This book contains the story of an 870-mile canoe trip through the Canadian Barren Lands west of Hudson Bay that two friends and I completed in the summer of 1988. The trip took 55 days. We started on Wollaston Lake, in northwest Saskatchewan and ended at Baker Lake in the Northwest Territories (now Nunavut). The journey took us through remote areas of the boreal forest country to the Arctic divide and into the vast Barren Lands of the Northwest Territories. The area we traveled through has become part of Nunavut as the result of the Nunavut Land Claims settlement. We faced many difficult portages, swarms of blackflies, dangerous whitewater, strong winds, and expansive ice-cold lakes. We retraced significant portions of J.B Tyrrell’s 1893 and 1894 geological expeditions in the Barrens and explored Farley Mowat’s “The Deer’s Way”, described in his book People of the Deer, that separates the waters of the Dubawnt and Kazan Rivers. We traveled part of the route used by the tragic Arthur Moffat expedition in 1955. We saw effects of past continental glaciation, herds of caribou and muskoxen, white wolves, abundant bird life and much evidence of past cultures that had once occupied the land.

“River of Stars is a major accomplishment, the work of a master novelist in full command of his subject.”—Michael Dirda, in The Washington Post “Game of Thrones in China.”—Salon.com Ren Daiyan was still just a boy when he took the lives of seven men while guarding an imperial magistrate. That moment on a lonely road changed his life in entirely unexpected ways, sending him into the forests of Kitai among the outlaws. From there he emerges years later—and his life changes again, dramatically, as he circles toward the court and emperor, while war approaches Kitai from the north. Lin Shan is the daughter of a scholar, his beloved only child. Educated by him in ways young women never are, gifted as a songwriter and calligrapher, she finds herself living a life suspended between two worlds. Her intelligence captivates an emperor—and alienates women at the court. But when her father’s life is endangered by the savage politics of the day, Shan must act in ways no woman ever has. In an empire divided by bitter factions circling an exquisitely cultured emperor who loves his gardens and his art far more than the burdens of governing, dramatic events on the northern steppe alter the balance of power in the world, leading to events no one could have foretold, under the river of stars.

There are a vast number of superhuman persons in the spiritual realm, created perfect, but having free will like us, and , therefore, capable of turning towards evil. Among them were Lucifer, Satan and Caligastia, for example. They are not God, but, when they function perfectly in tandem with God, they may be referred to as God, or the Good Shepherd, as in Psalm 23. Signi_ cantly, the majority of them, the good ones, tell us that they first recognize the FACT of God by His River of inexhaustible energy. Meditating on this led me to put my thoughts down in this book, partly for my own spiritual good. But I am happy to share them.

"Having been raised as a Catholic and educated in the West, then trained as a monk in India since the 1980s, Canadian author Swami Muktananda of Rishikesh is uniquely positioned to bring the Eastern tradition of Vedanta to Western spiritual seekers. In Awakening to the Infinite, he answers the eternal, fundamental question posed by philosophical seekers, "Who am I?" with straightforward simplicity. Knowing who you are and adopting a spiritual outlook, he counsels, can help solve problems in daily life to do with relationships, work, children, sexuality, illness, and social injustice. In answering the question "Who am I?," Swami Muktananda of Rishikesh draws on the ancient teachings of advaita or nonduality, the truth that there is no division between ourselves and others at a fundamental level. The book is drawn from the many conversations he has throughout the year meeting with individuals from different backgrounds, cultures, and walks of life, as well as public talks and question and answer sessions. Covering subjects ranging from the spiritual path to everyday problems, Muktananda addresses questions with simplicity and compassion, from the standpoint of someone who is anchored in the infinite but fully in touch with the world. His teaching follows the words of Christ and the Old Testament as well as those of the sages of India, who all proclaim a universal truth that transcends all religions: 'You are not the body; you are not the mind; you are the immortal, divine Self. Realize this and be free.'"--

For fans of Cormac McCarthy and Annie Proulx, “a wonderfully cinematic story” (The Washington Post) set in the post-Katrina South after violent storms have decimated the region. It had been raining for weeks. Maybe months. He had forgotten the last day that it hadn’t rained, when the storms gave way to the pale blue of the Gulf sky, when the birds flew and the clouds were white and sunshine glistened across the drenched land. The Gulf Coast has been brought to its knees. Years of catastrophic hurricanes have so punished and depleted the region that the government has drawn a new boundary ninety miles north of the coastline. Life below the Line offers no services, no electricity, and no resources, and those who stay behind live by their own rules—including Cohen, whose wife and unborn child were killed during an evacuation attempt. He buried them on family land and never left. But after he is ambushed and his home is ransacked, Cohen is forced to flee. On the road north, he is captured by Aggie, a fanatical, snake-handling preacher who has a colony of captives and dangerous visions of repopulating the barren region. Now Cohen is faced with a decision: continue to the Line alone, or try to shepherd the madman’s prisoners across the unforgiving land with the biggest hurricane yet bearing down—and Cohen harboring a secret that poses the greatest threat of all. Eerily prophetic in its depiction of a Southern landscape ravaged by extreme weather, Rivers is a masterful tale of survival and redemption in a world where the next devastating storm is never far behind.“This is the kind of book that lifts you up with its mesmerizing language then pulls you under like a riptide” (The Atlanta Journal-Constitution).