Simon Vance

As the world entered the long night of 2020, Philip Yancey turned to John Donne's Devotions, a nearly 400-year-old manuscript, for guidance. In it, he found a trustworthy companion for living through a global pandemic-or any other crisis. As Yancey says, "Nothing had prepared me for Donne's raw account of confrontations with God." By faithfully and poetically rendering Donne's 17th century prose into 21st century vernacular, Yancey opens up this...

C. S. Lewis had one of the great minds of the 20th century. Many know Lewis as an author of fiction and fantasy literature, including the Chronicles of Narnia and the Space Trilogy. Others know him for his books in apologetics, including Mere Christianity and The Problem of Pain. But few know him for his scholarly work as a professor of medieval and Renaissance literature. What shaped the mind of this great thinker? Jason Baxter argues that Lewis...

In this book, Stephen Cooper provides an overview of the greatest theologian of the early church: Augustine of Hippo. Augustine has had a towering influence in the history of Christianity and his Confessions have long been regarded as one of Christianity's classic texts. Cooper introduces the life and thought of Augustine through discussing the Confessions and shows how many of Augustine's human struggles are still with us today. He also examines...

Spurgeon's last thirty years, from the building of the Metropolitan Tabernacle to his death in 1892, saw long years of the full harvest of his youthful efforts. With a congregation of nearly 6,000 in the heart of London and a wider audience of perhaps a million to be addressed weekly through his printed sermon, Spurgeon not only sustained his productivity but even increased the quality of his work. But there is more to Spurgeon than the preacher:...

In The Question of God, renowned psychiatrist and educator Armand Nicholi presents a fascinating comparison of the beliefs of Sigmund Freud and C. S. Lewis. For all the variety of specific religious beliefs, there are fundamentally only two kinds of people: believers and nonbelievers. In the twentieth century, no spokesman was more prominent for nonbelief than Sigmund Freud, and no one argued for belief more successfully than C. S. Lewis. From pain...

This is a book about an almost universal anxiety that rarely gets mentioned directly: an anxiety about what others think of us, about whether we're judged a success or a failure. With the help of philosophers, artists, and writers, Alain de Botton examines the origins of status anxiety before revealing ingenious ways in which people have been able to overcome their worries in the search for happiness. The result is a book that isn't just highly entertaining...

With The Steel Remains, award-winning science fiction writer Richard K. Morgan turned his talents to sword and sorcery. The result: a genre-busting masterwork hailed as a milestone in contemporary epic fantasy. Now Morgan continues the riveting saga of Ringil Eskiath, Gil for short, a peerless warrior whose love for other men has made him an outcast and pariah. Only a select few have earned the right to call Gil friend. One is Egar, the Dragonbane,...

In 1978, Kim "Howard" Johnson ran away to join the circus, Monty Python's Flying Circus, that is. The Pythons converged on Tunisia to film their timeless classic, Life of Brian, and Howard found himself in the thick of it, doubling for nearly all the Pythons, playing more roles in the film than John Cleese, and managing to ruin only one shot. He became the unit journalist, substitute still photographer, Roman soldier, peasant, Biggus Dickus's double,...

It had been nearly a century since elephants had lived in Southern Zululand, South Africa, where Lawrence Anthony founded his Thula Thula wildlife reserve. Yet one day a phone call changed all that. A troubled, unpredictable herd needed a new home. In order to save their lives, Lawrence took them in, and in the years that followed found that they had a lot to teach him about life, loyalty, and freedom. He tells of hair-raising fights with poachers,...

"A succinct and witty literary venture that tells the strange story of a priceless treasure discovered in East Anglia on the eve of World War II. In the long, hot summer of 1939, Britain is preparing for war, but on a riverside farm in Suffolk there is excitement of another kind. Mrs. Pretty, the widowed owner of the farm, has had her hunch confirmed that the mounds on her land hold buried treasure. As the dig proceeds, it becomes clear that this...