In a small North Carolina riverside town where past and present are mysteriously entangled, young Daniel Waterson is growing up in the towering presence of his father Ray, a decorated Vietnam veteran whose mystical powers extend far beyond those of a trained soldier. Their lives are irrevocably altered when Ray accidentally kills a local boy, plunging their community into a maelstrom of sorrow and recrimination.

As Daniel struggles to reconcile the hero he admires with the flawed man before him, he finds himself haunted not just by the weight of the accident, but by the revenant of the boy whose life was so abruptly ended. Daniel is drawn into a world where lines between living and dead blur, and secrets rise to the surface as a community's violent past threatens to spill over into its present.

On his journey Daniel is sustained by his fierce and loving grandmother, his best friend, and most of all his mother Lee Ann, who is determined to keep him from tapping into the power and curse that courses through his father's veins. Eventually Daniel must face the choice confronting every man: Will I follow my father's path?

We Shall Not All Sleep is a captivating coming-of-age story woven with danger, mystery, and the bonds between father and son, husband and wife, and faithful friends. It is a haunting tale of a quest, enduring love, and the price of redemption.

In the 1990s, a young Ugandan Catholic nurse named Rose Busingye began working in the slums of Kampala with the many women there suffering from HIV/AIDS. Many of them were refugees from civil war in the north, having been raped, beaten, forced to kill in order not to be killed, to steal children in the hope of one day returning to see their own children.

Even though Rose brought food and medicine to them, she often discovered that the women had not taken their medications, so sunk were they in despair and a lack of self-worth. She was on the verge of abandoning everything, when she received an invitation to stay for some time in Italy. It was from Fr. Luigi Giussani, the Italian priest who had founded Communion and Liberation, the movement to which Rose also belongs. After those months spent in Milan, she returned to Uganda with a renewed desire to share with these women what she herself had experienced: the infinite value of her life. Of every life.

Soon things began to change. Out of that change grew Meeting Point International, an organization led by many of the same women Rose had ministered to. In time, new efforts arose, including schools and orphanages-projects that continue to embody Pope Francis's injunction to go to the margins. In Your Names Are Written in Heaven, veteran Italian journalist Davide Perillo tells the inspiring story of Rose Busingye and her women with clarity, compassion, and insight.

When he was a young seminarian, the teacher in Luigi Giussani's singing class played a recording of an aria from a Donizetti opera, Spirto gentil (Gentle spirit, you once shone in my dreams, but after, I lost you forever. . . .). At that moment, Giussani understood for the first time that God existed, and thus that nothing could exist without a meaning; that the heart could not exist unless the heart's goal existed: happiness.

Many years later, after founding Communion and Liberation-a lay movement within the Catholic Church-Father Giussani started and directed a series of compact discs, named Spirto Gentil, that included many of the great composers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, some of the masterpieces of church music, and collections of folk songs from various national traditions. The English translations of his introductions to the booklets that accompanied the compact discs have finally been gathered together, revised, and published in book form.

Giussani heard in music a privileged way of perceiving beauty as the splendor of truth, capable of arousing and keeping alive the desire for infinite beauty, recognizing it as one way through which the Mystery speaks to the heart of man. Spirto Gentil thus introduces us not only to the elements of musical form but above all it accompanies us in a search for the ultimate meaning of existence.

What do we mean when we say I? Behind that word there exists today a deep and abiding confusion. And yet what could be more urgent for each and every one of us than an understanding of what it means to be a subject-a true protagonist in the world? Nothing is as fascinating as the discovery of the true dimensions of one's own I.

And nothing is as moving and provocative as the belief that God became flesh and blood to accompany each person's journey in search of their own human face. Unfolding the implications of that belief is the burden of In Search of the Human Face, one of the seminal books by Monsignor Luigi Giussani, founder of Communion and Liberation.

Life presents us first of all with a decision about what we recognize as our own foundation-and this decision is an event that is continually proposed again. The encounter with the Christian event has for two thousand years been the encounter with a human phenomenon in which the passion for the discovery of one's own face and openness to reality are mysteriously awakened, and it has as an inevitable consequence-the inauguration of a new type of morality, aptly described by Romano Guardini: In the experience of a great love, all that happens becomes an event inside that love.

