New Releases by Stephen Mitchell

THE NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER David Mitchell''s novels have captivated critics and readers alike, as his Man Booker shortlistings and Richard & Judy Book of the Year award attest. Now he has written a masterpiece. The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is the kind of book that comes along once in a decade - enthralling in its storytelling, imagination and scope. Set at a turning point in history on a tiny island attached to mainland Japan, David Mitchell''s tale of power, passion and integrity transports us to a world that is at once exotic and familiar: an extraordinary place and an era when news from abroad took months to arrive, yet when people behaved as they always do - loving, lusting and yearning, cheating, fighting and killing. Bringing to vivid life a tectonic shift between East and West, The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet is dramatic, funny, heartbreaking, enlightening and thought-provoking. Reading it is an unforgettable experience.

Dispatched to the influential Japanese port of Dejima in 1799, ambitious clerk Jacob de Zoet resolves to earn enough money to deserve his wealthy fiancée, an effort that is challenged by his relationship with the midwife daughter of a samurai.

"A riot of goldfish taken from Kingyo: the artistry of Japanese goldfish by Kazuya Takaoka and Sachiko Kuru ... 2004"--T.p. verso.

Let the heavens and the earth rejoice: A new adaptation of the psalms from the author of The Gospel According to Jesus. When the ancient rabbis named the anthology that we know as the Book of Psalms, they called it sefer tehillim—the Book of Praises. That is the dominant theme of the greatest of the Psalms: a rapturous praise, a deep, exuberant gratitude for being here. In this volume, leading biblical scholar and award-winning translator Stephen Mitchell translates fifty of the most powerful and popular bible psalms—to create poems that recreate the music of the original Hebrew verse.

The bestselling, widely acclaimed translation from Stephen Mitchell "Mitchell''s rendition of the Tao Te Ching comes as close to being definitive for our time as any I can imagine. It embodies the virtues its translator credits to the Chinese original: a gemlike lucidity that is radiant with humor, grace, largeheartedness, and deep wisdom." — Huston Smith, author of The Religions of Man In eighty-one brief chapters, Lao-tzu''s Tao Te Ching, or Book of the Way, provides advice that imparts balance and perspective, a serene and generous spirit, and teaches us how to work for the good with the effortless skill that comes from being in accord with the Tao—the basic principle of the universe.

Following the phenomenal success of his own version of the Tao Te Ching, a renowned scholar and translator delivers a 21st-century form of ancient wisdom into the modern world.

Stephen Mitchell is widely known for his ability to make ancient masterpieces thrillingly new, to step in where many have tried before and create versions that are definitive for our time. His celebrated version of the Tao Te Ching is the most popular edition in print, and his translations of Jesus, Rilke, Genesis, and Job have won the hearts of readers and critics alike. Stephen Mitchell now brings to the Bhagavad Gita his gift for breathing new life into sacred texts. The Bhagavad Gita is universally acknowledged as one of the world''s literary and spiritual masterpieces. It is the core text of the Hindu tradition and has been treasured by American writers from Emerson and Thoreau to T. S. Eliot, who called it the greatest philosophical poem after the Divine Comedy. There have been more than two hundred English translations of the Gita, including many competent literal versions, but not one of them is a superlative literary text in its own right. Now all that has changed. Stephen Mitchell''s Bhagavad Gita sings with the clarity, the vigor, and the intensity of the original Sanskrit. It will, as William Arrowsmith said of Mitchell''s translation of The Sonnets to Orpheus, "instantly make every other rendering obsolete."

The classic guide for Zen students pursuing the true way. “Somebody comes into the Zen center with a lighted cigarette, walks up to the Buddha-statue, blows smoke in its face and drops ashes on its lap. You are standing there. What can you do?” This is a problem that Zen Master Seung Sahn was fond of posing to his American students who attended his Zen centers. Dropping Ashes on the Buddha is a delightful, irreverent, and often hilariously funny living record of the dialogue between Korean Zen Master Seung Sahn and his American students. Consisting of dialogues, stories, formal Zen interviews, Dharma speeches, and letters using the Zen Master’s actual words in spontaneous, living interaction, this book is a fresh presentation of the Zen teaching method of “instant dialogue” between Master and student which, through the use of astonishment and paradox, leads to an understanding of ultimate reality.

