The 12 trans-realist prose sketches in Christmas At The Four Corners of The Earth take the reader to Paris, Rio de Janeiro, Bahia, Rotterdam, China, New Mexico, New Zealand, the Ardennes Forest, and the south Atlantic ocean. We meet a one-armed man playing the piano in a small bungalow under the Southern Cross, a Countess who survives the sinking of a transatlantic steamer and artists who drink and sing through Christmas eve and day. These sketches - working together - are antitheses to traditional and perhaps sentimental Christmas stories. These are not tales of the star, the shepherds and the manger, but of common people confronted by all the beauty, terror, doubt and confusion of the 20th century. What remains? Cendrars's profound vision and a steadfast belief that the incarnation of the spirit does, indeed, endure.

Following the route taken by British explorer Ivan Champion in 1927, and amid breathtaking landscapes and wildlife, Salak traveled across this remote Pacific island - often called the last frontier of adventure travel - by dugout canoe and on foot. Along the way, she stayed in a village where cannibals m was still practiced behind the backs of the missionaries, met the leader of the OPM - the separatist guerrilla movement opposing the Indonesian occupation of Western New Guinea - and undertook an epic trek through the jungle. The New York Times said ''Kira Salak is tough, a real - life Lara Croft.'' And Edward Marriott, proclaimed Four Corners to be ''A travel book that transcends the genre?It is, like all the best travel narratives, a resonant interior journey, and offers wisdom for our times.''

A collection of folk stories from around the world, each accompanied by background information, that explain the various perspectives of different peoples on how the universe and their world came to be.

"In Debra Bloomfield's southwestern landscape photographs, color and light glow with a luminosity reminiscent of a Rothko painting. Her images, which transcend the visible, reflect the eternal spirit and energy found in these sacred places."--Judith Golden, professor emerita, photography, University of Arizona, Tucson.

By 1914, Theodore Dreiser was a successful writer living in New York. He had not been back to his home state in over 20 years. When his friend, the Indiana-born artist Franklin Booth, approached him with the idea of driving from New York to Indiana, Dreiser's response to Booth was immediate: "All my life I've been thinking of making a return trip to Indiana and writing a book about it". So was born the literary genre -- the American automobile road book. Along the route, Dreiser recorded his impressions of the people and land in words while his traveling companion sketched some of these scenes. In this reflective tale, Dreiser and Booth cross four states, covering 2,000 miles in two weeks, to arrive at Indiana and the sites and memories of Dreiser's early life in Terre Haute, Sullivan, Evansville, Warsaw, and his year at Indiana University. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.