Awake: Stories of Life-Changing Epiphanies - Softcover

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9781569245835: Awake: Stories of Life-Changing Epiphanies

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1569245835 ISBN 13: 9781569245835

Publisher: Marlowe & Company, 2001

Buddhists call it satori—the moment of intuitive illumination when the mind and soul finally understand the basic truth of the universe. It is the instant of spiritual fission, when the veil falls, when lives change. Awake collects the greatest, most moving, most inspiring tales of this ultimate experience: Thomas Merton and Henry Miller, Malcolm X and May Sarton, James Joyce and St. Augustine, Barbara Kingsolver and Leo Tolstoy. Some moments are mundane—Flannery O’Connor’s heroine finds meaning in a hog pen, and Virginia Woolf discovers it one complicated day by a lighthouse; others exotic, such as Dennis Covington, who experiences it in a church while handling rattlesnakes. To some, such as the protagonist in Henry James’s “The Beast in the Jungle,” the fact that it was never looked for, never thought about, is the final epiphany.

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About the Author:

Kristen Couse is an editor at Balliett & Fitzgerald. She lives in New York City

From Library Journal:

Compiled by Dyja (Play for a Kingdom), a series editor for Illumina Books, the fiction and nonfiction selections in this anthology of "epiphanies" deftly capture many varieties of intellectual, emotional, and spiritual unfolding. Anne Lamott's excerpt from Traveling Mercies chronicles a descent into an alcohol- and drug-induced hell, while Henry James's classic novella Beast in the Jungle uses spare language to recount a man's painful realization that he has spent decades awaiting a seismic life event that has in fact come and gone. Elsewhere, a Flannery O'Connor protagonist evolves from sharp-tongued hypocrite into a bizarre Southern vision of racial and social unity. Also included are excerpts from Joyce's Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man and Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Ilyich. Every now and then a truly useful anthology appears, and this is one; readers are sure to find both solace and good-natured humor among the many viewpoints represented. Susan A. Zappia, Paradise Valley Community Coll., Phoenix, AZ
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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