“Are we on the right path?” asked the rabbit. The boy looked around. “Maybe there is no path. Maybe the path is made simply by walking.”
THE OXHERD BOY
Parables of Love, Compassion, and Community
by Regina Linke
Clarkson Potter, March 2024
Following in the footsteps, hooves and pawprints of the bestselling illustrated inspirational book The Boy, The Mole, The Fox and The Horse comes Regina Linke’s exquisite fable THE OXHERD BOY.
Largely based on the wisdom of classical Asian philosophy and religion, the story gently cultivates resilience, compassion and humility through the small adventures and conversations of these three friends. As the boy, the rabbit, and the ox (who represent the three core beliefs of classical Chinese thought) wander through the day, meeting villagers, forging rivers, tilling fields, and planting rice, they muse about ways to live mindfully in an often stormy world. Artist and writer Regina Linke’s magnificent paintings are executed in the ancient Chinese technique known as gongbi that uses highly detailed brushstrokes and careful layering of color over fine line drawings to create magical, immersive scenes and emotive, engaging characters.
Regina Linke is a Taiwanese American artist specializing in contemporary Chinese gongbi painting. She writes and illustrates stories that celebrate East Asian folklore and philosophy in an accessible and modern way. Her most notable creation is “The Oxherd Boy,” a single-panel, adult webcomic with a highly engaged audience whose characters volunteers from around the world have translated the comics into ten languages. Regina Linke lives in Taipei, Taiwan with her husband and young son, who inspires her every day as a real-life oxherd boy.
Our lives are filled with repetitive tasks meant to boost productivity—what we know as habits. Over time, we do these activities automatically. But when we perform these habits mindfully—when we focus on the precise way an act is performed—we create a ritual. Now, an everyday act goes from black-and-white to technicolor. And as author and Harvard professor Michael Norton explains here, it’s these rituals that make life worth living.
Book 1: DUSKFALL
Book 2: DARK IMMOLATION
Book 3: BLOOD REQUIEM
Book 4: FEAR THE STARS
Book 5: DAWNRISE
Claire “Mac” Woods—a professor enjoying her newfound hotshot status at an academic conference—finally has the acceptance and admiration she has long craved. But at the conference’s hotel bar, Mac is surprised to run into a face from a past she’d rather forget: the moneyed, effortlessly perfect Gwendolyn Whitney, Mac’s foil, rival, and former best friend. When Gwen moved to town in high school, Claire—then known as Mac, a poor kid from a troubled family who had too much on her plate—saw what it meant to have. Money, sophistication, culture, the very blueprints to success. Mac had almost nothing, except the will to change. Change she did, habitually grinding herself to work as hard as straight-A Gwen, even eventually getting admitted into the same elite graduate program as Gwen. But then Mac and Gwen become entangled with the department’s power-couple professors and compete head-to-head for a life changing fellowship. The more twisted the track toward success becomes, the more Mac has to contort herself to stay one step ahead—which deception signals the point of no return? Jack-knifing between Mac’s world-expanding graduate days and the crucible of the hotel and its unexpected guests, Bad Habits follows Mac’s reckoning between her hardscrabble past and tenuous present. What, exactly, did Mac do to get what she has today? And what will she do to keep it? With taut, powerful prose, Amy Gentry asks how far we’ll go to get what we want—and whether we can ever truly leave the past behind.