In her first two books, Byron Katie showed how suffering can be ended by questioning the stressful thoughts that create it, through a process of self-inquiry she calls The Work. Now, in A Thousand Names for Joy, she encourages us to discover the freedom that lives on the other side of inquiry.Stephen Mitchell—the renowned translator of the Tao Te Ching—selected provocative excerpts from that ancient text as a stimulus for Katie to talk about the most essential issues that face us all: life and death, good and evil, love, work, and fulfillment. The result is a book that allows the timeless insights of the Tao Te Ching to resonate anew for us today, while offering a vivid and illuminating glimpse into the life of someone who for twenty years—ever since she “woke up to reality” one morning in 1986—has been living what Lao-tzu wrote more than 2,500 years ago.Katie’s profound, lighthearted wisdom is not theoretical; it is absolutely authentic. That is what makes this book so compelling. It’s a portrait of a woman who is imperturbably joyous, whether she is dancing with her infant granddaughter or finds that her house has been emptied out by burglars, whether she stands before a man about to kill her or embarks on the adventure of walking to the kitchen, whether she learns that she is going blind, flunks a “How Good a Lover Are You?” test, or is diagnosed with cancer. With her stories of total ease in all circumstances, Katie does more than describe the awakened mind; she lets you see it, feel it, in action. And she shows you how that mind is yours as well.

Jason Taylor is 13, doomed to be growing up in the most boring family in the deadest village in the dullest county in the most tedious nation on earth. This book follows 13 months in his life as he negotiates the pitfalls of school and home and contends with bullies, girls and politics.

Introducing an innovative four-pronged approach to self-liberation, this intriguing guide shows how to dissolve the debilitating stories we tell ourselves, which in turn allows the truth of "what is" to give rise to a life of new fulfillment and happiness. Reprint. 30,000 first printing.

Amusingly absurd and playfully profound, this delightfully illustrated volume of original poems is sure to tickle the fancy of children and adults alike. It happened on a winter’s day (The air was cold, the sky was gray): Out walking in the woods alone, I came upon a wishing bone. What would you do if everything you wished came true? How does a white rhinoceros take his tea? Where can you find the elusive purple tiger? Who wanders in the whiffle bog on a bilgy, bulgy night? Resonating with childlike questions, the fanciful poems in THE WISHING BONE invite readers to think and to dream. Full of illustrations as fresh and whimsical as the verse, here is a collection to read aloud and savor for its sheer verbal and visual exuberance.

Paired with exquisite paintings, this rendition of a story originally written in 1844 is graceful and true to the tale''s rich humor. Teaching the value of what is simple and genuine, this is the tale of the emperor of China, who lives in the most marvelous palace in the world, and how he learns a valuable lesson from a gentle kitchen maid and the beautiful sweet song of a nightingale. This translation is a timeless edition of a treasured classic. Acompañado con exquisitas pinturas, esta interpretación de una historia escrita originalmente en 1844 es fiel al estilo de humor de los cuentos. Enseñando el valor de lo que es simple y genuino, el emperador de China, que vive en el más maravilloso palacio del mundo, aprende una importante lección de una amable criada de cocina y de la bella canción de un ruiseñor. El resultado es una perdurable edición de un valioso clásico.

Full of graceful and rich humor, this retelling of Andersen''s classic fairy tale--of the Emperor of China who is enchanted by the song of a nightingale--is paired with impeccably researched, astonishingly beautiful paintings of acrylic, oil, and gouache.

