"A powerful, revealing story of hope, love, justice, and the power of reading by a man who spent thirty years on death row for a crime he didn't commit"--

A collection of poems and African folktales.

“Here is a memoir that takes us through many worlds, through heartache and noble hopes, through the mysteries of family love and toward a beautiful, light filled conclusion. Read Bending Toward the Sun and enrich your life.” — Rabbi David Wolpe, author of Why Faith Matters and Making Loss Matter-Creating Meaning in Difficult Times A beautifully written family memoir, Bending Toward the Sun explores an emotional legacy—forged in the terror of the Holocaust—that has shaped three generations of lives. Leslie Gilbert-Lurie tells the story of her mother, Rita, who like Anne Frank spent years hiding from the Nazis, and whose long-hidden pain shaped both her daughter and granddaughter’s lives. Bringing together the stories of three generations of women, Bending Toward the Sun reveals how deeply the Holocaust lives in the hearts and minds of survivors and their descendants.

If recent world events have taught us anything, it's that life doesn't always look the way we want it to look. And while we can't control the curveballs life throws at us, we can control our response to them. We can choose to loosen our grip on what we think life is "supposed" to be and embrace life for exactly what it is--messiness and mayhem and all. We can choose to stubbornly turn toward the sun, even as the storm rages around us. That surrender is where true happiness and peace lie. With insights born from her own hard-won battles, Mandy Hale turns her attention (and her sizable wit) to showing you what she's learned about letting go of the desire to control everything in life. With the honesty and authenticity she's known for, Mandy inspires you to stop striving, live in the moment, sit with your experiences, and trust God with the unknown. Like sunflowers that turn toward the sun that helps them grow tall and strong, we can turn to friends, family, and faith for strength in difficult times. If you've felt depleted or despairing as you've wrestled with circumstances beyond your control, you will find in Mandy a kind and trustworthy guide through the storm.

“A riveting mystery-thriller that also probes deeper into the nature of war and the ways in which it attracts and transforms some people.”—David Abrams, author of Fobbit When a car explodes in a crowded part of Kabul ten years after 9/11, a Japanese-American journalist is shocked to discover that the passengers were acquaintances—three fellow ex-pats who had formed an unlikely love triangle. Alexandra was a human rights lawyer for imprisoned Afghan women. Justin was a born-again Christian who taught at a local school. Clay was an ex-soldier who worked as a private contractor. The car’s driver, Idris, was one of Justin’s most promising pupils—and he is missing. Drawn to the secrets of these strangers, and increasingly convinced the events that led to the fatal explosion weren’t random, the journalist follows a trail that leads from Kabul to Louisiana, Maine, Québec, and Dubai. In the process, the tortured narratives of these individuals become inseparable from the larger story of America’s imperial misadventures. In this monumental novel, Deni Ellis Béchard draws “a ferociously intelligent and intensely gripping portrait of the expatriate community in Kabul,” indelibly capturing these journalists, mercenaries, idealists, and aid workers (Phil Klay, National Book Award-winning author). More importantly, Béchard vividly brings to life the city of Kabul itself, along with the people who live there: the hungry, determined, and resourceful locals who are just as willing as their occupiers to reinvent themselves to survive. “Béchard is the rare writer who knows the secret to telling the true story.”—Marlon James, Man Booker Prize-winning author “Béchard makes me think of Graham Greene and Robert Stone, which is heady company, indeed.”—Richard Ford, Pulitzer Prize-winning author

In Alan Huck?s image-text book, '?I walk toward the sun which is always going down?', an unnamed narrator wanders a city in the American Southwest, where their observations and encounters become catalysts for rumination on a wide range of subjects. Shifting between photographs of the city?s peripheries and an interior monologue written in first-person, fragmentary prose, this hybrid essay draws on the ambulatory works of writers such as W.G. Sebald and Annie Dillard, both of whom are incorporated into the network of literary and cultural references interwoven throughout the book?s text. Part metafiction about the working process of a photographer and part cross-disciplinary exploration of one?s relationship to a particular place, the author utilizes the essential indeterminacy of both photography and written language to craft an exercise in attention that moves seamlessly between the two mediums.