English Writing

Ricard has selected and translated some of the most profound and inspiring teachings from across these traditions. The selected teachings are taken from the sources of the traditions, including the Buddha himself, Nagarjuna, Guru Rinpoche, Atisha, Shantideva, and Asanga; from great masters of the past, including Thogme Zangpo, the Fifth Dalai Lama, Milarepa, Longchenpa, and Sakya Pandita; and from contemporary masters, including the Fourteenth Dalai Lama and Mingyur Rinpoche.

After accelerating their studies and graduating high school early, two teenagers set off from their hometown in Minnesota to embark on a 2,200-mile canoe journey up the heart of North America. Their destination: the permafrost shores of Hudson Bay. Inspired by a passion for the simple life, where gadgets and schedules are replaced by nature and its harsh beauty, the duo found something that many believe is lost: a true adventure.

This national best-seller vividly reconstructs one of the most unbelievable and controversial battles in American military history—General Custer’s Last Stand in 1876. Why would a seasoned leader like Custer lead 200 U.S. Army soldiers into battle against 2,000 Native American warriors? The answer lies in this book, which captures in stunning detail the heroism, foolishness, and brutality that led to this legendary battle.

During his remarkable lifetime, Harold Gatty became one of the world's great navigators (in 1931, he and Wiley Post flew around the world in a record-breaking eight days) and, to the benefit of posterity, recorded in this book much of his accumulated knowledge about pathfinding both on land and at sea. Applying methods used by primitive peoples and early explorers, the author reveals how to determine location, study wind directions and reflections in the sky, even how to use the senses of smell and hearing to find your way in the wilderness, in a desert, in snow-covered areas, and on the ocean.

Starting in November 2013 in a forest in Rwanda, where a modest spring spouts a trickle of clear, cold water, Levison Wood set forth on foot, aiming to become the first person to walk the entire length of the Nile. He followed the river for nine months, over 4,000 miles, through six nations - Rwanda, Tanzania, Uganda, South Sudan, the Republic of Sudan, and Egypt - to the Mediterranean coast.

What is the role of the writer? Prophet? High priest of art? Court jester? Or witness to the real world? Looking back on her own childhood and writing career, Margaret Atwood examines the metaphors which writers of fiction and poetry have used to explain - or excuse! - their activities, looking at what costumes they have assumed, what roles they have chosen to play. In her final chapter she takes up the challenge of the title: if a writer is to be seen as "gifted", who is doing the giving and what are the terms of the gift?

Kabbalah For Dummies presents a balanced perspective of Kabbalah as an "umbrella" for a complex assemblage of mystical Jewish teachings and codification techniques. Kabbalah for Dummies also shows how Kabbalah simultaneously presents an approach to the study of text, the performance of ritual, and the experience of worship, as well as how the listener can apply its teaching to everyday life.

For more than 2,000 years, the Heart Sutra has been part of the daily life of millions of Buddhists. This concise text, so rich and laden with meaning, concentrates the very heart of Buddhism into a powerful and evocative teaching on the interdependence of all reality. In Essence of the Heart Sutra, the Dalai Lama masterfully unpacks the Heart Sutra so that any listener can benefit from its teachings - teachings meant to help us release ourselves from suffering and live with true compassion.

When Vera decides to travel to an old house in the New England countryside for a month-long escape from some devastating news about her daughter, Cassie, she has no idea her life is about to change forever. It begins innocently enough—peeling the old wallpaper from the walls as a favor to the house’s owner. What she discovers underneath—written in India ink on the very walls of the house by a woman named Beth, in 1919—is the beginning of the reader’s unsettling crossing into the unknown world underneath the paper.

Does your knowledge of the Old Testament feel like a grab bag of people, books, events, and ideas? How many times have you resolved to really understand the OT? To finally make sense of it? Perhaps you are suffering from what Sandra Richter calls the "dysfunctional closet syndrome". If so, she has a solution. Like a home-organizing expert, she comes in and helps you straighten up your cluttered closet. Whether you are a frustrated do-it-yourselfer or a beginning student enrolled in a course, The Epic of Eden will organize your understanding of the Old Testament.

