Siblings Leah and Alan wake one morning in the middle of an enchanted forest and encounter a strange and spectacular world filled with foppish lions, giant rabbits, and a talking stone frog for a guide.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • In this moving, poignant novel by the bestselling author of Birds of America—and a master of American fiction—we share a grown woman’s bittersweet nostalgia for the wildness of her youth. "An enchanting novel." —The New York Times The summer Berie was fifteen, she and her best friend Sils had jobs at Storyland in upstate New York where Berie sold tickets to see the beautiful Sils portray Cinderella in a strapless evening gown. They spent their breaks smoking, joking, and gossiping. After work they followed their own reckless rules, teasing the fun out of small town life, sleeping in the family station wagon, and drinking borrowed liquor from old mayonnaise jars. But no matter how wild, they always managed to escape any real danger—until the adoring Berie sees that Sils really does need her help—and then everything changes.

The well-known questions such as What, How and, above all, Why are given some unexpected and enchanted answers in the volume III of the book A Little Frog’s Heart. These answers are delivered by the original characters we got used to celebrating along the story. The relationship between a grandfather and his grandson is being brought in a warm light destined to open up our hearts for the harmonies of this volume, The Stellar Waltz of Life. In the glittering bunch of the stories which interweave and overflow from each one to the others, as a modern version of the series On Thousand and One Nights, one could discern two mythological episodes, somehow a remnant of a popular Christianity magnificently adapted for a contemporaneous audience, of a genuine originality, which sheds their light as if they were some big rounded regal grapes, even if they are in a way ‘removed’ from the bunch and ‘spread’ all over the volume.

Simple mindfulness practices to help your child (ages 5-12) deal with anxiety, improve concentration, and handle difficult emotions—with a 60-minute audio CD of guided exercises Mindfulness—the quality of attention that combines full awareness with acceptance of each moment, just as it is—is gaining broad acceptance among mental health professionals as an adjunct to treatment. This little book is a very appealing introduction to mindfulness meditation for children and their parents. In a simple and accessible way, it describes what mindfulness is and how mindfulness-based practices can help children calm down, become more focused, fall asleep more easily, alleviate worry, manage anger, and generally become more patient and aware. The book contains eleven practices that focus on just these scenarios, along with short examples and anecdotes throughout. Included with purchase is an audio CD with guided meditations, voiced by Myla Kabat-Zinn, who along with her husband, Jon Kabat-Zinn, popularized mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) as a therapeutic approach.

Set in Czechoslovakia in the early 1980s, during the waning years of Communist rule, Martin M. Simecka's startlingly original first novel, The Year of the Frog, shows a young man struggling to understand the circumstances of his life. Simecka, born in Bratislava in 1957, is the son of a prominent Czechoslovak intellectual who was imprisoned for his dissident beliefs. Though not overtly political, Simecka's novel is unabashedly autobiographical. First published in installments in the underground Czechoslovak press, it was reissued in one volume after the lifting of restrictions. Written in engagingly simple, unadorned prose, The Year of the Frog follows the fortunes of Milan, a young intellectual forbidden to attend college because of his father's political activities. Unable to pursue his studies and under surveillance by the authorities, who frequently trail him in their yellow-and-white Zhiguli cars, Milan takes a succession of menial jobs, first as a surgical orderly in a hospital, where he witnesses death on a regular basis, and then as a clerk in a perpetually understocked hardware store, and then again in a hospital, this time as an assistant in a maternity ward. After Milan's father is arrested, his mother, a diabetic, spends her days pining for her husband and listening to the Voice of America over Viennese radio. Once, following a trip to Poland, Milan himself is briefly detained by the police. But the grimness of Milan's day-to-day existence cannot blunt his ever-agile, ever-questioning intellect, nor can it diminish the joy he derives from his two great passions: long-distance running, which he pursues with almost Zen-like dedication through the streets of Bratislava and thesurrounding countryside, and Tania, a university student with whom he falls in love and with whom he discovers that the world, even one as circumscribed as his own Communist-controlled one, is full of possibilities. Milan's story is told with the exuberance and innocence of youth. But the book's deceptively naive style does not mask its earnest seriousness. The Year of the Frog gives American readers a compelling and accurate view of life at a crucial time in Czechoslovakia's history; more important, it offers a vital and absorbing portrait of the coming of age of a young man unafraid to pose important questions about love and freedom, life and death.

The Best 21st Century Short Stories from Japan charts the enormous social and cultural changes that have taken place in Japan in the last twenty years. This collection of short stories features the most up-to-date and exciting writing from the most popular and finest award-winning authors in Japan today.