Leonard Cohen wrote the poems in Book of Longing - his first book of poetry in more than 20 years after 1984's Book of Mercy - during his five-year stay at a Zen monastery on Southern California's Mount Baldy, and in Los Angeles, Montreal, and Mumbai. This dazzling collection of poetry is timeless, meditative, and often darkly humorous.

The legend behind such songs as "Suzanne," "Bird on the Wire," and "Hallelujah" and the poet and novelist behind such groundbreaking literary works as Beautiful Losers and Book of Mercy, Leonard Cohen is one of the most important and influential artists of our era, a man of powerful emotion and intelligence whose work has explored the definitive issues of human life - sex, religion, power, meaning, love. I'm Your Man is the definitive account of Cohen's extraordinary life.

In October 1973, the poet and singer Leonard Cohen—thirty-nine years old, famous, unhappy, and at a creative dead end—traveled from his home on the Greek island of Hydra to the chaos and bloodshed of the Sinai desert when Egypt attacked Israel on the Jewish high holiday of Yom Kippur. Moving around the front with a guitar and a group of local musicians, Cohen met hundreds of young soldiers, men and women at the worst moment of their lives. In Who by Fire, journalist Matti Friedman gives us a riveting account of those weeks in the Sinai.

A memoir of the author's decades-long friendship and spiritual journey with the late singer, songwriter, novelist, and poet Leonard Cohen. Funny, revealing, self-aware, and deeply moving, Matters of Vital Interest is an insightful memoir about Eric Lerner's relationship with his friend, whose idiosyncratic style and dignified life was deeply informed by his spiritual practices.

Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey are unquestionably two of the greatest epic masterpieces in Western literature. Though more than 2,700 years old, their stories of brave heroics, capricious gods, and towering human emotions are vividly timeless. The Iliad can justly be called the world’s greatest war epic. The terrible and long-drawn-out siege of Troy remains one of the classic campaigns. The Odyssey chronicles the many trials and adventures Odysseus must pass through on his long journey home from the Trojan wars to his beloved wife.

What is the role of the writer? Prophet? High priest of art? Court jester? Or witness to the real world? Looking back on her own childhood and writing career, Margaret Atwood examines the metaphors which writers of fiction and poetry have used to explain - or excuse! - their activities, looking at what costumes they have assumed, what roles they have chosen to play. In her final chapter she takes up the challenge of the title: if a writer is to be seen as "gifted", who is doing the giving and what are the terms of the gift?

The pieces in this collection, written between 1956 and 1961 and including short fiction, a radio play, and a stunning early novel, offer startling insights into Cohen's imagination and creative process. Cohen explores themes that would permeate his later work, from shame and unworthiness to sexual desire in all its sacred and profane dimensions to longing, whether for love, family, freedom, or transcendence.

Dylan, who began working on the book in 2010, offers his insight into the nature of popular music. He writes over sixty essays focusing on songs by other artists, spanning from Stephen Foster to Elvis Costello, and in between ranging from Hank Williams to Nina Simone. He analyzes what he calls the trap of easy rhymes, breaks down how the addition of a single syllable can diminish a song, and even explains how bluegrass relates to heavy metal. These essays are written in Dylan’s unique prose. And while ostensibly about music, they are really meditations on the human condition.

In this unforgettable novel, Leonard Cohen boldly etches the youth and early manhood of Lawrence Breavman, only son of an old Jewish family in Montreal. Life for Breavman is made up of dazzling color - a series of motion pictures fed through a high-speed projector: the half-understood death of his father; the adult games of love and war, with their infinite capacity for fantasy and cruelty; his secret experiments with hypnotism; the night-long adventures with Krantz, his beloved comrade and confidant.

Miracle and Wonder: Conversations with Paul Simon is part memoir, part investigation, and unlike any creative portrait you’ve ever heard before. Recorded over a series of 30 hours of conversation between Simon, Gladwell, and Gladwell’s oldest friend and co-writer, journalist and Broken Record podcast co-host Bruce Headlam, the conversation flows from Simon’s music, to his childhood in Queens, NY, to his frequent collaborators including Art Garfunkel and the nature of creativity itself.

Whether complete or only fragmentary, the 930 extant Dead Sea Scrolls irrevocably altered how we look at and understand the foundations of faith and religious practice. Now you can get a comprehensive introduction to this unique series of archaeological documents, and to scholars' evolving understanding of their authorship and significance, with these 24 lectures. Learn what the scrolls are, what they contain, and how the insights they offered into religious and ancient history came into focus.

Just weeks before his death in late 2016, Leonard Cohen told The New Yorker that he was ready for the end to come. He just wanted enough time to put his last book in order. Fortunately, that time was granted. The Flame is Cohen’s eloquent farewell, a valedictory collection of lyrics and poems that maps his singular creative journey. As noted in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame’s citation, “For six decades, Leonard Cohen revealed his soul to the world through poetry and song - his deep and timeless humanity touching our very core.”

Why is it that Leonard Cohen receives the sort of reverence we reserve for a precious few living artists? Why are his songs, three or four decades after their original release, suddenly gracing the charts, blockbuster movie sound tracks, and television singing competitions? And why is it that while most of his contemporaries are either long dead or engaged in uninspired nostalgia tours, Cohen is at the peak of his powers and popularity? These are the questions at the heart of A Broken Hallelujah.

Faith, Hope and Carnage is a book about Nick Cave’s inner life. Created from more than forty hours of intimate conversations with Seán O’Hagan, it is a profoundly thoughtful exploration, in Cave’s own words, of what really drives his life and creativity. The book examines questions of faith, art, music, freedom, grief, and love. It draws candidly on Cave’s life, from his early childhood to the present day, his loves, his work ethic, and his dramatic transformation in recent years.

More than 100 years after his birth, Pablo Neruda's poetry is as vital and beloved as ever. This collection presents 50 of the most essential poems by one of history's greatest poets in dynamic new translations, the result of an unprecedented collaboration among a team of poets, translators, and the world's leading Neruda scholars.