The extraordinary and much-requested first volume of Cendrars' autobiography, this account chronicles the author's exploits in the Foreign Legion--including the loss of his arm--before the narrative sets off across continents. From Africa to South America, Cendrars encounters everyone from Gallic gipsies to Piquita, the Mexican millionairess. And to all his encounters he brings the vitality, savage humor, and vivid observation that characterize his dazzling writing.

Cendrars recounts the Foreign Legion (including the loss of his arm), his exploits in Africa and South America, and his encounters with everyone from Gallic gipsies to Piquita, the Mexican millionairess. To all his encounters he brings the vitality, savage humor and vivid observation that characterize his dazzling writing.

In Astonished, Pastor Mike Erre calls Christians away from simplistic formulas to honest and rugged faith in the mysterious and unpredictable God. God is more about deepening the mystery of faith, not removing it. Jesus should get bigger the longer we walk with him. Life and faith should grow to be more profound and wondrous, not less. In Astonished, you will see how we are far more comfortable with tips, steps and techniques for living, than we are with ruthlessly trusting the mysterious God of the Bible. God asks us to follow him into tension, frustration, and difficulty because he wants our trust, not just our intellectual agreement. He calls us to seek Him even as we live in awe of all that is yet to be known about Him. Astonished is an invitation to question in a culture that wants answers, to wonder in a world with little mystery left, and to believe in what is unseen and find it beautiful.

“A narrative composed of brutal honesty, tenderness, and an aching love for God. I could not put it down.” —Sue Monk Kidd, author of The Secret Life of Bees In the middle of her life, acclaimed memoirist Beverly Donofrio thought she’d found a safe haven in a beautiful town in Mexico—until she was awakened in her bed by a rapist. As she writes in this fierce, unflinching account: “This was not supposed to happen. I was supposed to have escaped: I had hot flashes and liver spots and was in the final stretch.” Here Donofrio wrestles with anger toward her attacker and toward life, yet realizes her despair is not unlike that of other friends who are struggling with grave illnesses, loss of jobs, deaths of loved ones. Hoping to heal from trauma, Donofrio turns to prayer while journeying to five very different monasteries. A testimony to how anyone who is broken can move away from fear and anger toward grace, Astonished will not only be read and shared by fans of Donofrio’s previous books, but also by anyone who hopes to be inspired by Donofrio’s strength and her search for faith, healing, and identity.

"After looking for him in the poems, we search for him in the prose. The pursuit of the Other in Pessoa's work is never-ending," writes Edwin Honig. Essential to understanding the great Portuguese poet are the essays written about (and by) his heteronyms-Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, and Alvaro de Campos-the several pseudonyms under which he wrote an extraordinary body of poetry. In Always Astonished, Pessoa and his several selves debate and discuss one another's work, revealing how Portuguese modernism was shaped. Fernando Pessoa is one of the great voices of twentieth-century literature, and these manifestos, letters, journal notes, and critical essays range through aesthetics, lyric poetry, dramatic and visual arts, and the psychology of the artist. He gives us, too, a singularly heterodox political position in his strange work of fiction, The Anarchist Banker.

This classic in communications is also a path-breaking study of American popular culture, combining the thoughtful sympathy of Gilbert Seldes with the critical sensitivity for form of H.L. Mencken. Denney accomplishes this by introducing new approaches to understanding products of popular culture with-out either moralizing over the profit motives of the producers or sermonizing about the base motives of consumers seeking mere entertainment. His forty-page introduction to this new edition is a major statement reexamining the themes in the original 1957 volume. The Astonished Muse analyzes a wide and varied sample of both the active and the passive leisure activities of Americans, ranging from television and science fiction to organized football and skyscraper design. On its initial appearance the book was praised as a work that combines a searching formal analysis of the popular arts with a close historical grasp of their genres and a sociological sense of their audiences. Its themes of critical competence and performance anticipate current concerns with reader-centered and linguistic approaches to popular literature. In an economic-historical sense, this book presages the rise of popular arts and media as rivals in scale to manufacturing industries in the United States. In a political sense, it affirms audience selectivity. Above all it takes a quiet stand against attempts to devalue, decry, and censor the popular arts under banners of morality, childhood inno-cence, puritanical religion, and other limits to free expression.