The Secrets of Story is a revolutionary and comprehensive writing guide for the 21st century, focused on clever ways to get an audience to fully identify with an all-too-human hero. Authors will learn to how to cut through pop culture noise and win over a jaded modern audience by rediscovering the heart of writing: shaping stories that ring true to our shared understanding of human nature.

Carrying only basic camping equipment and a collection of the world's great spiritual writings, Belden C. Lane embarks on solitary spiritual treks through the Ozarks and across the American Southwest. For companions, he has only such teachers as Rumi, John of the Cross, Hildegard of Bingen, Dag Hammarskjöld, and Thomas Merton, and as he walks, he engages their writings with the natural wonders he encounters, demonstrating how being alone in the wild opens a rare view onto one's interior landscape, and how the saints' writings reveal the divine in nature.

Over the past few years, Brianna Wiest has gained renown for her deeply moving, philosophical writing. This new compilation of her published work features pieces on why you should pursue purpose over passion, embrace negative thinking, see the wisdom in daily routine, and become aware of the cognitive biases that are creating the way you see your life. Some of these pieces have never been seen; others have been read by millions of people around the world. Regardless, each will leave you thinking: This idea changed my life.

In the late 1940s, a small pack of wolves crossed the ice of Lake Superior to the island wilderness of Isle Royale, creating a perfect "laboratory" for a long-term study of predators and prey. As the wolves hunted and killed the island's moose, a young graduate student named Dave Mech began research that would unlock the mystery of one of nature's most revered (and reviled) animals - and eventually became an internationally renowned and respected wolf expert. This is the story of those early years.

Here's what started the phenomenon: This book has been a best seller for over 15 years and has been used by screenwriters around the world! Blake Snyder tells all in this fast, funny, and candid look inside the movie business. Save the Cat is just one of many ironclad rules for making your ideas more marketable and your script more satisfying.

No one expects the police to knock on the door of the million-dollar two-story home of the perfect cul-de-sac housewife. But soccer mom Lara Love Hardin has been hiding a shady secret: she is funding her heroin addiction by stealing her neighbors’ credit cards. Lara is convicted of thirty-two felonies and becomes inmate S32179. She finds that jail is a class system with a power structure that is somewhere between an adolescent sleepover party and Lord of the Flies. But Lara quickly learns the rules and brings love and healing to her fellow inmates.

With Point Made, legal writing expert Ross Guberman throws a life preserver to attorneys, who are under more pressure than ever to produce compelling prose. What is the strongest opening for a motion or brief? How to draft winning headings? The answers are "more science than art," says Guberman, who has analyzed stellar arguments by distinguished attorneys to develop step-by-step instructions for achieving the results you want. In addition to all-new examples from the original 50 advocates, this second edition introduces eight new superstar lawyers

Written to help listeners better understand Jesus's life, death, and ultimate mission, this new book by well-known preacher John MacArthur looks at an important - yet often misunderstood - section of the Bible: Isaiah 53. Often hailed as one of the greatest chapters in the Bible, this passage foretells the crucifixion of Jesus, a critical event in God's ultimate plan for salvation. Explaining the prophetic words of Isaiah 53 verse by verse, MacArthur highlights important connections to the history of Israel and to the New Testament.

With seven unpublished novels wasting away on his hard drive, Tony Vanderwarker is astonished when John Grisham offers to take him under his wing and teach him the secrets of thriller writing. The beginning and the end are easy,” Grisham tells him. It’s the three hundred pages in the middle that’s the hard part.” To ensure his plot doesn’t run out of gas, Grisham puts Tony though his outline process. Tony does one, and then Grisham asks for another and another and another.

It's every novelist's greatest fear: pouring their blood, sweat, and tears into writing hundreds of pages only to realize that their story has no sense of urgency, no internal logic, and so is a page-one rewrite. The prevailing wisdom in the writing community is that there are just two ways around this problem: pantsing (winging it) and plotting (focusing on the external plot).