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The Life of the Caterpillar.
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My obsession with metamorphosis began after my wife and I discovered that we're going to have our third child. I started having nightly dreams about the butterflies I kept in a dry aquarium when I was a kid, waking up in the middle of the night with a flashlight strapped to my forehead, waiting to see them emerge from their chrysalis. A pregnancy somehow feels like our human version of emergence: few experiences are as life-changing as becoming a parent, and fewer wonders more exhilarating than the natural magic of metamorphosis. Both mark beginnings but are in fact continuations. Both, in different ways, are also forms of endings. Both make us wonder about the riddles of our world.
Maria Sibylla Merian was a 17th-century painter and naturalist who traveled with her daughter at the age of 52, in the year 1699, to observe and paint the life-cycle of butterflies and other insects in the Suriname jungles.
She was an extraordinary woman, often referred to as "the Mother of Ecology", and this is a beautiful book telling her story.
As it happens, Maria played an important role in cracking the mystery of metamorphosis, going back to the philosophers and naturalists of ancient Greece.
Before Darwin, before Audubon, before Gilbert White, there was Merian. An artist turned naturalist, known for her botanical illustrations, Maria Sybilla Merian was born in Germany just sixteen years after Galileo proclaimed that the earth orbited the sun. But at the age of fifty she sailed from Europe to the New World on a solo scientific expedition to study insect metamorphosis - an unheard-of journey for any naturalist at that time, much less an unaccompanied woman. When she returned she produced a book that secured her reputation, only to have it savaged in the nineteenth century by scientists who disdained…
The dragons of Yuro have been hunted to extinction.
On a small, isolated island, in a reclusive forest, lives bandit leader Marani and her brother Jacks. With their outlaw band they rob from the rich to feed themselves, raiding carriages and dodging the occasional vindictive…
My obsession with metamorphosis began after my wife and I discovered that we're going to have our third child. I started having nightly dreams about the butterflies I kept in a dry aquarium when I was a kid, waking up in the middle of the night with a flashlight strapped to my forehead, waiting to see them emerge from their chrysalis. A pregnancy somehow feels like our human version of emergence: few experiences are as life-changing as becoming a parent, and fewer wonders more exhilarating than the natural magic of metamorphosis. Both mark beginnings but are in fact continuations. Both, in different ways, are also forms of endings. Both make us wonder about the riddles of our world.
In this classic, Gregor Samsa, a traveling salesman, famously wakes up one morning to discover that he is a gigantic vermin.
Interpretations of the book range from Kafka trying to say that modern life reduces us all to being bugs, to the idea that Kafka was really writing about art, and how, since the artist cannot ever be understood, he might as well be an insect.
I read it as Kafka's attempt to reconcile two philosophies - that of Nietzsche, who claimed that the human will is a force that leads to happiness, and that of Schopenhauer, who claimed that the will is just about survival.
In Kafka's hands, metamorphosis is both life-affirming and life-denying.
“When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin.”
With this startling, bizarre, yet surprisingly funny first sentence, Kafka begins his masterpiece, The Metamorphosis. It is the story of a young man who, transformed overnight into a giant beetlelike insect, becomes an object of disgrace to his family, an outsider in his own home, a quintessentially alienated man. A harrowing—though absurdly comic—meditation on human feelings of inadequacy, guilt, and isolation, The Metamorphosis has taken its place as one of the most widely read and influential works of twentieth-century…
I have always been drawn to stories about identity and belonging, not just because of my own journey, but because of how powerful stories can be in helping us understand each other. Growing up between cultures, I often found myself searching for where I fit. Books played a big role in that. They gave me perspective, comfort, and sometimes just the reassurance that I was not alone in feeling that way. That is why these stories matter to me. They help people feel seen, and in doing so, help them understand others in a deeper and more human way.
This book approaches change and displacement in a completely different way.
It is not a traditional journey, and that is what makes it stand out. I found myself reflecting on how quickly life can shift, and how people adapt even when everything around them changes. It captures uncertainty, but also a quiet resilience that often goes unnoticed. That stayed with me.
At five years old, Kasiel was found with the pointed ends of his ears cut off. Despite that brutal start, he’s lived twelve peaceful years with the man who took him in. Keeping his hair long over his mutilated ears helps him hide the fact that he is Vanrian, a…
My obsession with metamorphosis began after my wife and I discovered that we're going to have our third child. I started having nightly dreams about the butterflies I kept in a dry aquarium when I was a kid, waking up in the middle of the night with a flashlight strapped to my forehead, waiting to see them emerge from their chrysalis. A pregnancy somehow feels like our human version of emergence: few experiences are as life-changing as becoming a parent, and fewer wonders more exhilarating than the natural magic of metamorphosis. Both mark beginnings but are in fact continuations. Both, in different ways, are also forms of endings. Both make us wonder about the riddles of our world.