Eiji Miyake arrives in a sprawling Japanese metropolis to track down the father he has never met. But the city is a mapless place if you are 18, broke, and the only person you can trust is John Lennon. His 8-week hunt plunges into the hinterland between the city and the mind, where a Polish art movie is no less real than the coffee in front of him and letters from an Imperial Army soldier are signposts to next week, and where he crosses paths with numerologists, staion masters, gateballers, hostesses, organ harvesters and insane chefs. Philosophical, colourful, sometimes violent, this is a dazzlingly inventive novel about image, control and memory.

A gallery attendant at the Hermitage. A young jazz buff in Tokyo. A crooked British lawyer in Hong Kong. A disc jockey in Manhattan. A physicist in Ireland. An elderly woman running a tea shack in rural China. A cult-controlled terrorist in Okinawa. A musician in London. A transmigrating spirit in Mongolia. What is the common thread of coincidence or destiny that connects the lives of these nine souls in nine far-flung countries, stretching across the globe from east to west? What pattern do their linked fates form through time and space? A writer of pyrotechnic virtuosity and profound compassion, a mind to which nothing human is alien, David Mitchell spins genres, cultures, and ideas like gossamer threads around and through these nine linked stories. Many forces bind these lives, but at root all involve the same universal longing for connection and transcendence, an axis of commonality that leads in two directions--to creation and to destruction. In the end, as lives converge with a fearful symmetry, Ghostwritten comes full circle, to a point at which a familiar idea--that whether the planet is vast or small is merely a matter of perspective--strikes home with the force of a new revelation. It marks the debut of a writer of astonishing gifts.

Gathers quotations by Novalis, Rainer Maria Rilke, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Franz Kafka, Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Buddha, Heraclitus, Lao-tzu, Ramana Maharshi, Confucious, and Baruch Spinoza.

The city of Pisidian Antioch was founded in the hellenistic period by the Seleucids, in what is now south-west Turkey. Under the emperor Augustus it became the most important Roman colony of the eastern empire. The city flourished until the sixth century AD. It has left dramatic and extensive ruins. This comprehensive and fully-illustrated study, a sequel to Mitchell''s Cremna in Pisidia, is based on a new survey of the site. It also includes the results of the most recent Turkish field work as well as detailed information from the important but unpublished 1924 excavation by the University of Michigan.

The narrator, having written a book decrying the current fascination with angels, is embarrassed when he receives a visit from the Archangel Gabriel

Offers practical lessons from one of the world''s most profound works of wisdom and shows how to transform the workplace into a source of satisfaction and fulfillment. The text called the Tao Te Ching, written by the Chinese sage Lao-Tzu in the 6th cent. B.C.E., is the world''s oldest leadership manual, written to help everyone who is in a position of power to turn that position into an opportunity for creating both inner and outer harmony, and to guide their communities to peaceful productivity and happiness. Shows how to create an environment in which everyone''s power can be expressed in order to produce the best results for everyone. Each essay carries an essential lesson.

A magnificent compilation of sacred writings from all traditions and the perfect companion to Stephen Mitchell''s poetry collection, The Enlightened Heart, and the bestselling Tao Te Ching.

A dazzling presentation of the life and teachings of Jesus by the eminent scholar and translator Stephen Mitchell.

"This is the first comprehensive study of the history of Asia Minor in antiquity to be written for nearly fifty years and the first attempt to treat Anatolian history as a whole over the millenium from the time of Alexander the Great to the peak of the Byzantine Empire. The first volume is in two parts. The first examines the region in the Hellenistic period, when it was dominated by Celtic tribes who settled in the interior of Asia Minor in the first half of the third century B.C. The second covers the period of the Roman Empire and looks in detail at the changes brought about by imperial rule" -- Amazon.com.

This is the first comprehensive study of the history of Asia Minor in antiquity to be written for nearly fifty years and the first attempt to treat Anatolian history as a whole over the millennium from the time of Alexander the Great to the peak of the Byzantine Empire. The first volume is in two parts. The first examines the region in the Hellenistic period, when it was dominated by Celtic tribes who settled in the interior of Asia Minor in the first half of the third century B.C. The second covers the period of the Roman Empire and looks in detail at the changes brought about by imperial rule.