Blue Arabesque

A Search For The Sublime

BY PATRICIA HAMPL
The author of "I could tell you stories" was mesmerized by a Matisse painting: an aloof woman gazing at goldfish in a bowl. In Blue Arabesque, she explores the allure of this lounging woman, immersed in leisure, so at odds with the rush of the modern era. Her meditations give her insights into her own early life in Minnesota.

Harvest 2007 224 PP. Paper

$13.00 (in stock)

The Florist's Daughter

BY PATRICIA HAMPL
Her writing is well known to friends from gathering workshops on spiritual storytelling that have used "I Could tell you stories" and made that book a best seller for us. This book tells the story of her parents a debonair Czech father, whose floral work gave him entrée to St. Paul society, and her mother a distrustful Irishwoman with an uncanny ability to tell a tale. Written while her mother was dying, it is a telling of life's lived with passion and spirit that created and enriched her own.

Harcourt 2007 227 PP. Paper

$5.00 (in stock)

I Could Tell You Stories

Sojourns In The Land Of Memory

BY PATRICIA HAMPL
Memoir has become the signature genre of our age. In this timely gathering, Patricia Hampl, one of our most elegant practitioners, "weaves personal stories and grand ideas into shimmering bolts of prose" (Minneapolis Star Tribune) as she explores the autobiographical writing that has enchanted or bedeviled her. Subjects engaging Hampl's attention include her family's response to her writing, the ethics of writing about family and friends, St. Augustine's Confessions, reflections on reading Walt Whitman during the Vietnam War, and an early experience reviewing Sylvia Plath. The word that unites the impulse within all the pieces is "Remember!" This book is required for Workshop #70.

W. W. Norton Paper

$14.95 (low stock)

Virgin Time

In Search Of The Contemplative Life

BY PATRICIA HAMPL
This beguiling account of Patricia Hampl's spiritual quest at first seeks little more than to rub out the Catholic-school upbringing that clung to her like an Ash Wednesday smudge. Hampl's "old world" pilgrimage in the footsteps of saints Francis and Clare is overrun by crotchety English agnostics, American Franciscan friars and nuns, and various eccentric seekers. She then travels to Lourdes, and recoils from the surging crowds with their candles and incurable diseases. She finally finds the communion she seeks in a Californian monastery, amid the smell of wild rose bushes and the whine of chainsaws felling redwoods.

Northpoint 2002 242 PP, Paper

$6.00 (in stock)