Literary Collections

Kathleen Norris’s masterpiece: a personal and moving memoir that resurrects the ancient term acedia, or soul-weariness, and brilliantly explores its relevancy to the modern individual and culture. Kathleen Norris had written several much loved books, yet she couldn’t drag herself out of bed in the morning, couldn’t summon the energy for daily tasks. Even as she struggled, Norris recognized her familiar battle with acedia. She had discovered the word in an early Church text when she was in her thirties. Having endured times of deep soul-weariness since she was a teenager, she immediately recognized that this passage described her affliction: sinking into a state of being unable to care. Fascinated by this “noonday demon,” so familiar to those in the early and medieval Church, Norris read intensively and knew she must restore this forgotten but utterly relevant and important concept to the modern world’s vernacular. Like Norris’s bestselling The Cloister Walk, Acedia & me is part memoir and part meditation. As in her bestselling Amazing Grace, here Norris explicates and demystifies a spiritual concept, exploring acedia through the geography of her life as a writer; her marriage and the challenges of commitment in the midst of grave illness; and her keen interest in the monastic tradition. Unlike her earlier books, this one features a poignant narrative throughout of Norris’s and her husband’s bouts with acedia and its clinical cousin, depression. Moreover, her analysis of acedia reveals its burden not just on individuals but on whole societies— and that the “restless boredom, frantic escapism, commitment phobia, and enervating despair that we struggle with today are the ancient demon of acedia in modern dress.”. An examination of acedia in the light of theology, psychology, monastic spirituality, the healing powers of religious practice, and Norris’s own experience, Acedia & me is both intimate and histo more...

Price: $25.95

"Addresses, Messages, and Replies" by Thomas Jefferson is a classic work of literature that can be enjoyed by all. Download "Addresses, Messages, and Replies" and enjoy another quality Digireads.com publication. more...

Price: $9.99

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, by Mark Twain, is a popular 1876 novel about a young boy growing up in the Antebellum South on the Mississippi River in the fictional town of St. Petersburg, Missouri. of Huckleberry Finn (1884) (often shortened to Huck Finn) by Mark Twain is commonly accounted as one of the first Great American Novels. It is also one of the first major American novels ever written using Local Color Regionalism, or vernacular, told in the first person by the eponymous Huckleberry "Huck" Finn, best friend of Tom Sawyer and hero of three other Mark Twain books. — Excerpted from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. Intuitive navigation. Illustrations by True Williams and E. W. Kemble. Text annotation and mark-up. . more...

Price: $3.99

Aesop was an Ancient Greek story-teller and slave, famed and cherished for his short fables that often involve personified animals. In the renowned collection of works that is Aesop's Fables , he weaves moral education and entertainment together into tales that have been enjoyed by many, many generations. A lot of the stories in Aesop's Fables, such as The Fox and the Grapes (giving us the term "sour grapes"), The Tortoise and the Hare ... more...

Price: $3.99

After the Fire is the story of the poet Paul Zimmer’s journey from his boyhood in Canton, Ohio, and his days as a soldier during atomic tests in the Nevada desert, to his many years as a writer and publisher, and the rural tranquility of his present life. Zimmer juxtaposes timeless rustic subjects with flashbacks to key moments: his first and only boxing match, his return to the France of his ancestors, his painful departure from the publishing world after forty years. These stories are full of humor and pathos, but the real center of the book is the abiding beauty of the driftless hills, the silence and peace that is the source of and reward for Zimmer’s hard-won wisdom. more...

Price: $23.00