There’s a bar at the crossroads on the way out of town. Or the way in, depending on whether you’re coming or going. Marcie and her husband have run it for years. After thirty years of marriage, there aren’t many secrets left between them. Couples often say that, don’t they? But it’s not always true.

Arlene appeared in the bar one day, not long before Franky Albertino came back to town, hoping that she’d find a man called Jack. Franky was hoping that people might have forgotten the mess he’d left behind him the first time around. Franky’s problem had always been women. Women and money. What Arlene’s problem is isn’t clear. It’s obvious she has a history, but who doesn’t?

As Arlene gets closer to finding Jack – her father? her lover? – the bar becomes the scene of a great unravelling; secrets buried a lifetime ago are dragged into the light. In Things We Nearly Knew, Jim Powell invites us to consider how much we know about the people we love and asks, finally: would you want to know the truth?

Every church has a unique culture that serves as the soil where its ministry occurs. A church's culture is the somewhat nebulous and complex blend of norms, beliefs, attitudes, traditions, and practices that define the congregation. The culture establishes the environment that often predetermines the effectiveness or ineffectiveness of God's Word within that body of believers. It influences a congregation's potential impact more than techniques, programs, or pragmatic changes.

Dirt Matters explains and illustrates the importance of church culture, connecting it to a simple analogy that anyone can understand. It also shares how it's possible to cultivate and nurture a healthier church environment that can put you and your congregation in a better position to bear fruit for God's glory.

http: //www.youtube.com/watch?v=BXPTuQjrIR0

'With his gallows humour and observational wit, Jim Powell gives us a vivid portrait of a man in meltdown.' Daily Mail When I was small, my mother showed me how to grow a carrot from a carrot. She filled a jam jar with water, cut the top off a carrot, ran a cocktail stick horizontally through the stub and suspended it over the jar, just touching the water. In time, roots sprouted, and when they were long enough and strong enough, the plant was translated to the garden and new carrots grew. This was one of the many exciting ways in which I was prepared for adult life. This is Matthew Oxenhay at sixty: a stranger to his wife, an embarrassment to his children, and failed former contender for the top job at his City firm. Seizing on his birthday party as an opportunity to deliver some rather crushing home truths to his assembled loved ones, it seems as though Matthew might have hit rock bottom. The truth, however, is that he has some way to go yet . . . With forensic precision and mordant wit, Matthew unpicks the threads that bind him: a comfortable home in the suburbs, a career spent trading futures and a life that bears little resemblance to the one he imagined for himself at twenty. When he unexpectedly bumps into Anna (the one who got away), the stage is set for an epic unravelling. Darkly funny, Trading Futures forces us to confront how change, like death, is an inevitable fact of life: feared by most, it can transform or overwhelm us. This is a brilliantly observed novel, for fans of works such as John Lanchester's Mr Phillips and On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan. It also featured as Radio 4's Book at Bedtime.

Today, thousands of years after her birth, in lands remote from her native island of Lesbos and in languages that did not exist when she wrote her poetry in Aeolic Greek, Sappho remains an important name among lovers of poetry and poets alike. Celebrated throughout antiquity as the supreme Greek poet of love and of the personal lyric, noted especially for her limpid fusion of formal poise, lucid insight, and incandescent passion, today her poetry is also prized for its uniquely vivid participation in a living paganism. Collected in an edition of nine scrolls by scholars in the second century BC, Sappho's poetry largely disappeared when the Fourth Crusade sacked Constantinople in 1204. All that remained was one poem and a handful of quoted passages . A century ago papyrus fragments recovered in Egypt added a half dozen important texts to Sappho's surviving works. In 2004 a new complete poem was deciphered and published. By far the most significant discovery in a hundred years, it offers a new and tellingly different example of Sappho's poetic art and reveals another side of the poet, thinking about aging and about the transmission of culture from one generation to the next. Jim Powell's translations represent a unique combination of poetic mastery in English verse and a deep schlolarly engagement with Sappho's ancient Greek. They are incomparably faithful to the literal sense of the Greek poems and, simultaneously, to their forms, preserving the original meters and stanzas while exactly replicating the dramatic action of their sequences of disclosure and the passionate momentum of their sentences. Powell's translations have often been anthologized and selected for use in textbooks, winning recognition among discerning readers as by far the best versions in English.

Derrida is one of those annoying geniuses you can take a class on, read half-a-dozen books by and still have no idea what he's talking about. Derrida's 'writing' is definitely confusing (it's like he's pulling the rug out from under the rug that he pulled out from under philosophy). But beneath the confusion, like the heartbeat of a bird in your hand, you can feel Derrida's electric genius. It draws you to it; you want to understand it...but it's so confusing. Jim Powell's Derrida For Beginners is the clearest explanation of Derrida and deconstruction presently available in our solar system. Powell guides us through blindingly obscure texts like Grammatology (Derrida's deconstruction of Saussure, Levi Strauss, Roussseau), "Differance" (his essay on language and life), Dissemination (his dismantling of Plato, his rap on Mallarme), along with his other masterpieces.

