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To many readers Christopher Isherwood means Berlin. The author of Goodbye to Berlin (1939), the British Isherwood found fame through the adaptation of that work into the stage play and film I Am a Camera and then into the stage musical and film Cabaret. Throughout his career he was a keen observer, always seemingly in the right place at the right time. Whether in Berlin in the 1930s or in Los Angeles in the 1960s and 1970s, Isherwood (1904--86) reflected on his life and his world and wrote perceptive commentary on contemporary European and American history and culture. His ties to California made him more American than British. "I have spent half my life in the United States," he said. "Los Angeles is a great place for feeling at home because everybody's from someplace else." Isherwood can be credited for helping make L.A. an acceptable setting for serious fiction, paving the way for John Rechy, Joan Didion, Paul Monette, and Bernard Cooper, among others. The interviews in this volume--two of which have never before been published--stretch over a period of forty years. They address a wide range of topics, including the importance of diary-keeping to his life and work; the interplay between fiction and autobiography; his turning from Christianity to Hinduism; his circle of friends, including W. H. Auden, Aldous Huxley, and E. M. Forster; several important places in his life--Berlin, England, and California; and his homosexual identity. These interviews are substantive, smart, and insightful, allowing the author to discuss his approach to writing of both fiction and nonfiction. "More and more," he explains, "writing is appearing to me as a kind of self-analysis, a finding-out of something about myself and about the past and about what life is like, as far as I'm concerned: who I am, who these people are, what it's all about." This emphasis on self-discovery comes as no surprise from a writer who mined his own diaries and experiences for inspiration. As an interviewee, Isherwood is introspective, thoughtful, and humorous. James J. Berg is the program director for the Center for Teaching and Learning, Minnesota State Colleges and Universities. Chris Freeman is an assistant professor of English at St. John's University. Berg and Freeman are editors of The Isherwood Century: Essays on the Life and Work of Christopher Isherwood, which was a finalist for the 2001 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Studies.

Chuang Tzu uses grand metaphors and charming parables to help us to stop identifying with this and that thing, and to instead identify with our horizon-spanning field of consciousness and our embodied sense of spirit or energy. This frees us to be present with, and to playfully engage with, whatever things happen to appear before us. His remarkable book, written in Ancient China sometime around 300 BC, has lain hidden for millennia in a sprawling morass misleadingly known as the Chuang Tzu. Now, at last, it has been excavated. Here for the first time in over two thousand years is Chuang Tzu’s actual book: crisp and poetic, structured and elegant. A philosophical and literary work of art.

This book is about a boy who is not older than six who explores a world that is pure hell. Where maggots and worms rain down from the sky; meanwhile, he hears flies and bugs buzzing their wings as maggots land in his hair. The Bedrooms Halo is made up of multiple realms that change and alter. Where nothing seems real. Silence he hears until his flashlight beams on a loud marry-go-round suddenly filling the whole room with a rusted screech of gears and cogs making up the melody. His mother and fathers images follow him everywhere in this room as the bedroom indirectly accuses him for being a narc (his daddy did something very naughty to him and he told his mom). Its a world of the conscious and the spirit of the heart come to life. Amen?

Is Your Inner Farmer Calling? It's Time to Listen! Christopher McNinch has heard the whisper that has spoken to so many of our hearts: Come back, come home to a simpler time, to the rural ways that shaped the values of our forebears. A longtime financial advisor, McNinch dreamed of returning to the land and the farm life his grandparents knew. He now runs a small farm of 14 acres in Upstate New York, where he and his wife, Lisa, and their two teenage children raise alpacas and chickens. "You are not alone," he writes to those dreaming of embarking on such a journey. "The multitude of Farmville fans who indulge their virtual farm fantasy on Facebook is a reflection of our yearning to return to the land, start a real farm, build a backyard coop, grow the perfect tomato, tend a beehive, milk a goat. People want a share of the life that their parents, perhaps, or their grandparents knew, for themselves. Comes a time, for some, that the virtual must become reality." In Whispers from the Farm, McNinch weaves collected stories of those who have the same passion or who delight in their rural memories into a guide filled with practical advice for those who hope to embark on the adventure of running a small farm. Should you buy or lease your land? Which crops or livestock are appropriate for you? Along with telling you what you need to know and showing where to find it, he imparts the lessons learned along his own journey in starting a small farm. Christopher McNinch has created a book that he hopes will help a new generation of small farmers grow their own crop of memories - ones they can pass down for their children to cherish. Is starting a small farm whispering in your ear?

Once again the meticulous Mr. Mycroft plays the role of detective. The setting is simplicity itself. Here is a lovely arbour in a quiet Shropshire garden. There lies the body of a man killed by the thrust of a slender instrument identifiable as an antique hairpin. Was it really suicide, as Mr. Mycroft's colleague believes?

A collection of children's books on the subject of Animals.

An indispensable memoir by one of the most prominent writers of his generation Originally published in 1976, Christopher and His Kind covers the most memorable ten years in the writer's life—from 1928, when Christopher Isherwood left England to spend a week in Berlin and decided to stay there indefinitely, to 1939, when he arrived in America. His friends and colleagues during this time included W. H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and E. M. Forster, as well as colorful figures he met in Germany and later fictionalized in his two Berlin novels—and who appeared again, fictionalized to an even greater degree, in I Am a Camera and Cabaret. What most impressed the first readers of this memoir, however, was the candor with which he describes his life in gay Berlin of the 1930s and his struggles to save his companion, a German man named Heinz, from the Nazis. An engrossing and dramatic story and a fascinating glimpse into a little-known world, Christopher and His Kind remains one of Isherwood's greatest achievements.

The 1770s was marked by the emergence of themes of violence, horror and the supernatural in art: the birth of the Gothic. Published to accompany an exhibition at Tate Britain, 'Gothic Nightmares' considers these themes in visual art.