An expert in the field of mind/body medicine, Dr. Kabat-Zinn is known for his advocacy of the mindfulness approach, which highlights living in the moment. Here, Dr. Kabat-Zinn applies the mindfulness-based approach to stress and other health issues in a work that has become a classic in the alternative health field, and which was featured on the Bill Moyers PBS show HEALING AND THE MIND.

An expert in the field of mind/body medicine, Dr. Kabat-Zinn is known for his advocacy of the mindfulness approach, which highlights living in the moment. Here, Dr. Kabat-Zinn applies the mindfulness-based approach to stress and other health issues in a work that has become a classic in the alternative health field, and which was featured on the Bill Moyers PBS show HEALING AND THE MIND.

The prolific Albanian writer Ismail Kadare, 2005 winner of the first Man Booker International Prize (for a body of work), tenaciously chases the surreal and illusive nature of power with a determination unmatched since Franz Kafka. Like Kafka, Kadare understands that power is a shifting, capricious, infuriating thing, even to those who wield it. In his novels, tyrants and dictators--from Mao Tse-tung to the pharaoh Cheops--must constantly create elaborate and inscrutable symbols by which to cow their subjects into addled submission. The protagonist of Kadare's novel THE SUCCESSOR is known only as "The Successor," but he is clearly based on Mehmet Shehu, the Albanian Prime Minister who allegedly committed suicide in 1981 under highly suspect circumstances. From a listless limbo world, the Successor tries to unravel the events leading up to his death, and to determine if and how the man known as the Guide (based on Albanian communist dictator Enver Hoxha) brought about his murder. The Guide, however, ruled his country through hints and insinuation and, in the end, even he does not know the truth. Kadare's darkly philosophical and terribly comic tale acts as an existential parable of man's doomed quest for understanding amidst the politics of misinformation and the senselessness of the universe.

In ancient Egypt, the Pharaoh Cheops is building his tomb. Thousands upon thousands of his subjects toil to build this monument to his reign and life, the largest pyramid yet. As the edifice rises, Egypt's resources dwindle, the people suffer under torture, false accusations, and death by overwork. To Cheops, the worship of his people is paramount, and they willingly, unquestioningly, acquiesce to him.

Born with synesthesia, the hero of "Kamikaze L'Amour" becomes a rock star and then bails out, taking the name Ryder as he disappears from the limelight. Meanwhile, the engulfment of North America by a rain forest run amok is underway.

Kafka's exploration of the psychological terror inherent in everyday life is both allegorical and stunningly realistic. A bank employee named Joseph K. is accused of a crime he not only did not commit but doesn't even understand. He is released, but thereafter enslaved to a legal system that requires him to continue to go to court to defend his innocence in a case that is never explained, never resolved. Try though he may to take control of the situation, the hero's life, revealed in all its barrenness, disintegrates not only at the bank where he works but in his relationship with a young woman and with his landlady. Finally, in a last absurd twist, he is executed. Kafka expressed the wish that THE TRIAL never be published, but thanks to the intervention of his literary executor, Max Brod, it appeared posthumously. It is considered a classic of modernist literature, an early existential work that has had enormous influence on most serious 20th-century writers.