When he was a young seminarian, the teacher in Luigi Giussani's singing class played a recording of an aria from a Donizetti opera, Spirto gentil (Gentle spirit, you once shone in my dreams, but after, I lost you forever. . . .). At that moment, Giussani understood for the first time that God existed, and thus that nothing could exist without a meaning; that the heart could not exist unless the heart's goal existed: happiness.

Many years later, after founding Communion and Liberation-a lay movement within the Catholic Church-Father Giussani started and directed a series of compact discs, named Spirto Gentil, that included many of the great composers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, some of the masterpieces of church music, and collections of folk songs from various national traditions. The English translations of his introductions to the booklets that accompanied the compact discs have finally been gathered together, revised, and published in book form.

Giussani heard in music a privileged way of perceiving beauty as the splendor of truth, capable of arousing and keeping alive the desire for infinite beauty, recognizing it as one way through which the Mystery speaks to the heart of man. Spirto Gentil thus introduces us not only to the elements of musical form but above all it accompanies us in a search for the ultimate meaning of existence.

In a small North Carolina riverside town where past and present are mysteriously entangled, young Daniel Waterson is growing up in the towering presence of his father Ray, a decorated Vietnam veteran whose mystical powers extend far beyond those of a trained soldier. Their lives are irrevocably altered when Ray accidentally kills a local boy, plunging their community into a maelstrom of sorrow and recrimination.

As Daniel struggles to reconcile the hero he admires with the flawed man before him, he finds himself haunted not just by the weight of the accident, but by the revenant of the boy whose life was so abruptly ended. Daniel is drawn into a world where lines between living and dead blur, and secrets rise to the surface as a community's violent past threatens to spill over into its present.

On his journey Daniel is sustained by his fierce and loving grandmother, his best friend, and most of all his mother Lee Ann, who is determined to keep him from tapping into the power and curse that courses through his father's veins. Eventually Daniel must face the choice confronting every man: Will I follow my father's path?

We Shall Not All Sleep is a captivating coming-of-age story woven with danger, mystery, and the bonds between father and son, husband and wife, and faithful friends. It is a haunting tale of a quest, enduring love, and the price of redemption.

Plato famously defined a human being as a featherless biped. It's hard not to sense the ironic humor in this definition, a reminder that, for all our talk about human dignity, our condition is contingent, vulnerable, and at some level even comic.

Perhaps that's why the writer A.G. Mojtabai-known for her dry, understated, subtly humorous but ultimately honest and courageous depictions of the human condition-chose the name for her latest novel, set in the confines of Shady Rest Home for the Aged.

Mojtabai offers us a varied cast of characters at Shady Rest, including: Eli, who fancies himself a ladies man; Elora, anxious about her wayward nephew; the aloof but lonely scholar Wiktor; and Maddie, a bit eccentric, true, but more wise and compassionate than most. At the center of it all is Daniel, an old soul in a young man's body, with a strange gift for caring for the elderly.

Featherless is one of those rare books that brings us news from the final frontier, the end of life. Its unflinching but humane gaze-informed by the author's own experience-serves as a fitting capstone for a literary career of uncommon distinction.

According to T.R. Hummer, Stephen Haven is a poet of incisive discipline deployed in the service of a passionate, humanistic ethos. His poems reflect concern for humanity, and concern for language, humanity's best hope. The poems in Haven's new collection, The Flight from Meaning, have been shaped by-and serve as responses to-contemporary culture's predilection for violence, spectacle, and distraction and the ways they flatten and diminish our experience of the world.

But for Haven, meaning is something rich, mysterious, and multi-layered, and our apprehension of it can only be sustained by the imagination's capacity to counter the tyranny of rationalism.

The Flight from Meaning contains meditations on American history, on the nature of religion in our time, on racism and its legacy in the post-Civil Rights era, and brings the reader to intimate poems about family in Haven's industrial hometown in upstate New York, and to poems drawn from years of living and teaching in Beijing, Houston, Cleveland, Boston, and New York City.

