Margery Sharp’s enchanting New York Times–bestselling novel about the profound ways that love can change our view of other people and the world around us Miss Dolores Diver and Harry Gibson have been passionately in love ever since they met at the Chelsea Arts Ball: He came as a brown paper parcel, she as a Spanish dancer. Only the eye of love could have transformed plain Dolores into a Spanish rose and stout Harry into the man of Dolores’s dreams. But ten years later, during the Great Depression, Harry must marry his colleague’s daughter in order to save his nearly bankrupt business. The course of true love never runs smoothly but with some inadvertent help from Dolores’s keenly observant nine-year-old niece, Martha, Harry’s grasping fiancée, and Dolores’s calculating lodger, Harry might succeed in both averting financial ruin and reclaiming his beloved.

The Inner Eye of Love offers a contemporary theology of mysticism that locates it at the very center of authentic religious experience. It provides as well a practical guide for meditation even as it maps out the oceanic experience toward which meditation points.

The tale of a bizarre yet familiar triangle involving a moneyed butcher who writes poetry, a poor but idealistic inventor who is interested in security and securities, and a girl forced to decide between love and money, the play is easily recognized as a good-humored allegory on the last several decades of American life presented in the rollicking style of music-hall comedy.

For 100 days, Traktung Yeshe Dorje, an American born lama in the Nyingma lineage of Vajrayana Buddhism kept a journal of short reflections. Some mornings, the heartbreaking poetry of devotion, or essays in celebration of dawn, light, trees; on others, razor-like distinctions about the nature of the mind, challenges to conventional views of seeing, or seething commentary on the shallowness of contemporary culture. Taken together, but in small considered bites, the entries will provide a rare meal to any sincere practitioner who recognizes direct and authentic spiritual discourse. The unique offering of this book is the deeply personal manner in which insights are presented-using a journal format rather than direct instructions about spiritual topics. An astute reader will glimpse-even “fall into”-the way of perceiving of a tantric spiritual adept. We experience, if only for a moment, how things appear to one whose mind is free from conditioning. Eye to Form challenges the reader to consider familiar topics and scenarios from a new, perhaps radical, perspective. The invitation here is to profound consideration of life’s deeper meanings through the unique intersection of beauty, wisdom and silence. This is not a “practical guide”-it offers no plans for or steps to enlightenment or happiness. In fact, the author has no compunction in undermining such fast-food approaches to the recognition of Buddhahood. Eye to Form, therefore, can be extremely beneficial to those who not looking to be told what to do, but rather are inspired to think deeply, carefully and freshly. Intelligent choices on the spiritual path can be made only as one’s considerations reach beyond ordinary-mind’s conditioning. The challenge for this type of consideration is perhaps more useful than yet another self-help manual. Traktung Yeshe Dorje has been guiding both individuals and community for the last 23 years, drawing his students and friends into the world of spiritual awakening by offering them a window into a different way of considering appearances. He teaches in the U.S. and Europe, and is also president of Wishing Tree Gardens, a non-profit sustainable-agriculture educational program in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

In these linked stories Jewel navigates the stage of life between 25 and 45, from the day she finds a body on a wild California beach to crossroads encounters with mystics, lovers, beggars, surgeons, and sailors on the shores of Maui and streets of San Miguel de Allende, Lisbon, Larkspur, Mill Valley, and Barcelona. Falling in love, whether with the one she marries, her newborn babies, total strangers, or the places she goes, calls forth conflicting sensations: ease/excitement, pleasure/danger, attachment/release. One eye sees and the other is blind as Jewel learns to love and grieve by staying in motion, finding and losing her way in the crowds and landscapes, heart cracked open.

In Love and the Eye there is no world. only images of a world holding so fast to us we are more nature than human, more landscape than flesh. There is a delicate elegance in the shifting gaze of these poems. One leans into their beauty because of all the ways they do not settle down. because of all the ways they insist on seeing---Claudia Rankine Here is a voice that will stay with you long after the book is closed and safely on your shelf. A haunting, once-upon-a-time voice. as if a wide-eyed child lost in the woods forever and a day emerged. finally, to speak: "A lark flew through the word so/l loved it." With the lightest of touches. Newbern has given us a touching and magical book---Alice Friman Nothing is out of reach for this very fine poet---not childhood or love, not the old, the mad, the body, not Gandhi's ashes or caves in greece. "To grieve is my occupation." she tells us as she opens so much more...speaking of a thing a told" so deeply into my ear it would begin/to bloom there."---Marianne Boruch Love and the Eye is playful and grave, wry and intimate. self-deprecating and passionate. It is precise and yet has the sideways movement of dreams. Newbern speaks in a voice completely her own, showing us everything from an angle we hadn't seen with surprising and revelatory clarity. A book to be welcomed and cherished.---Reginald Gibbons Newbern gives us a transformative vision in which beauty is evident everywhere: mosquitoes as "a thousand/black lace stars/hugging the white walls: sadness that hangs.../like a sumptuous grape." Shining sadness limns these poems---quiet grief like the dark edge of a cloud or field: ever-present and capable of making one who loves love harder.---Natasha Trethewey

“A beautifully written and well-researched cultural criticism as well as an honest memoir” (Los Angeles Review of Books) from the author of the popular New York Times essay, “To Fall in Love with Anyone, Do This,” explores the romantic myths we create and explains how they limit our ability to achieve and sustain intimacy. What really makes love last? Does love ever work the way we say it does in movies and books and Facebook posts? Or does obsessing over those love stories hurt our real-life relationships? When her parents divorced after a twenty-eight year marriage and her own ten-year relationship ended, those were the questions that Mandy Len Catron wanted to answer. In a series of candid, vulnerable, and wise essays that takes a closer look at what it means to love someone, be loved, and how we present our love to the world, “Catron melds science and emotion beautifully into a thoughtful and thought-provoking meditation” (Bookpage). She delves back to 1944, when her grandparents met in a coal mining town in Appalachia, to her own dating life as a professor in Vancouver. She uses biologists’ research into dopamine triggers to ask whether the need to love is an innate human drive. She uses literary theory to show why we prefer certain kinds of love stories. She urges us to question the unwritten scripts we follow in relationships and looks into where those scripts come from. And she tells the story of how she decided to test an experiment that she’d read about—where the goal was to create intimacy between strangers using a list of thirty-six questions—and ended up in the surreal situation of having millions of people following her brand-new relationship. “Perfect fodder for the romantic and the cynic in all of us” (Booklist), How to Fall in Love with Anyone flips the script on love. “Clear-eyed and full of heart, it is mandatory reading for anyone coping with—or curious about—the challenges of contemporary courtship” (The Toronto Star).