The novel about an aimless young man in 1960s America that inspired the classic film: "Moves with the speed and drive of a runaway locomotive." — Chicago Sunday ReviewWhen Benjamin Braddock graduates from a small eastern college and comes home to his parents' house, everyone wants to know what he's going to do with his life. Benjamin has no idea. Feeling empty, embittered, and adrift, he stumbles into an affair with Mrs. Robinson, the wife of his father's ...

As The Tao of Aging opens, we encounter a strange old, sage-like Chinese philosopher and raconteur who claims to actually be Zhuangzi (ChuangTzu) - the second most important originator of Taoist thought after Lao Tzu.Zhuangzi now lives in San Francisco and is known simply as "Z". As it turns out, over 2000 years after his exploits in ancient China, "Z" is still rambling about the world - trickster to the bone - tinkering with the way we look at what we call reality. He insists that ...

At the end of Charles Webb's first novel, The Graduate, Benjamin Braddock rescues his beloved Elaine from a marriage made not in heaven but in California.It is now eleven years and 3,000 miles later, and the couple live in Westchester County, a suburb of New York City, with their two young sons, whom they are educating at home.Through no accident, a continent now stands between them and the boys' surviving grandparent, now known as Nan, but who in former days answe...

TABLOID HAIKU! Is a collection of haiku based on tabloid headlines. The inspiration for composing these haiku came to me one afternoon while standing in a supermarket checkout line listening to a fellow customer read loudly from the Weekly World News. Off the wall and beyond the fringe pulp poetry resonated down the supermarket aisles as the man read through the paper, then folded it neatly and placed it back on the rack. Haiku immediately came to mind, since the utter strangeness of many ...

Kwatz! describes a confrontation…a strange and amusing, encounter...Dharma combat...between two modern masters…one from the Zen tradition, the other an unlikely Taoist…who has decided that this deadly serious "combat" may be a new and amusing way to spend an afternoon. Each answers the other using variations on sayings from other "masters" that they find apropos to the situation. The writers, philosophers, artists, comedians, etc. whom they paraphrase, are not mentioned by name during the ...

YOU are a bodymind, not a body with a mind or vice versa. You are a verb, not a noun. You are fluid, constantly changing. The static you is a persistent illusion. You… your self, persona, ego…who you are… is a construct that is formed by the interaction of genetics, imprinting, and learning. Now consider that this you that you now seem to be is, actually, very much like a fictitious character that may appear in a novel, play or movie and may be re-written, re-produced and re-performed, usi...

You are a bodymind, not a body with a mind or vice versa. You are a verb, not a noun. You are fluid, constantly changing. The static you is a persistent illusion. You… your self, persona, ego…who you are… is a construct that is formed by the interaction of genetics, imprinting, and learning. You have little input into this process until after you have been thoroughly shaped by parents, peers and culture. Now consider that this you that you now seem to be is, actually, very much like a fict...

At the end of Charles Webb's first novel, The Graduate, Benjamin Braddock rescues his beloved Elaine from a marriage made not in heaven but in California.It is now eleven years and 3,000 miles later, and the couple live in Westchester County, a suburb of New York City, with their two young sons, whom they are educating at home.Through no accident, a continent now stands between them and the boys' surviving grandparent, now known as Nan, but who in former days answe...

With eleven full-length books and a spate of major prizes, Charles Harper Webb—once a well-kept secret in the poetry underground—has gained national recognition as a writer of poems that are complex yet reader-friendly. Sidebend World shows clearly why Webb has been called one of the most inventive, incisive, and psychologically astute poets writing in the U.S.A. today, as well as one of the most entertaining.Webb is celebrated for his use of humor; yet even his funniest p...

Originally published in 1935, this book charts the revolution from a banking to an industrial conception of currency which took place between 1922 and 1932. Having failed to stabilise the purchasing power of gold, General Strong stabilised the purchasing power of the dollar, an idea which was revived on an international scale by the Ottawa Conference of 1932. The stabilisation of purchasing power, independently of gold, was subsequently adopted as the keystone of British currency policy.

Originally published in 1931, this book was written at a time when the utility and value of gold was under great scrutiny. Global financial circles were discussing the necessity of reducing the price of gold, pressing for the return of Britain to a gold standard and imposing a managed currency. Against a background of post-war monetary and financial dislocations, the author argues that the unique monetary quality of gold is its liquidity, and its universal acceptability as a natural form o...

Charles Harper Webb is celebrated for his use of humor; yet even his funniest poems rise, as the best comedy must, out of deep human drives, sorrows, and needs. Powerful immersions in what it means to be human, these poems explore the spectrum of emotions from love to hate, tenderness to brutality. They can be withering and vulnerable in the same breath. Models of clarity and vividness, they are mysterious when they need to be, ranging from lyric to narrative, from realism to wild surreal ...