BEYOND DISTRACTION de Shaila Catherine

Learn how to overcome distraction in meditation practice and develop clarity in your relationships, work, and activities with this new guide from a beloved meditation teacher.

BEYOND DISTRACTION:
Five Practical Ways to Focus the Mind
by Shaila Catherine
Wisdom Publications, May 2022

The mind can be a potent tool, used to guide extraordinary achievements, inspire good works, and incline your spiritual path toward peace and awakening. But the mind can also produce thoughts that lead to suffering. For many people, thoughts run rampant and seem to oppress or control their lives. Even the Buddha tells us that before his enlightenment, he sometimes found his mind preoccupied by thoughts connected with sensual desire, ill will, and harm. But he figured out how to respond to thoughts skillfully and developed a step-by-step approach to calm the restless mind.
Now, Insight Meditation teacher Shaila Catherine offers an accessible approach to training the mind that is guided by the Buddha’s pragmatic instructions on removing distracting thoughts. Drawing on two scriptures in the Middle Length Discourses of the Buddha, Shaila shows you how to overcome habitual modes of thinking, develop deeper concentration, and discover the insights into emptiness that are vital for a liberating spiritual path.
Following the Buddha’s pragmatic approach, Shaila guides you through five steps for overcoming distraction and focusing the mind. Each chapter includes exercises and reflections to help you cultivate the five steps to deeper concentration. You’ll learn about your mind and develop your ability to direct your attention more skillfully in meditation and daily activities. And ultimately, you’ll discover for yourself how these five steps boil down to one key realization: In the moment you recognize that a thought is just a thought, you will find yourself on the path to a life of remarkable freedom.

Shaila Catherine has been leading meditation retreats worldwide since 1996, emphasizing deep concentration, jhana, and the path of liberating insight. Shaila is the founder of Bodhi Courses, an online Dhamma classroom, and Insight Meditation South Bay, a Buddhist meditation center in Silicon Valley in California. She has practiced meditation since 1980, studied with founders of Western insight meditation centers, and accumulated more than nine years of silent retreat experience. Shaila spent most of the 1990s practicing with eminent masters in India, Thailand, and Nepal. From 2006 to 2014, she practiced under the guidance of Pa-Auk Sayadaw and twice completed his rigorous training in jhana and vipassana. Shaila loves deep meditation, and appreciates a variety of approaches to exploring, developing, and liberating the mind. Shaila is the author of Focused and Fearless: A Meditator’s Guide to States of Deep Joy, Calm, and Clarity and Wisdom Wide and Deep: A Practical Handbook for Mastering Jhana and Vipassana.

BEUTEZEIT de Norris Von Schirach

An impressively topical novel about a post-Soviet society sinking into a swamp of corruption and terror. Through the lens of his hero Anton, von Schirach tells how the global conflicts between Russia, China and the West over mineral resources, power and influence are fought out with the hardest of sticks – and how the individual is ground down in the process, should he not follow the commercial codes of the new era.

BEUTEZEIT
(Prey Time)
by Norris Von Schirach
Penguin Verlag, September 2022

When Vladimir Putin becomes president in January 2000, Anton, a rich commodities trader, flees Moscow. Behind him lie eight breathtaking years in post-Soviet predatory capitalism, ahead of him yawning boredom in the well-off milieu of New York. But even at forty, Anton is still an incorrigible romantic in search of the next thrill. Then a headhunter makes him an enticing offer. Anton is to build up a steel company in Kazakhstan, which is so rich in mineral resources, with money from anonymous sources. The German embarks on the adventure and learns painfully how local clans and insatiable elites ruthlessly defend the loot they have amassed after the fall of the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, Anton finds allies and makes a momentous pact.

Norris von Schirach, born in Munich in 1963, worked in London and New York after graduating from high school and completing a commercial apprenticeship. After his studies, he lived in Moscow from 1993 to 2003. There he experienced the euphoria and frustration of the Yeltsin years, when the border between organized crime and state institutions dissolved while large parts of the population became impoverished. Norris von Schirach has a son and now lives in Romania after extended stays in Kazakhstan and Australia.

THE NOBODIES d’Alanna Schubach

The story of two young women whose friendship offered—and demanded—more than either should share. A powerful exploration of the boundaries between ourselves and those we are closest to that poses questions about the nature of intimacy, the many flavors of betrayal, and the value of female friendships. For fans of Sally Rooney and Claire North.

THE NOBODIES
by Alanna Schubach
Blackstone Publishing, June 2022
(via Sterling Lord)

When they meet as children, Nina and Jess form a strong bond, one that quickly intensifies when they discover they share an extraordinary power: they can swap bodies. As they grow older, they use this ability to steal into each other’s lives, unearthing secrets and betraying confidences. Nina, introspective and self-conscious, is seduced by the turbulence of Jess’ life, but also possessive of her bolder friend. Jess, meanwhile, envies the stability of Nina’s world, and wishes to seize it for herself. Now, Jess has re-entered Nina’s life after a long separation. She is in crisis after her father’s death, and says she needs Nina’s help, but Nina fears she may try to take far more than that. Over the course of this novel, they reckon with the truth, the beauty, and the horror of walking in another person’s shoes.
THE NOBODIES is the story of a power struggle that poses questions about the nature of intimacy, the power of female friendships, the extent to which we can ever “know” someone, and if in possessing another, we might transcend ourselves.