This classic is one of the main sources for Greek and Roman mythology, giving us the tales, among others, of the daughter of the river god, the nymph Daphne, turning into a laurel tree to escape the suffocating love of Apollo; the son of Neptune, Cygnus, beaten in battle by Achilles and turned by his father into a swan to escape terrible death; the King of Cyprus, Pygmalion, falling in love with his own sculpture, only to have her turn into a real woman.
When Ovid completed his great work, he stated: “Evening has overtaken me, and the sun has dipped below the horizon of the Ocean, yet I have not had time to tell you of all the things that have evolved into new forms”.
'Still remarkably vivid. It is easier to read this for pure pleasure than just about any other ancient text' Nicholas Lezard, Guardian
Ovid's sensuous and witty poem begins with the creation of the world and brings together a dazzling array of mythological tales, ingeniously linked by the idea of transformation - often as a result of love or lust - where men and women find themselves magically changed into extraordinary new beings. Including the well-known stories of Daedalus and Icarus, Pyramus and Thisbe, Pygmalion, Perseus and Andromeda, and the fall of Troy, the Metamorphoses has influenced writers and artists from…
I began my career as an assistant nursery school teacher when I graduated from college. My head teacher was my mentor. She knew how to engage children with her storytelling. She also managed to inspire children with an enthusiasm for learning. She challenged each child to develop his/her own individual skills. I loved the way she was able to connect with children, and for me, she was the ideal role model. Throughout my teaching career, I tried to connect with the children I taught. My goal was to reach every child, to stimulate their desire for learning, and to help them develop positive self-esteem in a nurturing environment.
Christmas is. . . sharing with others . . . giving gifts with love . . . enjoying the magic of the season
Join The Very Hungry Caterpillar for a celebration of Christmas and all the ways to wish the ones you love a Very Merry Christmas.
This delightful board book features Eric Carle's bright and distinctive artwork from sparkling stars and snowy scenes - and you can spot The Very Hungry Caterpillar on every page.
With it's festive artwork and gentle rhyming text, this is the perfect gift for Christmas!
The only thing I love reading more than books about myth and legend are books you’re not supposed to read. George Bataille once wrote that if you ever caught him producing a book that he risked nothing to write, you should throw it away, and I take that to heart. Every book should be dangerous, because only danger makes you think. I hope every book I’ve written is, in some sense, dangerous, although of course I also hope my readers do not get ripped to pieces by the devil. That’s a little too dangerous.
Not necessarily the world’s first novel (the world’s first novel is probably lost) nor even the world’s first great novel (that would be Petronius’ Satyricon, which you should also not get caught reading), The Golden Ass is definitely the world’s first great novel that has survived through the centuries intact.
It’s the story of a man who tries just one time to dabble in magic and accidentally turns himself into a donkey. The poor guy has a bunch of adventures as he tries to figure out how to, you know, stop being a donkey.
That doesn’t sound so bad, but no one’s ever going to let you read a book with the title The Golden Ass. It just means the golden donkey! There’s nothing filthy about it! But no one will believe you!
Written towards the end of the second century AD, The Golden Ass tells the story of the many adventures of a young man whose fascination with witchcraft leads him to be transformed into a donkey. The bewitched Lucius passes from owner to owner - encountering a desperate gang of robbers and being forced to perform lewd 'human' tricks on stage - until the Goddess Isis finally breaks the spell and Lucius is initiated into her cult. Apuleius' enchanting story has inspired generations of writers such as Boccaccio, Shakespeare, Cervantes and Keats with its dazzling combination of allegory, satire, bawdiness and…
Resonant Blue and Other Stories
by
Mary Vensel White,
The first collection of award-winning short fiction from the author of Bellflower and Things to See in Arizona, whose writing reflects “how we can endure and overcome our personal histories, better understand our ancestral ones, and accept the unknown future ahead.”
As a writer, artist, and actor throughout my life, I’ve explored and enjoyed many artistic forms. While I appreciate books across many genres, I elevate to the highest level those works that manage to break conventional boundaries and create something original. In my own work, I have always challenged myself to create something unique with a medium that has never been done before. At the same time, I have sought to discover a process and resulting work that inspires readers’ own creativity and challenges them to expand their imagination.
Locos is charming and cruel, tragic and hilarious, ambiguous yet direct, and written with clear, poetic prose. The experimental style on display never overwhelms the narrative. Despite the fact that Alfau directly declares the fictive nature of his characters, he made me care about them. The book contains a series of interconnected short stories with characters reappearing throughout and even when they are not featured, a brief mention may act as a dramatic revelation that changes significantly what you read before. And further, some of the characters seem to metamorphosize and serve different roles in subsequent stories.
