The Bliss Experiment

Presents advice on overcoming depression, anxiety, and stress and recommends a series of practices which foster a deeper spirituality and promote peace of mind and harmony.

Now a new series on Peacock with Rainn Wilson, THE GEOGRAPHY OF BLISS is part travel memoir, part humor, and part twisted self-help guide that takes the viewer across the globe to investigate not what happiness is, but WHERE it is. Are people in Switzerland happier because it is the most democratic country in the world? Do citizens of Qatar, awash in petrodollars, find joy in all that cash? Is the King of Bhutan a visionary for his initiative to calculate Gross National Happiness? Why is Asheville, North Carolina so damn happy? In a unique mix of travel, psychology, science and humor, Eric Weiner answers those questions and many others, offering travelers of all moods some interesting new ideas for sunnier destinations and dispositions.

The perfect novel for young readers who love baking and magic! Rosemary Bliss's family has a secret. It's the Bliss Cookery Booke—an ancient, leather-bound volume of enchanted recipes like Singing Gingersnaps. Rose and her siblings are supposed to keep the Cookery Booke locked away while their parents are out of town, but then a mysterious stranger shows up. "Aunt" Lily rides a motorcycle and also whips up exotic (but delicious) dishes for dinner. Soon boring, non-magical recipes feel like life before Aunt Lily—a lot less fun. So Rose and her siblings experiment with just a couple of recipes from the forbidden Cookery Booke. A few Love Muffins and Cookies of Truth couldn't cause too much trouble . . . could they? Kathryn Littlewood's culinary caper blends rich emotional flavor with truly enchanting wit, yielding one heaping portion of hilarious family adventure.

Although he is a dog, Bailey goes to school, where his canine abilities enliven an ordinary day.

Michael A. Singer, author of The Untethered Soul, tells the extraordinary story of what happened when, after a deep spiritual awakening, he decided to let go of his personal preferences and simply let life call the shots. As Singer takes you on this great experiment and journey into life's perfection, the events that transpire will both challenge your deepest assumptions about life and inspire you to look at your own life in a radically different way. Spirituality is meant to bring about harmony and peace. But the diversity of our philosophies, beliefs, concepts, and views about the soul often leads to confusion. To reconcile the noise that clouds spirituality, Michael Singer combines accounts of his own life journey to enlightenment - from his years as a hippie-loner to his success as a computer program engineer to his work in spiritual and humanitarian efforts - with lessons on how to put aside conflicting beliefs, let go of worries, and transform misdirected desires. Singer provides a road map to a new way of living not in the moment, but to exist in a state of perpetual happiness.

In lively, accessible prose, Victorians Undone fills the space where the body ought to be, proposing new ways of thinking and writing about flesh in the nineteenth century.

Genre-defying fiction that accelerates "cross-cultural dialogue" into a kaleidoscopic rush of sensory estrangements, fairy tales, and alien encounters. "There's really no difference between us and them, so we're told…." Based on the author's experiences of living as an American in Iran, Kristen Alvanson's XYZT is a wildly imaginative dramatization of the idea of a "dialogue of civilizations" and its potentially outlandish ramifications. As part of an advanced technological test program, volunteers are shuttled back and forth between the US and Iran, hidden from the watchful eyes of immigration police and state bureaucracies. Each is given a single opportunity to be received by a local host and to have a brief authentic experience of what it means to live as “them” before being transported back home. But far from heralding the bliss of mutual recognition, the experiment unleashes a series of displacements so disorienting that the fabric of reality begins to fray. Ordinary people become entangled in extraordinary situations, and everyday life bleeds into mythological encounters, alternate universes and dark psychedelic journeys in alien lands where the real and the imaginary are indistinguishable. A treasury of tales told from multiple perspectives and in a multiplicity of styles, XYZT is an audacious cross-genre experiment, a firsthand memoir of what it means to see what "they" see, and a science-fictional, nonstandard engagement with anthropology in which cross-cultural encounters take on all the unpredictable features of a contemporary fairy tale.

Fiction. A bond between three friends forms over a mutual fascination with an obscure Peruvian novella and is fractured by an accidental death. From the streets of Montreal's Plateau and Latin Quarter to the ruins of Machu Picchu, award-winning author Devon Code's INVOLUNTARY BLESS traces this tragic affinity with dark humour and linguistic verve. Over one hazy weekend in late August, an unnamed narrator visits his troubled friend James following a gap of many months. The two young men are set adrift in the city by way of James's memories, which flow out of him as lush set pieces--an affair, a stint volunteering at a children's hospital, a striptease show--assembling a picture of James's haunted life in the wake of their close friend's death. By turns comic, erotic, tender and harrowing, this freewheeling narrative sees Montreal's bohemians and biker gangs entwine with psychotropic shamanic practices in the mountains of Peru, in a tale of friendship and mortality as unpredictable as it is true to life. "A wry elegy for youth and a melancholy ode to Montreal. Almost as disquieting as it is entertaining, INVOLUNTARY BLISS is a literary derangement of the senses and an elegant addition to the current stream of coming-of-age fiction."--Mike Steeves "INVOLUNTARY BLISS is the right kind of coming-of-age-as-an-artist novel in that it's wry, dark, and mercifully self-aware. Even when he literally lets us admire his impressive scaffolding, Code remains a natural storyteller with a clear, urgent voice. This is a sophisticated and impressive debut."--Jonathan Bennett "How does one create urgency and profound emotional attachment in a novel about two characters conversing as they wander around Montreal? By writing one beautiful, brilliant sentence after another. By constructing an essential, inimitable spiral of narrative encoded, like DNA, with a particular life. Devon Code is up to the job: INVOLUNTARY BLISS is a marvel."--Alissa York