Science Poetry

In this audiobook Maria Popova, creator of The Marginalian, presents a celebration of the human search for truth and beauty through the lenses of science and poetry. Poetry and science, as Popova writes in her introduction, "are instruments for knowing the world more intimately and loving it...

What if the universe isn’t something out there —but a living, responsive field that listens, feels, and creates with you? If time is an illusion, entangled particles don’t care about distance, you observe your reality into being, and everything is connected, then why oh why are you living your life via the outdated, old way of thinking? I set my intention, followed aligned guidance, and manifested an incredibly easy-to-follow book about how the amazing phenomena of quantum physics go hand-in-hand with what our ancestors knew —and how to easily use this knowledge to one’s advantage.

Doing Time: For the prison writers whose work is included in this anthology, it means more than "serving a sentence"; it means staying alive and sane, preserving dignity, reinventing oneself, and somehow retaining one's humanity. For the last quarter century the prestigious writers' organization PEN has sponsored a contest for writers behind bars to help prisoners face these challenges. The contest honors the best short stories, plays, essays, and poems among hundreds submitted annually by men and women nationwide.

The original and immortal poem also known as "A Visit from St. Nicholas". Classic Tales narrator B. J. Harrison gives a stellar reading of this Christmas classic.

From the Marginalian creator and bestselling author Maria Popova, a bold exploration of what makes a meaningful life. "Natasha McElhone narrates Popova's layered prose at a measured pace...and captivates whether she's voicing the concerns of Venus or presenting a simple rhyming couplet." —...

Under the order of King Pelias, Jason embarks on a perilous journey to steal the Golden Fleece from the Land of Colchis. Far from heroic, Jason is the typical everyman. Often compared with Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Jason and the Argonauts is the only surviving poem from the Hellenistic period and was hugely influential on later literature, especially the Roman poetry of Virgil and Ovid.

In this "wise and wondrous" (David Quammen) exploration, a science writer reintroduces readers to The Snake, encouraging our initial reaction to the slithery creature to be one of awe rather than disgust. For millennia, depictions of snakes as alternatively beautiful and menacing creatures have...

The illustrated edition of this audiobook features 14 beautiful pieces of artwork in an attached PDF, and a link to a comprehensive set of behind-the-scenes videos documenting the illustration and narration processes. The ultimate way to experience this classic tale! What happens after Homer's Iliad? Not only is the larger conflict unresolved by the end of that story, but several of the most famous events of the Trojan War are absent from its pages. It's hard not to want another complete epic to pick up where Achilles, Agamemnon, and Priam left off.

The greatest of all the medieval romances about the Holy Grail, Parzival was written in the early 13th century. The narrative describes the quest of the Arthurian knight Parzival for the Holy Grail. His journey is filled with incident, from tournaments and sieges to chivalrous deeds and displays of true love.

A NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR The acclaimed author of An Unquiet Mind considers the age-old quest for relief from psychological pain and the role of the exceptional healer in the journey back to health. “To treat, even to cure, is not always to heal.” In this expansive cultural...

Transcendentalism embodies the concept that people have a deeper and more profound understanding of the world around them than simply by what they can glimpse with their senses. In this collection of essays and poems, the works of three transcendentalist authors are shared, each with their own impressions and opinions supporting the movement.

In this companion volume to The Discoverers, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Daniel J. Boorstin brings to life more than three thousand years of human artistic achievement, examining painting, sculpture, architecture, theology, philosophy, history, poetry, drama, literature, dance, music, and film.

The Iliad is one of the two great epics of Homer, and is typically described as one of the greatest war stories of all time, but to say the Iliad is a war story does not begin to describe the emotional sweep of its action and characters: Achilles, Helen, Hector, and other heroes of Greek myth and history in the tenth and final year of the Greek siege of Troy.

In 2007, when a new edition of the Oxford Junior Dictionary - widely used in schools around the world - was published, a sharp-eyed reader soon noticed that around 40 common words concerning nature had been dropped. Apparently they were no longer being used enough by children to merit their place in the dictionary. Ten years later, Robert Macfarlane and Jackie Morris set out to make a “spell book” that will conjure back 20 of these lost words and the beings they name, from acorn to wren.

Parzival is a romantic poem written by Wolfram von Eschenbach in Middle High German. Regarded as one of the masterpieces of the Middle Ages, the romance was the most popular vernacular verse narrative in medieval Germany. Dated to the first quarter of the 13th century, the poem tells the story of the Arthurian hero Parzival and his quest for the Holy Grail. The most notable elements of the work are an emphasis on the importance of humility, compassion, and sympathy. Richard Wagner based his famous opera Parsifal on Parzival.

Strange worlds, dark whispers, and bizarre nightmares. Step beyond the limits of ordinary imagination into something exquisitely bizarre, where the boundaries between reality and the surreal dissolve into an unsettling dreamscape and every line invites you to see the world anew. In Looney Limericks: Weird Poetry Vol 4, the whimsical and the uncanny reverberate through an enchanting landscape of poetic oddities. Here, shadows come alive, and inanimate objects hold profound conversations. A shoe embarks on a quest, a beetle contemplates the cosmos, and a clock shares secrets with the floor—...

As we open up to life and love and each other, as we awaken from our dream of separation, we encounter not just the bliss of existence, but its pain, too; not only life's ecstasy, but also its agony. Healing doesn't always feel good or comfortable or even "spiritual", for we are inevitably forced to confront our shadows, fears, and deepest longings - those secret parts of ourselves that we have denied, repressed, or deemed "negative" and unworthy of our love.

The Fable of the Bees—a satirical poem, prose discussion, three essays and six dialogues completed in 1729—exposes human vices but defends them as a necessity within a wealthy society. Mandeville’s bees thrive until they start living by honesty and virtue… then they are impoverished. Mandeville did not play by the rules: he satirized the sins of society but also ridiculed the widespread hypocrisy of deploring these sins whilst reaping their benefits. He and his work were attacked for the rest of the century.

A rich and varied collection of contemporary short stories, extracts from novels, and poetry that will go a long way toward informing the English-speaking world of the latest developments in Iranian literature. This sampling - or to use the Farsi term golchine, a bouquet - provides a window onto an important but sorely neglected segment of world culture. We hope it will also serve to awaken further interest in the work and in translations of Iranian novelists and poets.

The Narrow Road to the Interior and Hojoki are two of the best-loved works of their kind; famous for their beautiful, delicate verse and subtle insight into the human condition. It has been said of The Narrow Road that 'it was as if the very soul of Japan had itself written it'. It takes the form of a travel diary, and traces the poet's journey from Edo (modern-day Tokyo) to the northern interior.