Jesus taught his followers that it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter heaven. Yet by the fall of Rome, the church was becoming rich beyond measure. Through the Eye of a Needle is a sweeping intellectual and social history of the vexing problem of wealth in Christianity in the waning days of the Roman Empire, written by the world's foremost scholar of late antiquity.Peter Brown examines the rise of the church through the len...

Torment is a terrible thing; it festers and consumes and is nurtured by each ugly experience. The teacher is a product of his past—left embittered by events best forgotten. He is a loner, avoiding any social contact that might inflict pain or distress. His classroom is his refuge, an island of solace, a place where he can embrace the innocence and kindness missing in the outside world. When one of his favorite students suffers a gruesome death, he reaches a breaking point. But will a new d...

THE #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERThe heartwarming and action-packed illustrated novel exploring what happens when nature and technology collide.When robot Roz opens her eyes for the first time, she discovers that she is alone on a remote, wild island. She has no idea how she got there or what her purpose is - but she knows she needs to survive.After battling a fierce storm and escaping a vicious bear attack,...

Today is the day the exuberant Lucy is going to make a new friend! But she finds it's harder than she had thought--she accidentally ruins the giraffe's breakfast and is much too big for the frogs' pond. Just when she's about to give up, an unexpected friend finds her, and loves her just the way she is.This heartwarming story offers a unique and humor-filled spin on the all-important themes of persistence and friendship.

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the YearA Tablet Book of the YearMarking a departure in our understanding of Christian views of the afterlife from 250 to 650 CE, The Ransom of the Soul explores a revolutionary shift in thinking about the fate of the soul that occurred around the time of Rome’s fall. Peter Brown describes how this shift transformed the Church’s institutional relationship to money and set the stage for its domination of mediev...

Lucy, a young bear, meets a charming little boy in the forest. When she brings him home, her mother cautions her "children make terrible pets." Can Lucy prove her wrong?

From a New York Times bestselling author and Caldecott-honor winning artist comes an exuberant illustrated story about playing dress up, having fun, and feeling free.The boy loves to be naked. He romps around his house naked and wild and free. Until he romps into his parents' closet and is inspired to get dressed. First he tries on his dad's clothes, but they don't fit well. Then he tries on his mom's clothes, and wow! The boy looks great. He looks through...

Chaucer at Work is a new kind of introduction to the Canterbury Tales. It avoids excessive amounts of background information and involves the reader in the discovery of how Chaucer composed his famous work. It presents a series of sources and contexts to be considered in conjunction with key passages from Chaucer's poems. It includes sets of questions to encourage the reader to examine the text in detail and to build on his or her observations. This well-informed and practical gui...

Winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction, A Bright Soothing Noise by Peter Brown is a captivating collection of short stories with the "scenic intensity and quality of Tennessee Williams' one-act plays" (Josip Novakovich, best-selling author). Always on the verge of something better, Brown's characters are often hard drinking and fast driving-tending to be both violent and religious. And as they grasp for hope, they sometimes make a leap into a new life.

The story of a band formed by five young musically inexperienced mates from The Rock, a small NSW regional town in Australia, during the second half of the 1960s pop music revolution. The book charts the band's progression from its first non-paid gig where it played the same five songs over and over because that was extent the band's song list and chronologically moves through the next 4 years with the band ultimately being voted the best band in Wagga, NSW's largest inland city in late 19...