Art & Fear explores the way art gets made, the reasons it often doesn't get made, and the nature of the difficulties that cause so many artists to give up along the way. This is a book about what it feels like to sit in your studio or classroom, at your wheel or keyboard, easel or camera, trying to do the work you need to do. It is about committing your future to your own hands, placing free will above predestination, choice above chance. It is about finding your own work.

In this landmark modern-day rendition of the ancient Taoist classic, Ursula K. Le Guin presents Lao Tzu’s time-honored and astonishingly powerful philosophy like never before. Drawing on a lifetime of contemplation, she offers an unparalleled window into the text’s awe-inspiring, immediately relatable teachings and their inestimable value for our troubled world.

ガドルフは旅をしていた。歩き続けたが、いつになっても次の町は見えてこない。疲れきったガドルフを突然のはげしい雷雨が襲う。絶望的な気分になったガドルフの前に、不思議な誰かの気配が……。憔悴し、人生の嵐に心が折れそうになっても、人はきっと生き続けることができる。そんな小さな希望を示唆してくれる賢治の掌編。 【朗読者について】 夏目漱石「草枕」「それから」他長編作品を朗読するかたわら、大好きな宮沢賢治作品を読み続けている渡部龍朗。独自の視点で見つけた賢治作品をとりあげていきます。(C)アイ文庫 「ことのは出版オーディオブック作品一覧http://www.kotonoha.co.jpにて」

Conservationist Rachel Carson spent over six years documenting the effects on DDT, a synthetic organic compound used as an insecticide, on numerous communities. Her analysis revealed that such powerful, persistent chemical pesticides have been used without a full understanding of the extent of their potential harm to the whole biota, including the damage they've caused to wildlife, birds, bees, agricultural animals, domestic pets, and even humans. An instant best seller that was read by President Kennedy during the summer of 1962, this classic remains one of the best introductions to the complicated and controversial subject.

Essentially the start of Dazai's career, Schoolgirl gained notoriety for its ironic and inventive use of language. Now it illuminates the prevalent social structures of a lost time, as well as the struggle of the individual against them—a theme that occupied Dazai's life both personally and professionally. This new translation preserves the playful language of the original and offers the listener a new window into the mind of one of the greatest Japanese authors of the 20th century.

Twenty-year-old Violet Sorrengail was supposed to enter the Scribe Quadrant, living a quiet life among books and history. Now, the commanding general—also known as her tough-as-talons mother—has ordered Violet to join the hundreds of candidates striving to become the elite of Navarre: dragon riders. But when you’re smaller than everyone else and your body is brittle, death is only a heartbeat away...because dragons don’t bond to “fragile” humans. They incinerate them.

From Brandon Sanderson, the number one New York Times best-selling author of the Reckoners series, Words of Radiance, and the internationally best-selling Mistborn series, comes the first book in an epic new series about a girl who dreams of becoming a pilot in a dangerous world at war for humanity's future.

Rudeus Greyrat has finally emerged victorious from the showdown at Biheiril Kingdom. With his hard-fought battle over, he can finally rest easy and put his adventuring days behind him. Yeah right! The epic fight may be done, but the story of the Jobless Reincarnation cast is far from over.

From acclaimed author Ursula K. Le Guin, and with an introduction by Karen Joy Fowler, a collection of thoughts - always adroit, often acerbic - on aging, belief, the state of literature, and the state of the nation. Ursula K. Le Guin has taken listeners to imaginary worlds for decades. Now she's in the last great frontier of life, old age, and exploring new literary territory: the blog, a forum where her voice - sharp, witty, as compassionate as it is critical - shines. No Time to Spare collects the best of Ursula's blog, presenting perfectly crystallized dispatches on what matters.

On the world called Hyperion, beyond the law of the Hegemony of Man, there waits the creature called the Shrike. There are those who worship it. There are those who fear it. And there are those who have vowed to destroy it. In the Valley of the Time Tombs, where huge, brooding structures move backward through time, the Shrike waits for them all.

