Forerunner

“I do not think the East has spoken with so beautiful a voice since the Gitanjali of Rabindranath Tagore ...” – G. W. Russell

Predicated upon the towers of collapse, while T.S. Eliot, the representative modernist, in order to re-construct his culture out of the debris of its imperialist past, concluded his Waste Land (1922) by looking Eastward, into the all-pervading “shantih” of the Brihadaranyaka Upanishad, Kahlil Gibran, a Lebanese American, authored The Prophet (1923) to deconstruct such enterprise and retrieve a culture that was swirling in-between Darwinian metaphors and Nietzschean Nihilism. He who was exterior to the ‘omnipotent definitions’ of the West, saw in “Beauty” the “eternity gazing at itself in a mirror.” So, to him, “you are eternity and you are the mirror.” This book is a reading of Kahlil Gibran's life and works: his life as a text and his works as the terrains of a never-ending journey. It opens up those fissures and ruptures that make Gibran and his writings relevant vis-á-vis the socio-political, cultural and religious urgencies that the world is grappling with today. Often misconstrued as a mystic or an Oriental Wise Man, Gibran dwells in an amorphous placeless-ness within the academic space and outside of it. “Forerunner” in its own way, this book, by unfolding the process of 'reading' as a mode of travelling, subverts such stereotypes and tries to reveal to the readers that 'outlandish' lonely intellectual who, through his works, fashioned a self and a land ‘out of place’, rather in a ‘non-place’, for dismantling and up-setting monolithic cultures and their decadent notions.

Two Andre Norton novels in her Forerunner series featuring young alien/human hybrid Simsa, collected for the first time in one volume. A heroic young woman seeks her origins as she comes of age on worlds of peril and alien mystery. Forerunner: On the ancient planet Kuxortal, young Simsa grows up among the ancient ruins of a fallen galactic civilization¾the Forerunners. But Simsa has always been different, with iridescent blue-black skin and a telepathic bond with her bat-like zorsal. When her mentor dies, her future looks bleak¾until Thom, a star ranger, arrives and leads Simsa on a new path that takes both through danger to the ultimate revelation, which will change her life, and perhaps galactic civilization itself, forever. Forerunner: The Second Venture: Simsa has been captured by starfaring humans intent on discovering the secrets of the Forerunners. With the aid of her pet zorsal, Simsa escapes her captors and crash lands on another world touched by ancient Forerunner civilization. Now Simsa must battle the spirit within her that seeks to transform her into something utterly inhuman. But the ancient Forerunners, however scientifically advanced, have not reckoned with the courage of this young woman who is determined to keep her freedom and write her own destiny among the stars. At the publisher's request, this title is sold without DRM (Digital Rights Management).

"The Romance of Leonardo da Vinci, the Forerunner" is a book by Dmitry Sergeyevich Merezhkovsky that focuses on the life of Leonardo da Vinci, an Italian painter, draftsman, sculptor, architect, and engineer whose skill and intelligence are to be revered and embraced. This book walks us through the journey of this great man through Milan, Florence, and Rome.

The second novel of the Forerunner Saga trilogy by science fiction legend Greg Bear—set in the Halo universe and based on the New York Times bestselling video game series! One hundred thousand years ago. In the wake of the apparent self-destruction of the alien Forerunner empire, two humans—Chakas and Riser—are like flotsam washed up on very strange shores indeed. Captured by the Forerunner known as the Master Builder and then misplaced during a furious battle in space, Chakas and Riser now find themselves on an inverted world, where horizons rise into the sky and humans of all kinds are trapped in a perilous cycle of horror and neglect. They have become both research animals and strategic pawns in a cosmic game whose madness knows no end—a game of ancient vengeance between the powers who seeded the galaxy with life, and the Forerunners who expect to inherit their sacred Mantle of Responsibility to all living things. In the company of a young girl and an old man, Chakas begins an epic journey across a lost and damaged Halo ringworld in search of a way home, an explanation for the warrior spirits rising up within, and the reason for the Forerunner Librarian’s tampering with human destiny. Their travels will take them into the domain of a powerful and monstrous intelligence—known as “the Captive” by Forerunners, and “the Primordial” by ancient human warriors, this being may not only control the fate of Chakas, Riser, and the rest of humanity, but of all sentient life across the galaxy…

Gibran Khalil Gibran (1883 – 1931) was a Lebanese-American poet, writer, and artist best known as the author of “The Prophet” (1923), which is one of the best-selling books of all time. Gibran's work covers such themes as justice, religion, science, free will, love, happiness, the soul, the body, and death. He is widely considered to have been one of the most important figures in Arabic poetry and literature during the first half of the twentieth century. First published three years before “The Prophet” in 1920, “The Forerunner” is a collection of 24 tales that contain much that is present in his masterpiece and for which he is famous: beautiful prose writing full of wisdom, insight, and deep humanity. Contents include: “God’s Fool”, “Love”, “The King-Hermit”, “The Lion’s Daughter”, “Tyranny”, “The Saint”, “The Plutocrat”, “The Greater Self”, “War and the Small Nations”, “Critics”, “Poets”, “The Weather-cock”, “The King of Aradus”, “Out of My Deeper Heart”, etc. Other notable works by this author include: “Music” (1905), “Rebellious Spirits” (1908), and “Broken Wings” (1912). Many vintage books such as this are becoming increasingly scarce and expensive. We are republishing this volume now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition complete with a specially-commissioned new biography of the author.

Oberman's magisterial work transfers discussion of late medieval Christian thought from the private studies of the specialist to more general use and understanding, and explains the significance of the ideas of the time. Although this 'Late Medieval Reader' does not exhaust the riches of the period between the High Middle Ages and the Reformation era, it introduces the reader to aspects of such major themes as conciliarism, curialism, mysticism, scholasticism, the spirituality of the Devotio Moderna, and the impact of Renaissance humanism.The theme of the Forerunners has grown out of the consideration that the justified rejection of a confessional reading of the past has been succeeded by an equally unhistorical disjunction of the Medieval and Reformation periods. Without a grasp of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, the medieval basis of modern thought is incomplete, since Reformation and Counter Reformation seem to arise 'out of the blue'.