The entirety manages to hold together as more of a novel than a collection partly thanks to the overlapping characters, partly through the consistent tone and style, and partly because Alfau is always in the background or making appearances as "the author." Some of the stories are quite hilarious, while some are devastating.…
The interconnected stones that form Felipe Alfau's novel LOCOS take place in a Madrid as exotic as the Baghdad of the 1001 ARABIAN NIGHTS and feature unforgettable characters in revolt against their young 'author' "For them", he complains, "reality is what fiction is to real people; they simply love it and make for it against ray almost heroic opposition" Alfau's "comedy of gestures" -- a mercurial dreamscape of the eccentric, sometimes criminal, habitues of Toledo's Cafe of the Crazy -- was written in English and first published in 1936, favorably reviewed for The Nation by Mary McCarthy, as she recounts…
I rediscovered my love of romantic fantasies when my mother went into the hospital, and I needed a place to go to escape the horror of watching a parent’s health fail. I not only buried myself in reading fantasies filled with magical love stories, I started writing them again. Throughout my life, I’ve reached for fantasy novels whenever life got tough. As a child, I would read nearly every fantasy I could find. As an adult, my tastes have changed, and I’m looking for fantasy novels with a romantic twist. But still, it’s the heroine overcoming adversity despite the worst odds that gives me hope and comfort exactly when I need it.
I discovered the Drakon series when wandering the stacks at my local library many years ago. Nearly twenty years later, I’m still thinking about these books.
Set in eighteenth-century England, this book is a romance between a thief and an earl—who are also dragons. How fun is that? This series feeds into my love of high-stakes historical romance and magical creatures.
I devoured the story of Kit’s chase of the elusive thief Clarissa, who is destined to steal his heart just as he is destined to capture hers. They are the ultimate enemies-to-lovers trope that I love to read and reread.
For centuries they’ve lived in secret among northern England’s green and misted hills. Creatures of extraordinary beauty, power, and sensuality, they possess the ability to shape-shift from human to dragon and back again. Now their secret—and their survival—is threatened by a temptation that will break every boundary. . . .
Dubbed the Smoke Thief, a daring jewel thief is confounding the London police. His wealthy victims claim the master burglar can walk through walls and vanish into thin air. But Christoff, the charismatic Marquess of Langford, knows the truth: the thief is no ordinary human but a “runner” who’s fled…
I resonate with these stories; I feel a kinship with authors of books about teen sexual abuse. My heart breaks for another innocent young person, and I am also inspired by the different ways we find healing and peace. I am so grateful for my healing journey that I want to share what helped me with others who are looking for greater peace with their struggles and scars. I am proud to join the ranks of these authors because we all shine a spotlight on the harm done by this too-common abuse of the trust and innocence of teenage girls.
I resonated with this memoir of teen grooming because I saw myself in it and I felt less alone, like I had found a kindred spirit. Many details of our stories are different, but the core wounding from being taken advantage of by an older more powerful man felt the same.
The author and I both experienced the thrill of being chosen and the deep sadness resulting from this kind of betrayal, and we both found a way to heal, even though the scars remain.
AS FEATURED IN THE HULU DOCUMENTARY KEEP THIS BETWEEN US
A dark relationship evolves between a high schooler and her English teacher in this breathtakingly powerful memoir about a young woman who must learn to rewrite her own story.
“Have you ever read Lolita?”
So begins seventeen-year-old Alisson’s metamorphosis from student to lover and then victim. A lonely and vulnerable high school senior, Alisson finds solace only in her writing—and in a young, charismatic English teacher, Mr. North.
Mr. North gives Alisson a copy of Lolita to read, telling her it is a beautiful story about love. The book soon…
After her mother is killed in a rare Northern Michigan tornado, Sadie Wixom is left with only her father and grandfather to guide her through young adulthood. Miles away in western Saskatchewan, Stefan Montegrand and his Indigenous family are displaced from their land by multinational energy companies. They are taken…
I’m an author from England who set out one lunchbreak to write the type of book I wanted to read. I like strong, imperfect heroines who fight for justice, both in their own lives and for others. Plus most of my books involve romance, so hot guys are a must too. I’ve written over fifty novels and novellas, from romcoms to thrillers, and one constant is strong female characters who do things for themselves.
Assassin Calypso was my favourite side character throughout the series, and in Black Heart, we finally get to meet her properly.
As part of her metamorphosis, she has to learn to trust others, which is perhaps her biggest challenge of all. There’s as much romance as suspense in this book, and former CIA agent Ian Black makes a worthy hero as he teams up with Calypso to right past wrongs.
He’s untouchable. Unbreakable. She plans to destroy him.
Former CIA agent Ian Black has done terrible deeds. Sacrificed his honor and reputation for God and country. He’s a fighter and a survivor. His mission is to rid the world of scumbags who prey on innocent people.
No price is too high, and no one crosses him. Not for long, anyway.
But then Natasha Oliver walks in, threatening to expose the one thing Ian thought dead and buried: his heart.
Natasha’s innocence was ripped away years ago when she was thrown into prison for crimes her parents committed. Now, as the…
