for walks and brought home bones. The best bones weren’t on trails—deer and moose don’t die conveniently—and soon I was wandering so far into the woods that I needed a map and compass to find my way home. When winter came and snow blew into the mountains, burying the bones, I continued to spend my days and often my nights in the woods. I vaguely understood that I was doing this because I could no longer think; I found relief in walking up hills. When the night temperatures dropped below zero, I felt visited by necessity, a baseline purpose, and I walked for miles, my only objective to remain upright, keep moving, preserve warmth. When I was lost, I told myself stories . . .” So Charles D’Ambrosio recounted his life in Philipsburg, Montana, the genesis of the brilliant stories collected here, six of which originally appeared in The New Yorker. Each of these eight burnished, terrifying, masterfully crafted stories is set against a landscape that is both deeply American and unmistakably universal. A son confronts his father’s madness and his own hunger for connection on a misguided hike in the Pacific Northwest. A screenwriter fights for his sanity in the bleak corridors of a Manhattan psych ward while lusting after a ballerina who sets herself ablaze. A Thanksgiving hunting trip in Northern Michigan becomes the scene of a haunting reckoning with marital infidelity and desperation. And in the magnificent title story, carpenters building sets for a porn movie drift dreamily beneath a surface of sexual tension toward a racial violence they will never fully comprehend. Taking place in remote cabins, asylums, Indian reservations, the backloads of Iowa and the streets of Seattle, this collection of stories, as muscular and challenging as the best novels, is about people who have been orphaned, who have lost connection, and who have exhausted the ability to generate meaning in their lives. Yet in the midst of lacerating difficulty, the sensibility at work in these fictions boldly insists on the enduring power of love. D’Ambrosio conjures a world that is fearfully inhospitable, darkly humorous, and touched by glory; here are characters, tested by every kind of failure, who struggle to remain human, whose lives have been sharpened rather than numbed by adversity, whose apprehension of truth and beauty has been deepened rather than defeated by their troubles. Many writers speak of the abyss. Charles D’Ambrosio writes as if he is inside of it, gazing upward, and the gaze itself is redemptive, a great yearning ache, poignant and wondrous, equal parts grit and grace. A must read for everyone who cares about literary writing, The Dead Fish Museum belongs on the same shelf with the best American short fiction.

In 1671, Ambrosio Bembo, a young nobleman bored with everyday life in Venice, decided to broaden his knowledge of the world through travel. That August he set off on a remarkable, occasionally hazardous, four-year voyage to Syria, Turkey, Iraq, Iran, and the Portuguese colonies of western India. His journal, now translated into English for the first time, is the most important new European travel account of western Asia to be published in the past hundred years. It opens an extraordinary perspective on the Near East and India at a time when few Europeans traveled to these lands. Keenly observed and engagingly written, Bembo's vivid account is filled with a high sense of adventure and curiosity and provides intriguing descriptions of people, landscapes, food, fashion, architecture, customs, cities, commerce, and more. Presented here with the original illustrations and with a rich introduction and annotations, this lively and important historical document is at last available to scholars, students, and armchair travelers alike.