In the literary family to which Stephen Haven belongs, his poems embrace both Dickinson and Whitman, Stevens and Frost, Eliot and Williams, Hart Crane, Robert Hass, Cormac McCarthy, Flannery O'Connor, Roethke, Pasolini, Rilke, Glück, Trethewey, Levine, Levis, Komunyakaa, and many others who dodge simplistic dichotomies in favor of the way the ear, the eye, the mind and feeling, achieve a lightness of being and a range of meaning that trouble and enrich the heart of human experience.

In the fall of 2014, educators Eric and Rixa Freeze moved with their young family to Old Nice, a medieval town-within-a-city on the famed Côte d'Azur. They'd bought a 700-square-foot dive, an apartment in need of renovation just a couple blocks from the Mediterranean.

They were a family with a plan: to live differently. No home in the suburbs with a two-car garage, no bedroom for every child, no 24-hour Walmart.

Carefully researched and vividly written, French Dive chronicles the Freeze family's integration into a culture where large families aren't all treated alike. What they find--spearfishing for food, renting their car to strangers, fixing and selling old furniture from the garbage depot--is that a city gives back the more you give to it.

Morally complex and unflinching in its analysis of contemporary life and the things that keep human beings apart, Freeze tackles racism, homelessness, art, reality TV, social media, and parenting with wit and humor. Along the way he and his family learn what it means to be a neighbor, a member of a community, and a global citizen, how to treat others with empathy and understanding as they try to carve out a place in this world.

What do we mean when we say I? Behind that word there exists today a deep and abiding confusion. And yet what could be more urgent for each and every one of us than an understanding of what it means to be a subject-a true protagonist in the world? Nothing is as fascinating as the discovery of the true dimensions of one's own I.

And nothing is as moving and provocative as the belief that God became flesh and blood to accompany each person's journey in search of their own human face. Unfolding the implications of that belief is the burden of In Search of the Human Face, one of the seminal books by Monsignor Luigi Giussani, founder of Communion and Liberation.

Life presents us first of all with a decision about what we recognize as our own foundation-and this decision is an event that is continually proposed again. The encounter with the Christian event has for two thousand years been the encounter with a human phenomenon in which the passion for the discovery of one's own face and openness to reality are mysteriously awakened, and it has as an inevitable consequence-the inauguration of a new type of morality, aptly described by Romano Guardini: In the experience of a great love, all that happens becomes an event inside that love.

Plato famously defined a human being as a featherless biped. It's hard not to sense the ironic humor in this definition, a reminder that, for all our talk about human dignity, our condition is contingent, vulnerable, and at some level even comic.

Perhaps that's why the writer A.G. Mojtabai-known for her dry, understated, subtly humorous but ultimately honest and courageous depictions of the human condition-chose the name for her latest novel, set in the confines of Shady Rest Home for the Aged.

Mojtabai offers us a varied cast of characters at Shady Rest, including: Eli, who fancies himself a ladies man; Elora, anxious about her wayward nephew; the aloof but lonely scholar Wiktor; and Maddie, a bit eccentric, true, but more wise and compassionate than most. At the center of it all is Daniel, an old soul in a young man's body, with a strange gift for caring for the elderly.

Featherless is one of those rare books that brings us news from the final frontier, the end of life. Its unflinching but humane gaze-informed by the author's own experience-serves as a fitting capstone for a literary career of uncommon distinction.

In the 1990s, a young Ugandan Catholic nurse named Rose Busingye began working in the slums of Kampala with the many women there suffering from HIV/AIDS. Many of them were refugees from civil war in the north, having been raped, beaten, forced to kill in order not to be killed, to steal children in the hope of one day returning to see their own children.

Even though Rose brought food and medicine to them, she often discovered that the women had not taken their medications, so sunk were they in despair and a lack of self-worth. She was on the verge of abandoning everything, when she received an invitation to stay for some time in Italy. It was from Fr. Luigi Giussani, the Italian priest who had founded Communion and Liberation, the movement to which Rose also belongs. After those months spent in Milan, she returned to Uganda with a renewed desire to share with these women what she herself had experienced: the infinite value of her life. Of every life.

