The Land Of Silence

2017 INSPY Award winner, general fiction category Before Christ called her daughter . . . Before she stole healing by touching the hem of his garment . . . Elianna is a young girl crushed by guilt. After her only brother is killed while in her care, Elianna tries to earn forgiveness by working for her father’s textile trade and caring for her family. When another tragedy places Elianna in sole charge of the business, her talent for design brings enormous success, but never the absolution she longs for. As her world unravels, she breaks off her betrothal to the only man she will ever love. Then illness strikes, isolating Elianna from everyone, stripping everything she has left. No physician can cure her. No end is in sight. Until she hears whispers of a man whose mere touch can heal. After so many years of suffering and disappointment, is it possible that one man could redeem the wounds of body . . . and soul?

The story of Jursafu, a Bolivian journalist caught up in a revolutionary struggle. The novel traces his development from simple country boy to intellectual, but one who still retains the common touch.

This masterful translation of a recent Bolivian novel, En el pais del silencio, transports us to a mysterious, silent, and unfamiliar land where astonishing truths are placed within our grasp. Like a parabola, this amazing story begins and ends in the same place on the same day in the life of a single persona with three interior entities: Jursafú, The Other, and The Dead Man. By portraying them as separate, Urzagasti accentuates their interrelatedness, for one character cannot grow without the others, nor can any one of them move toward an ultimate goal without the experience and knowledge of the other two. The author’s mature and thoroughly Bolivian style is marked by a synthesis of poetic and novelistic techniques which blend perfectly the indigenous and European voices of his ancestral home.

In ancient Greece, the spoken word connoted power, whether in the free speech accorded to citizens or in the voice of the poet, whose song was thought to know no earthly bounds. But how did silence fit into the mental framework of a society that valued speech so highly? Here Silvia Montiglio provides the first comprehensive investigation into silence as a distinctive and meaningful phenomenon in archaic and classical Greece. Arguing that the notion of silence is not a universal given but is rather situated in a complex network of associations and values, Montiglio seeks to establish general principles for understanding silence through analyses of cultural practices, including religion, literature, and law. Unlike the silence of a Christian before an ineffable God, which signifies the uselessness of words, silence in Greek religion paradoxically expresses the power of logos--for example, during prayer and sacrifice, it serves as a shield against words that could offend the gods. Montiglio goes on to explore silence in the world of the epic hero, where words are equated with action and their absence signals paralysis or tension in power relationships. Her other examples include oratory, a practice in which citizens must balance their words with silence in very complex ways in order to show that they do not abuse their right to speak. Inquiries into lyric poetry, drama, medical writings, and historiography round out this unprecedented study, revealing silence as a force in its own right.

Lilly and Jimmy were traveling through the woods late at night to escape from their hometown. They run into a bloodthirsty fiend, who attacks them within a moment’s notice. They are scattered, running wild into the night, as Jimmy gets dangerously wounded. They then get separated as Lilly’s left alone, where she too gets caught by the beast. As her human life ends, a new one starts—she becomes something else as she awakens in a new form. She runs wild as she is set free from her worries, ready to slaughter all who did her wrong in her town.

Majestic mountains, snow-capped peaks, and beyond a pass a mysterious master is said to exist. The narrator goes to the Himalayas searching for one of those legendary masters who lives an austere life in a cave and whose spirit encompasses countless ages and myriad worlds. The seeker is guided in perceptible and often imperceptible ways until he ultimately enters the land of silence. All of the sudden, in one single moment, my entire world was reduced to a pile of ashes. A mysterious power compelled me to penetrate still deeper into hidden, unknown worlds. During his process of inner revolution, the author experiences a profound transformation. Between day and dream, the truth is revealed to him in the pure light of the Universal. The reader is taken in a very unconventional manner through vast mountainous realms towards an encounter with extraordinarily cultivated high masters. Mario Mantese is the author of over twenty works of spiritual literature. Among them are classics such as In the Heart of the World and Wisdom for Everyone. Thousands of people come to his gatherings from all over the world. He refers to himself as the empty teacher. His home is the great silence.

At the heart of Silence in the Land of Gold is an intrigue over a fortune lost in an air crash involving the Burmese military and the Kachin Independence Army. George Wilford is a foreign lawyer who must solve the mystery of the crash to save his own life and that of the woman with whom he falls in love.