Alanna Schubach is a fiction writer, freelance journalist, and teacher. She was named a NYC Emerging Writers Fellow with the Center for Fiction in 2019, and a Fellow in Fiction with the New York Foundation for the Arts in 2015. She was awarded a residency at the Vermont Studio Center in 2017. Her short stories have appeared in Electric Literature, The Lifted Brow, Post Road, and more. She earned an MFA in Creative Writing from Sarah Lawrence College. She served as Contributing Editor for Brick Underground and has contributed essays, features, criticism, opinion, and profiles to The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Al Jazeera, Jezebel, Dame, The Village Voice, and more. She teaches fiction and non-fiction for the Gotham Writers Workshop.

NAZI BILLIONAIRES de David de Jong

A groundbreaking investigation of how the Nazis helped German tycoons make billions off the horrors of the Third Reich and World War II—and how America allowed them to get away with it.

NAZI BILLIONAIRES:
The Dark History of Germany’s Wealthiest Dynasties
by David de Jong
‎ Mariner Books/HarperCollins, April 2022

In 1946, Günther Quandt—patriarch of Germany’s most iconic industrial empire, a dynasty that today controls BMW—was arrested for suspected Nazi collaboration. Quandt claimed that he had been forced to join the party by his archrival, propaganda minister Joseph Goebbels, and the courts acquitted him. But Quandt lied. And his heirs, and those of other Nazi billionaires, have only grown wealthier in the generations since, while their reckoning with this dark past remains incomplete at best. Many of them continue to control swaths of the world economy, owning iconic brands whose products blanket the globe. The brutal legacy of the dynasties that dominated Daimler-Benz, cofounded Allianz, and still control Porsche, Volkswagen, and BMW has remained hidden in plain sight—until now.
In this landmark work of investigative journalism, David de Jong reveals the true story of how Germany’s wealthiest business dynasties amassed untold money and power by abetting the atrocities of the Third Reich. Using a wealth of untapped sources, de Jong shows how these tycoons seized Jewish businesses, procured slave laborers, and ramped up weapons production to equip Hitler’s army as Europe burned around them. Most shocking of all, de Jong exposes how America’s political expediency enabled these billionaires to get away with their crimes, covering up a bloodstain that defiles the German and global economy to this day.

“A provocative group portrait of five industrialists who expanded their fortunes by colluding with Hitler and then, after World War II, walked away with minimal punishment and barely a dent in their bottom lines… In this meticulously researched book, Mr. de Jong, an investigative journalist and former reporter at Bloomberg News, compels us to confront the current-day legacy of these Nazi ties. »—The Wall Street Journal

David de Jong is a journalist who previously covered European banking and finance from Amsterdam and hidden wealth and billionaire fortunes from New York for Bloomberg News. His work has also appeared in Bloomberg Businessweek, the Wall Street Journal, and the Dutch Financial Daily. A native of the Netherlands, de Jong currently lives in Tel Aviv. He spent four years researching and writing this book from Berlin.

JONATHAN ABERNATHY YOU ARE KIND de Molly McGhee

At once tender, startling, and deeply funny, JONATHAN ABERNATHY YOU ARE KIND is a gimlet-eyed reckoning with late-stage capitalism, a brilliant, ferocious novel for readers of Paul Beatty’s The Sellout and Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This.

JONATHAN ABERNATHY YOU ARE KIND
by Molly McGhee
‎ Atra, Fall 2023
(via Sterling Lord Literistic)

Jonathan Abernathy is screwed. Jobless, behind on his student loan payments, and a self-declared failure, the only thing Abernathy has in abundance is debt. When a government loan forgiveness program offers him a job he can do literally in his sleep, he thinks he’s found his big break. That is, until he finds himself auditing the dreams of white collar workers, flagging their anxieties and preoccupations for removal.
As Abernathy finds his footing in this new role, reality and morality begin to warp around him. Soon, the lines between life and work, love and hate, right and wrong, even sleep and consciousness, have blurred.

“Molly McGhee reminds me of absolutely no one. Here’s an original mind brimming over with invention and comic ferocity and a new world sensibility that serves to remind us what good hands the future of literature is in. I am hugely excited for everyone to read this mad, hilarious writer.” —Ben Marcus, Guggenheim Fellow and author of The Flame Alphabet

Molly McGhee is from a cluster of unincorporated towns outside of Nashville, Tennessee. She completed her M.F.A. in fiction at Columbia University, where, in addition to receiving a Chair’s Fellowship, she taught in the undergraduate creative writing department. She has worked in the editorial departments of McSweeney’s, The Believer, NOON, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and Tor. Currently living in Brooklyn, her work has appeared in The Paris Review.