"Zen enriches no one," Thomas Merton provocatively writes in his opening statement to Zen and the Birds of Appetite-one of the last books to be published before his death in 1968. "There is no body to be found. The birds may come and circle for a while... but they soon go elsewhere. When they are gone, the 'nothing,' the 'no-body' that was there, suddenly appears. That is Zen. It was there all the time but the scavengers missed it, because it was...

The zany lives and morals of the girls of the "May of Teck Club", a haven for young ladies, in 1945, when "all the nice people of England were poor, allowing for exceptions."

This collection is made up of four sections: "Far West" -- poems of the Western mountain country where, as a young man. Gary Snyder worked as a logger and forest ranger; "Far East" -- poems written between 1956 and 1964 in Japan where he studied Zen at the monastery in Kyoto; "Kali" -- poems inspired by a visit to India and his reading of Indian religious texts, particularly those of Shivaism and Tibetan Buddhism; and "Back" -- poems done on his return...

Death on the Installment Plan is a companion volume to Louis-Ferinand Céline's earlier novel Journey to the End of Night. Published in rapid succession in the middle 1930s, these two books shocked European literature and world consciousness. Nominally fiction but more rightly called "creative confessions," they told of the author's childhood in excoriating Paris slums, of serves in the mud wastes of World War I and African jungles. Mixing unmitigated...

In this novel, Madame Rosa is a Jewish Holocaust survivor turned prositute, who boards the children of other prostitutes.