Here are 22 charming Japanese Fairy Tales, translated by Yei Theodora Ozaki, including "My Lord Bag of Rice", "The Tongue-Cut Sparrow", "The Story of Urashima Taro, the Fisher Lad", "The Farmer and the Badger", "The Shinansha, or the South Pointing Carriage", "The Adventures of Kintaro, the Golden Boy", "The Story of Princess Hase", "The Story of the Man Who Did Not Wish to Die", "The Bamboo-Cutter and the Moonchild", "The Mirror of Matsuyama", and more.

After the loss of her mother and her own battle with breast cancer, Joanna Teale returns to her graduate research on nesting birds in rural Illinois, determined to prove that her recent hardships have not broken her. She throws herself into her work from dusk to dawn, until her solitary routine is disrupted by the appearance of a mysterious child who shows up at her cabin barefoot and covered in bruises. The girl calls herself Ursa, and she claims to have been sent from the stars to witness five miracles.

A mysterious convergence of natural disasters threatens to destroy life as we know it, and people across the United States are going missing. With no one left to investigate, Special Agent Kendra Baker takes the case, trying to solve the disappearances before she’s out of time. Among those abducted is Valeria Miller, the daughter of ex-Marine Corporal Andrew Miller, and he’ll stop at nothing to find her. With the help of an unstable conspiracy theorist, they find themselves on the trail of a reclusive billionaire who just might have all the answers.

When Kazuya Souma is unexpectedly transported to another world, he knows the people expect a hero. But Souma's idea of heroism is more practical than most—he wants to rebuild the flagging economy of the new land he's found himself in! Betrothed to the princess and abruptly planted on the throne, this realist hero must gather talented people to help him get the country back on its feet—not through war, or adventure, but with administrative reform!

Leo Graf was just your average highly efficient engineer: mind your own business, fix what's wrong, and move on to the next job. But all that changed on his assignment to the Cay Habitat, where a group of humanoids had been secretly, commercially bioengineered for working in free fall. Could he just stand there and allow the exploitation of hundreds of helpless children merely to enhance the bottom line of a heartless mega-corporation?

All Systems Red is the tense first science fiction adventure novella in Martha Wells' series The Murderbot Diaries. For fans of Westworld, Ex Machina, Ann Leckie's Imperial Raadch series, or Iain M. Banks' Culture novels. The main character is a deadly security droid that has bucked its restrictive programming and is balanced between contemplative self-discovery and an idle instinct to kill all humans.

A man. His ex-girlfriend's cat. A sadistic game show unlike anything in the universe: a dungeon crawl where survival depends on killing your prey in the most entertaining way possible. In a flash, every human-erected construction on Earth - from Buckingham Palace to the tiniest of sheds - collapses in a heap, sinking into the ground. The buildings and all the people inside have all been atomized and transformed into the dungeon: an 18-level labyrinth filled with traps, monsters, and loot.

I never believed in the whole “light at the end of the tunnel” folly where people, after having a near-death experience, would startle awake in a cold sweat exclaiming, “I saw the light!” But there I was, in this so-called “tunnel” facing a glaring light, when the last thing I remembered was sleeping in my room - the royal bed-chamber, as others called it. Had I died? If so, how? King Grey once benefited from unrivaled strength, wealth, and prestige in a world governed by martial ability but now finds himself reborn in a society dominated by magic.

This is a tale of sorrow, a tale of survival, a tale of one man's search for meaning in his universe, and how that search, and the indomitable will that drove it, gave birth to a legend.

A certain college girl who's loved books ever since she was a little girl dies in an accident and is reborn in another world she knows nothing about. She is now Myne, the sickly five-year-old daughter of a poor soldier. To make things worse, the world she's been reborn in has a very low literacy rate and books mostly don't exist. She'd have to pay an enormous amount of money to buy one.