The Essence of Reality

An essential look at the ways California’s Native nations are resisting colonialism today, from education reform to protests against environmental injustice and beyond.

Collecting over twenty-five essays written by more than twenty California Indian authors, Know We Are Here surveys many of the ways California’s Indigenous communities are resisting the legacies of genocide. Focusing on the particular histories, challenges, and dynamics of life in Native California—which are often very different from elsewhere in the United States—the book collects essays from writers across the state. It encompasses the perspectives of both elders and the rising generation, and the contributors include activists, academics, students, memoirists, and tribal leaders. The collection examines histories of resistance to colonialism in California, the reclaiming of cultures and languages, the connection of place and nature to wellness in tribal communities, efforts to overhaul the racist presentation of California Indians in classrooms and popular culture, and the meanings of solidarity in Native California. Unifying the book is an introduction by Terria Smith (Torres Martinez Desert Cahuilla Indians), editor of the renowned and long-running magazine News from Native California. This book is an indispensable resource for California Indian readers, educators of all levels in California, and students in Native studies courses nationally.

A collection of insightful and personal essays on the role of food in our lives

In an age of mass factory farming, processed and pre-packaged meals, and unprecedented food waste, how does one eat ethically?

Featuring a highly diverse ensemble of award-winning writers, chefs, farmers, activists, educators, and journalists, Good Eats invites readers to think about what it means to eat according to individual and collective values. These essays are not lectures about what you should eat, nor an advertisement for the latest diet. Instead, the contributors tell stories of real people—real bellies, real bodies—including the writers themselves, who seek to understand the experiences, cultures, histories, and systems that have shaped their eating and their ethics.

A wide array of themes, topics, and perspectives inform the selections within Good Eats, contributing to an enhanced understanding of how we eat as individuals and in groups. From factory farming and the exploitative labor practices surrounding chocolate production, to Indigenous foodways and home and community gardens, the topics featured in this collection describe the wider context of sustenance and ethical choices.

Good Eats will encourage you to become more mindful of what and how you eat—and to consider the larger systems and cultures that shape that eating. These essays turn mundane meals into remarkable symbols of how we live, encouraging each of us to find food that is both sustaining and sustainable.

Contributors include Ross Gay, DeLyssa Begay, Lynn Z. Bloom, Michael P. Branch, Nikky Finney, Shirley Geok-lin Lim, Barbara J. King, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Leah Penniman, Adrienne Su, Ira Sukrungruang, Tina Vasquez, Nicole Walker, Thérèse Nelson, Lisa Knopp, Jane Brox, Maureen Stanton, Taté Walker, and many others.

Life-affirming and lyrical writings for inspiration and meditation, from saints and sages of the Christian, Hindu, Sufi, Jewish, Native American, Buddhist, and Taoist traditions.

Eknath Easwaran taught meditation and spiritual living for nearly 40 years and drew deep, ongoing inspiration from the sacred literature of the world's traditions.

Read these 149 passages for daily inspiration, for the insights they give into other spiritual traditions, for the light they throw on how to live, for the sustenance they offer when we feel sad or tired, and for the deep transformation they can bring in Easwaran's spiritual practice of passage meditation.

Rich supporting material includes detailed background notes, suggestions for memorization and for studying the texts, and instruction in using these sacred writings in passage meditation.

A rich banquet at the cutting edge of the arts, rooted in California’s eclectic cultural gumbo, by one of America’s most gifted critics, who died young in 2019.

"A perfect journalistic valediction from one of LA’s finest commentators."—Richard Thompson

"Timberg, who loved Los Angeles and culture journalism with an intense passion, was among the essential chroniclers of the city […] Boom Times is both a celebration of a prodigious talent and a valediction for a lost soul." —Los Angeles Times

The late Scott Timberg championed artists earnestly and relentlessly, with empathy and persistence. He was a vocal and widely admired advocate for working artists, one of the first to sound the alarm on the escalating economic challenges that have faced creative workers in the twenty-first century. The twenty-six reflections in this book form a valuable window onto many cultural shifts that have upended the country’s creative traditions and expectations. They are, by turns, surprising, wide-ranging, passionate, and fun. Timberg’s perceptive and enthusiastic profiles on the arts extend to West Coast jazz and Gustavo Dudamel’s LA Philharmonic, the fiction of Ray Bradbury and John Rechy, the early films of Spike Jonze and Christopher Nolan, the comics of Los Bros Hernandez and Adrian Tomine, and many more musicians, novelists, filmmakers, architects, and impresarios. Timberg had a knack, as Ted Gioia writes in his introduction, for “finding the best in the cultural scene on the dream coast.” This is an indispensable volume that showcases the author’s endless curiosity, as well as his passion and love for California—especially that confounding and complex metropolis Los Angeles.

Long before the Romantics embraced nature, people in the West saw the human and nonhuman worlds as both intimately interdependent and violently antagonistic. With its peerless selection of ninety-eight original sources concerned with the natural world and humankind's place within it, The Marvels of the World offers a corrective to the still-prevalent tendency to dismiss premodern attitudes toward nature as simple or univocal.

Gathering together medical texts, herbals, and how-to books, as well as scientific, religious, philosophical, and poetic works dating from antiquity to the dawn of the Enlightenment, the anthology explores both mainstream and unconventional thinking about the natural world. Its seven parts focus on philosophy and science; plants; animals; weather and climate; ways of inhabiting the land; gardens and gardening; and European encounters with the wider world. Each section and each of the book's selections is prefaced with a helpful introduction by volume editor Rebecca Bushnell that weaves connections among these compelling pieces of the past. The early writers collected here wrote with extraordinary openness about ways of coexisting with the nonhuman forces that shaped them, Bushnell demonstrates, even as they sought to control and exploit their environment. Taken as a whole, The Marvels of the World reveals how many of these early writers cared as much about the natural world as we do today.

Timeless fables of loyalty and betrayal

Like Aesop’s Fables, Kalīlah and Dimnah is a collection designed not only for moral instruction, but also for the entertainment of readers. The stories, which originated in the Sanskrit Panchatantra and Mahabharata, were adapted, augmented, and translated into Arabic by the scholar and state official Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ in the second/eighth century. The stories are engaging, entertaining, and often funny, from “The Man Who Found a Treasure But Could Not Keep It,” to “The Raven Who Tried To Learn To Walk Like a Partridge” and “How the Wolf, the Raven, and the Jackal Destroyed the Camel.”

Kalīlah and Dimnah is a “mirror for princes,” a book meant to inculcate virtues and discernment in rulers and warn against flattery and deception. Many of the animals who populate the book represent ministers counseling kings, friends advising friends, or wives admonishing husbands. Throughout, Kalīlah and Dimnah offers insight into the moral lessons Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ wished to impart to rulers—and readers.

An English-only edition.