Mythic Worlds

In 1927, as a twenty-three-year-old postgraduate scholar in Paris, Joseph Campbell first encountered James Joyce’s Ulysses. Known for being praised and for kicking up controversy (including an obscenity trial in the United States in 1920), the novel left Campbell both intrigued and confused, as it had many others. Because he was in Paris, he was able to visit the Shakespeare & Company bookstore - the outpost of the original publisher of Ulysses, Sylvia Beach. She gave him “clues” for reading Ulysses, and that, Campbell attested, changed his career.

For Malcom McKnight, her life has been entrenched in a protective web of secrets and lies, but when she discovers soul-shattering truths about her family, she finds herself thrust into an entirely different world, and falling headfirst into the comforting arms of a stranger. But she has no time to rest. A nightmarish creature of unbridled rage threatens her new life—the result of a secret that has plagued her family for centuries.

Before he was the engaging professor who brought mythology into people’s living rooms through his conversations with Bill Moyers, before he became known as the thinker whose ideas influenced Star Wars, and before his now-beloved phrase “follow your bliss” entered the popular lexicon, Joseph Campbell was a young man who tried his hand at writing fiction. After years of Depression-era unemployment, when he lived off money he had earned playing saxophone and read the world’s great literature in a syllabus of his own design, Campbell published his first short story.

This is the tale of the coming of the Irish to Ireland, and of the men and women who made that emerald isle their own.

Sam Keen, best-selling author of Fire in the Belly, and Anne Valley-Fox combine their talents to help today's men and women rediscover the mythic dimension in their own daily lives.

The Origins of Shintoism is an invaluable resource for anyone interested in the history and culture of Japan, as well as for those interested in the development and evolution of religions around the world.