If you are like most people, you're not sure what Postmodernism is. And if this were like most books on the subject, it probably wouldn't tell you. Besides what a few grumpy critics claim, Postmodernism is not a bunch of meaningless intellectual mind games. On the contrary, it is a reaction to the most profound spiritual and philosophical crises of our time-the failure of the Enlightenment. Jim Powell takes the position that Postmodernism is a series of "maps" that help people find their way through a changing world. "Postmodernism For Beginners "features the thoughts of Foucault on power and knowledge, Jameson on mapping the postmodern, Baudrillard on the media, Harvey on time-space compression, Derrida on deconstruction and Deleuze and Guattari on rhizomes. The book also discusses postmodern artifacts such as Madonna, cyberpunk sci-fi, Buddhist ecology and teledildonics.

Today, thousands of years after her birth, in lands remote from her native island of Lesbos and in languages that did not exist when she wrote her poetry in Aeolic Greek, Sappho remains an important name among lovers of poetry and poets alike, . Celebrated throughout antiquity as the supreme Greek poet of love and of the personal lyric, noted especially for her limpid fusion of formal poise, lucid insight, and incandescent passion, today her poetry is also prized for its uniquely vivid participation in a living paganism. Collected in an edition of nine scrolls by scholars in the second century BC, Sappho's poetry largely disappeared when the Fourth Crusade sacked Constantinople in 1204. All that remained was one poem and a handful of quoted passages . A century ago papyrus fragments recovered in Egypt added a half dozen important texts to Sappho's surviving works. In 2004 a new complete poem was deciphered and published. By far the most significant discovery in a hundred years, it offers a new and tellingly different example of Sappho's poetic art and reveals another side of the poet, thinking about aging and about the transmission of culture from one generation to the next. Jim Powell's translations represent a unique combination of poetic mastery in English verse and a deep schlolarly engagement with Sappho's ancient Greek. They are incomparably faithful to the literal sense of the Greek poems and, simultaneously, to their forms, preserving the original meters and stanzas while exactly replicating the dramatic action of their sequences of disclosure and the passionate momentum of their sentences. Powell's translations have often been anthologized and selected for use in textbooks, winning recognition among discerning readers as by far the best versions in English.

This sophisticated first collection by Jim Powell synthesizes personal and world history to produce a compelling vision of the past, through verse letters to friends and relatives, translations of Horace, Propertius, Sappho, and others, and allusions to ancient figures of history and mythology. I find it difficult to overpraise the ease of this writing, which in one act combines succinct physical presentation and explanation of it. . . . It is perhaps here that Jim Powell, not yet forty, most shows his superiority to many of his contemporaries and seniors. He not only understands the way in which opposites are necessary to one another, he achieves his knowledge in the poem, and so we grasp it as we read. . . . he has tapped a subject matter that is endless and important, and by the thoroughgoingness and the subtlety of his exploration shows he has the power to do almost anything.--Thom Gunn, Shelf Life His title burns away everywhere in the volume, in the fevers of eros, divination, memory, destruction, and grief. . . . Page for page, there is more sheer fine, clear, yet syntactically subtle and metaphorically gorgeous writing in Powell than I have seen in some time.--Mary Kinzie, Poetry Jim Powell's poems, like those of Thomas Hardy, are haunted forms, full of ghosts and mocking gods, shadows and foreshadowings. But Powell is a Hardy whose poems we've never read, a Hardy with his hand in the blaze, not stirring the ash in a cold and wind-torn grate.--Jennifer Clarvoe, The Threepenny Review

"The Sapphic impression of emotion poured out in unpremeditated speech is the product of sophisticated art. Such poetry confronts the translator with a formidable challenge.... Jim Powell is fully aware of the dangers, and speaks of the 'fluidity, ease, grace, and melodic variety' of Sappho's measures. Powell has tried to reproduce the effect. The resulting book is a brilliant success. Powell has shored her fragments against [Sappho's] ruins to give us a garland in which the flowers, though tattered, have not faded."-Bernard Knox, The New Republic "Graceful, fluent, lucid while respectful of mystery: Jim Powell's unsurpassed embodiment of Sappho in English has all the conviction of art."-Robert Pinsky This new edition of The Poetry of Sappho translates all the surviving texts of Sappho that make consecutive poetic sense, including the newly discovered "Brothers Ode," "Cypris fragment," and other papyrus texts published in 2014. The translation is particularly intent on bringing over into English Sappho's formal mastery along with her sense. It includes summary discussions of Sappho's biography and the history of her texts, an essay on the formal character of her work and its tradition, and notes on the poems.