Soon things began to change. Out of that change grew Meeting Point International, an organization led by many of the same women Rose had ministered to. In time, new efforts arose, including schools and orphanages-projects that continue to embody Pope Francis's injunction to go to the margins. In Your Names Are Written in Heaven, veteran Italian journalist Davide Perillo tells the inspiring story of Rose Busingye and her women with clarity, compassion, and insight.

In Hotly in Pursuit of the Real, the beloved bestselling novelist Ron Hansen opens the doors of his writing studio to share with us his passions for history, scandal, theology, Jesuits, the American West, and golf (which he plays even in bad weather).

If Hansen's novels explore people very different from himself--from a stigmatic nun to a Victorian poet to Billy the Kid, and even Hitler's niece--the meditations in this book do the opposite, allowing us to glimpse the wellsprings of his imagination, the places and traditions and books that drive him to create made-up worlds. In that sense, the reflections in these pages truly serve as notes toward a memoir.

As each section unfolds, we gain a clearer sense of Hansen's aesthetic, the parallels he sees between writing and the sacraments, between literature's capacity to make history present to us and the Church's rich array of traditions, including the Jesuit charism that has inspired great writers, such as Gerard Manley Hopkins (and himself).

Equally adept at telling a hilarious anecdote and guiding us through a complex, ambiguous episode in history, Hansen's language remains fresh and invigorating. Hotly in Pursuit of the Real takes you inside one writer's imagination, only to send you back out into the wide world with new eyes.

According to T.R. Hummer, Stephen Haven is a poet of incisive discipline deployed in the service of a passionate, humanistic ethos. His poems reflect concern for humanity, and concern for language, humanity's best hope. The poems in Haven's new collection, The Flight from Meaning, have been shaped by-and serve as responses to-contemporary culture's predilection for violence, spectacle, and distraction and the ways they flatten and diminish our experience of the world.

But for Haven, meaning is something rich, mysterious, and multi-layered, and our apprehension of it can only be sustained by the imagination's capacity to counter the tyranny of rationalism.

The Flight from Meaning contains meditations on American history, on the nature of religion in our time, on racism and its legacy in the post-Civil Rights era, and brings the reader to intimate poems about family in Haven's industrial hometown in upstate New York, and to poems drawn from years of living and teaching in Beijing, Houston, Cleveland, Boston, and New York City.

In the literary family to which Stephen Haven belongs, his poems embrace both Dickinson and Whitman, Stevens and Frost, Eliot and Williams, Hart Crane, Robert Hass, Cormac McCarthy, Flannery O'Connor, Roethke, Pasolini, Rilke, Glück, Trethewey, Levine, Levis, Komunyakaa, and many others who dodge simplistic dichotomies in favor of the way the ear, the eye, the mind and feeling, achieve a lightness of being and a range of meaning that trouble and enrich the heart of human experience.

British journalist Robert Lovelace travels to California to report on the social media giant Global Village. He's horrified by what he finds: a company--guided by the ruthless vision of its founder, Evan Bone--that seems to be making journalism itself redundant. Appalled, he decides to abandon the project and return home.

But as he leaves he has a disconcerting encounter that sends him off in a totally different direction. Soon he finds himself embarked on an increasingly fraught and dangerous mission. The aim: to uncover the murky truth about Evan Bone's past and his pathological disregard for the human cost of the behemoth he has created.

Robert's quest takes him from San Francisco to a small college town in the Midwest, to the site of a former hippie commune in northern California, introducing us to a range of vivid characters, and confronting us with the price we pay--online trolling; the loss of privacy; professional ruin--for living in an interconnected world. Finally, he makes a startling discovery--and is thrown into a completely unforeseen existential dilemma.

A timely, stylishly written, and brilliantly conceived metaphysical thriller, Coyote Fork carries us on an unforgettable journey, before bringing us face to face with the darkness at the heart of Silicon Valley itself.