Mario, a 35-year-old gay actor, knows that he doesn't have long to live. For five years, he has been surviving himself. For five years, the virus has schooled him in fear. Mario lies in the prison of his room and gives himself failing grades for his life-an F for his lack of success, and F for his pathological need for intimacy, and F for his neurotic lack of independence. Locked within him is resentment toward his mother, the lifelong yearning for a father, and a pimply-faced kid who cowers and refuses to grow up. Mario stumbles through the wilderness of men and waits for the call. He's learned his les

Mario Wirz is wrestling with a problem of major proportions--the constant threat of death hanging over his shoulder. Death is his muse. It is a shadow that hangs over all of us, but it is the fate of some to feel it more keenly, to live with it minute-by-minute, hour-by-hour, and day-by-day. These poems hone in relentlessly on this topic, until one is inexorably affected by their stark, existential reality. Wirz's poems have been published in French, Italian, Ukrainian, Polish, Finnish, Greek, Hungarian, and Chinese, but it took ten years for his first novel to be published in English, and now the publication of this companion volume of poems is made possible only by recent changes in the publishing world--the rise of e-books and desktop publishing-that have made it far easier and more cost--effective to publish literature in a minor key. But this volume, though small, is not minor. It is poetry that speaks to all of us.

Hans Apel (1895-1989) was a German economist and younger brother of the musicologist Willi Apel. He studied at the University of Berlin and rose to become managing director of a Berlin-based company. In 1935 he left Germany and finally immigrated to the United States in 1937. He earned a Ph.D. from Boston University in 1945. From 1950 until his retirement in 1961, he was chairman of the Department of Economics at the University of Bridgeport, Connecticut. He later returned to Germany traveled extensively in Eastern Europe in pursuit of his research objectives during a time when travel restrictions on Westerners were strictly enforced. Born and raised as a Jew in a highly anti-Semitic environment, he steadfastly refused to be affected by the hostility of the world around him. From early on, he rebelled against authority and chose to disregard accepted rules of propriety. He was a man of vision--an iconoclast who routinely took unpopular positions that went against the conventional thinking of his time. The life of rebellion that he lived was, in a sense, a truly spiritual life, because he rejected all attempts by others to define him. This narrative, compiled from a series of taped interviews with his grandson in 1977, offers a compelling vision of the way that one can live a life of uncompromising principle and authenticity.

Toward the end of a distinguished scholarly career in the field of political science, Alfred G. Meyer wrote two books that were never published. The first was a biography of Friedrich Engels and the second was a memoir that looked back on his life and career. Both manuscripts were lively and entertaining, full of sharply drawn, humorous observations of the people he met during his life, and dominated by his intellectual curiosity. This volume merges the two manuscripts, by taking the chapters of his memoir that focused on his career as a political scientist and juxtaposing them with the Engels biography. The result is a radically new experiment in portraiture-an intellectual self-portrait of a scholar rendered by means of the picture he drew of his historical subject.

What is the true test of spirituality? Is it loyalty to a master, group, or teaching? Or is it having the courage to act on one's deepest convictions, even in the face of disapproval and sanction? This is the question that confronts Kip Morgan. Kip is a karma seeker-an individual committed to testing himself by means of his own choices. For such people, who are engaged in an experiment with unknown forces, there is no way to prove that they are fit to discover what they seek except by doing it. As a young man, Kip joins the League, one of the burgeoning new age spiritual groups of the late 1960s and early 1970s. He learns the fundamentals of its teachings, which involve cultivating inner experiences through contemplation, dreams, and out-of-body experiences. The high point of his experience comes with his initiation into the League's inner circle, a transcendent event that significantly alters his view of life. It doesn't take long, however, before he discovers how fragile this experience is, and how difficult it is to hold on to his new state of consciousness. Kip embarks on a quest that takes him beyond the confines of the League. Eventually, he comes to question the group's claim to exclusivity, and to see it as merely a portal to a universal spiritual path. As he becomes less reliant on the League and its members for support and guidance, he is torn between his personal vision of truth and his fear of spiritual failure. This puts him on a collision course with the League President, the group's ultimate spiritual authority. The Karma Seeker is a far-reaching guidebook to contemporary spirituality. It presents the reader with the essential paradigm of the modern spiritual path-its highs and lows, its rewards and pitfalls. It illustrates how individuals who embark on such a path are tested in the areas of their greatest deficiency in order to build up their spiritual strength, all so that they may eventually become active participants in their own destiny.

Know Thy Self was the Ancient Greek aphorism inscribed in the forecourt of the Temple of Apollo at Delphi. If this maxim deserves the importance ascribed to it over the centuries, then the Ancient Science of the Cards is surely of great potential significance, for it can vastly aid us in understanding ourselves, as well as our relations with others. Apart from our basic need for food, shelter, and sustenance, our most consuming preoccupation is our relations with our fellow human beings. We're concerned with how we can get along better with others, how we can tell which people are trustworthy, with whom we can form productive relationships or conduct business negotiations, and to whom we can entrust our health and finances. We're particularly interested in finding the perfect mate and other questions that hinge on our chemistry or compatibility with other people. The Ancient Science of the Cards can answer many of these questions at a glance, with just a few arithmetical calculations and a bit of interpretation. Stefan G. Meyer has intensively studied the methods of Robert Lee Camp and Iain McLaren-Owens, two of the foremost authorities on this metaphysical system, and has synthesized both of their approaches in order to come up with a method of understanding relationships that almost anyone can easily understand and practice. He offers a step-by-step approach to the basic system, as well as detailed methods, step-by-step instructions, and worksheets that can be printed out and used for personal practice.

"I saw a woman, back turned to me, shoulders covered by the masses of her own dark hair. Suddenly, she turned round, and I saw that her face was wet with tears. And when she looked up at me with my own eyes, I saw that her sorrow was my sorrow, that her face was my face, that I had caused her sorrow and that she had caused mine, that the sorrow of the world was our sorrow, that the face of the world was wet with our tears, and that our tears filled the oceans and rivers, and came down in rain, and watered the world with sorrow. "And the thing I regretted most was that I could not tell her of my sorrow. The wall stood between us, choking my words, rendering her gaze impenetrable, our bodies immobile. I walked away without speaking, as if silence could do justice to an ocean of feeling, as if cowardice could possibly be mistaken for strength, as if time would erase all memory, as if life were unreality, a fiction, a story that could easily be rewritten. And now I walk in the shadow of the wall, whose escarpment engulfs me like the towering cliffs of a canyon, and my own muteness cries out to me like a madman whose screams can be heard high above the wind, and my muteness mingles with the muteness of others, and my silence with theirs, and my screams with theirs, and I feel myself drowning in the silence of those screams, and I know it as a silence that encircles and enfolds us all." - from The Empty Cup