The spiritual rewards and intellectual challenges of Eastern philosophy are revealed in this visually stunning book, illustrated by Joe Lee and with 19th-century engravings. Eastern philosophy is not only an intellectual pursuit, but one that involves one's entire being. Much of it is so deeply entwined with the non-intellectual art of meditation, that the two are impossible to separate. In this survey of the major philosophies of India, China, Tibet and Japan, Jim Powell draws upon his knowledge of Sanskrit and Chinese, as well as decades of meditation. Whether tackling Buddha, Confucius, Lao Tzu, Dogen, the Dalai Lama or Patanjal-Powell's insights are deeply illuminating. All the major philosophies of India, China, Tibet and Japan are explained and everyone, from beginner to expert, will find "Eastern Philosophy For Beginners" an insightful overview.

Read Jim Powell's blogs and other content on the Penguin Community.

"The Breaking of Eggs" is the story of the curmudgeonly Feliks Zhokovski, Polish by birth, Communist at heart, who at age 61 finds that just about everything he has based his life on is crumbling. Separated from him family as a child when the Nazis invaded Poland, Feliks is currently living in Paris and his life's work is a travel guide to the old Eastern bloc. But unfortunately for Feliks, it's 1991: the Berlin Wall has fallen, Communism has collapsed, East Germany isn't the economic miracle he wants it to be, and he's forced to confront the fact that his travel-writing days are numbered. His guide was a flourishing business, but the old pro-Communist descriptions won't do, for Western visitors will now be able to see for themselves. So he makes the (extremely difficult) decision to sell his guide to a big, capitalist American publisher. This sets in motion a chain of events that will reunite him with a brother living in Ohio that he hasn't seen in fifty years, reveal the truth about the mother he thought abandoned him and offer him a second chance with a long-lost love.

Equal parts hilarious and moving, "The Breaking of Eggs" is the story of a man who closed himself off from everyone and everything years ago and now awakens to discover the world has changed dramatically and he must change with it. "The Breaking of Eggs" also has the added bonus of being a crash course in 20th century European history, subtly told as a backdrop to Feliks' riveting personal story. Imagine "Everything is Illuminated" meets "The Elegance of the Hedgehog," then forget all the publishing cliches and discover this incredible new voice.

How much do we know about the people we love? And would you want to know the truth?

'An engrossing read' Sunday Times

There’s a bar at the crossroads on the way out of town. Or the way in, depending on whether you’re coming or going. Marcie and her husband have run it for years. After thirty years of marriage, there aren’t many secrets left between them. Couples often say that, don’t they? But it’s not always true.

Arlene appeared in the bar one day, hoping that she’d find a man called Jack. Franky came back to town soon after, hoping that people might have forgotten the mess he’d left behind him the first time around. Franky’s problem had always been women. Women and money. What Arlene’s problem is isn’t clear. It’s obvious she has a history, but who doesn’t?

As Arlene gets closer to finding Jack – her father? her lover? – the bar becomes the scene of a great unravelling. In Jim Powell's Things We Nearly Knew, secrets buried a lifetime ago are dragged into the light.

Read Jim Powell's blogs and other content on the Penguin Community.

"The Breaking of Eggs" is the story of the curmudgeonly Feliks Zhokovski, Polish by birth, Communist at heart, who at age 61 finds that just about everything he has based his life on is crumbling. Separated from him family as a child when the Nazis invaded Poland, Feliks is currently living in Paris and his life's work is a travel guide to the old Eastern bloc. But unfortunately for Feliks, it's 1991: the Berlin Wall has fallen, Communism has collapsed, East Germany isn't the economic miracle he wants it to be, and he's forced to confront the fact that his travel-writing days are numbered. His guide was a flourishing business, but the old pro-Communist descriptions won't do, for Western visitors will now be able to see for themselves. So he makes the (extremely difficult) decision to sell his guide to a big, capitalist American publisher. This sets in motion a chain of events that will reunite him with a brother living in Ohio that he hasn't seen in fifty years, reveal the truth about the mother he thought abandoned him and offer him a second chance with a long-lost love.

Equal parts hilarious and moving, "The Breaking of Eggs" is the story of a man who closed himself off from everyone and everything years ago and now awakens to discover the world has changed dramatically and he must change with it. "The Breaking of Eggs" also has the added bonus of being a crash course in 20th century European history, subtly told as a backdrop to Feliks' riveting personal story. Imagine "Everything is Illuminated" meets "The Elegance of the Hedgehog," then forget all the publishing cliches and discover this incredible new voice.