Stephen Mitchell

"The first great adventure story in the Western canon, The Odyssey is a poem about violence and the aftermath of war; about wealth, poverty, and power; about marriage and family; about travelers, hospitality, and the yearning for home. In this fresh, authoritative version--the first English translation of The Odyssey by a woman--this stirring tale of shipwrecks, monsters, and magic comes alive in an entirely new way. Written in iambic pentameter verse...

Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet are arguably the most famous and beloved letters of the twentieth century. Written when the poet was himself still a young man, with most of his greatest work before him, they were addressed to a student who had sent Rilke some of his own writing, asking for advice on becoming a writer. The two never met, but over a period of several years Rilke wrote him these ten letters, cherished by readers for what translator Mitchell...

"In A Mind at Home with Itself, Byron Katie illuminates one of the most profound ancient Buddhist texts, The Diamond Sutra (newly translated in these pages by distinguished scholar Stephen Mitchell) to reveal the nature of the mind and to liberate us from painful thoughts, using her revolutionary system of self-inquiry called 'The Work.' Byron Katie doesn't merely describe the awakened mind; she empowers us to see it and feel it in action. At once...

""Stephen Mitchell's gift is to breathe new life into ancient classics. In Joseph and the Way of Forgiveness, he offers us his riveting novelistic version of the Biblical tale in which Jacob's favorite son is sold into slavery and eventually becomes viceroy of Egypt. Tolstoy called it the most beautiful story in the world. What's new here is the lyrical, witty, vivid prose, informed by a wisdom that brings fresh insight to this foundational legend...

In her first two books, Byron Katie showed how suffering can be ended by questioning the stressful thoughts that create it, through a process of self-inquiry she calls The Work. Now, she encourages us to discover the freedom that lives on the other side of inquiry. Her husband, a renowned translator of the Tao Te Ching, selected provocative excerpts from that ancient text as a stimulus for Katie to talk about the most essential issues that face us...

Living in Paris as he attempts to write a novel, Brigge, a young Danish aristocrat and poet obsessed with death, muses on his family, his background, and his observations of Parisian life.

An English-language rendering of the world's oldest epic follows the journey of conquest and self-discovery by the king of Uruk, in an edition that includes an introduction that places the story in its historical and cultural context.