Description

<div><b>Book 1 – Me and Rumi:</b>&nbsp;</div><div><br></div><div>The astounding autobiography of the man who transformed Rumi from a learned religious teacher into the world’s greatest poet of mystical love.</div><div><br></div><div><b>Book 2 – Rumi’s Little Book of Love and Laughter:</b></div><div><br></div><div>Rowdy, ecstatic, and sometimes stern, these teaching stories and fables reveal new and very human properties in Rumi’s vision. Included here are the notorious “Latin parts” that Reynold Nicholson felt were too unseemly to appear in English in his 1920s translation. For Rumi, anything that human beings do—however compulsive—affords a glimpse into the inner life.</div><div>Here are more than 40 fables or teaching stories that deal with love, laughter, death, betrayal, and the soul. The stories are exuberant, earthy, and bursting with vitality—much like a painting by Hieronymus Bosch or Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. The characters are guilty, lecherous, tricky, ribald, and finally possessors of opened souls.</div><div>Barks writes: “These teaching stories are a kind of scrimshaw—intricately carved, busy figures, confused and threatening, and weirdly funny.</div><div>This is an entertaining collection from one of the greatest spiritual poets of all time, rendered by his most popular translator.</div><div>“The minute I heard my first love story, I started looking for you, not knowing how blind that was. Lovers don’t finally meet somewhere. They’re in each other all along.”–Rumi</div><div><br></div><div><b>Book 3 – Teachings of Rumi:</b></div><div><br></div><div>Jelalludin Rumi (1207-1273) led the quiet life of an Islamic teacher in the central Anatolia (modern Turkey) until the age of thirty-seven, when he met a wandering dervish named Shams Tabriz—through whom he encountered the Divine Presence in a way that utterly transformed him. The result of this epiphany was the greatest body of mystical poetry the world has ever seen, and the establishment of a spiritual movement that would eventually stretch from Africa to China, enduring to our own day.</div><div>This collection of versions of Rumi by Andrew Harvey contains some of the master’s most luminous verse, along with selections from his lesser-read prose works, with the aim of presenting a balanced view of his teaching that includes both the high-flying love of God and the rigorous path of discipline essential for those who seek it.</div><div><br></div><div><b>Book 4 – Rumi’s Secret:</b></div><div><br></div><div>The acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of Smash Cut, Flannery, and City Poet delivers the first popular biography of Rumi, the thirteenth-century Persian poet revered by contemporary Western readers.</div><div>Ecstatic love poems of Rumi, a Persian poet and Sufi mystic born over eight centuries ago, are beloved by millions of readers in America as well as around the world. He has been compared to Shakespeare for his outpouring of creativity and to Saint Francis of Assisi for his spiritual wisdom. Yet his life has long remained the stuff of legend rather than intimate knowledge.</div><div>In this breakthrough biography, Brad Gooch brilliantly brings to life the man and puts a face to the name Rumi, vividly coloring in his time and place—a world as rife with conflict as our own. The map of Rumi’s life stretched over 2,500 miles. Gooch traces this epic journey from Central Asia, where Rumi was born in 1207, traveling with his family, displaced by Mongol terror, to settle in Konya, Turkey. Pivotal was the disruptive appearance of Shams of Tabriz, who taught him to whirl and transformed him from a respectable Muslim preacher into a poet and mystic. Their vital connection as teacher and pupil, friend and beloved, is one of the world’s greatest spiritual love stories. When Shams disappeared, Rumi coped with the pain of separation by composing joyous poems of reunion, both human and divine.</div><div>Ambitious, bold, and beautifully written, Rumi’s Secret reveals the unfolding of Rumi’s devotion to a “religion of love,” remarkable in his own time and made even more relevant for the twenty-first century by this compelling account.&nbsp;</div><div><br></div>