Not too long ago, I took all the money I had in the world and bought a postage stamp of a farm in Chimayo, New Mexico. It was an impulse buy. I didn’t know much about country living, had never entertained secret pastoral fantasies. One moment I was a money- grubbing bastard, the next a guy negotiating for a donkey. Sure, there was the recent conclusion that nothing in common remained between the life I had imagined and the one I was leading—but did farm animals solve this particular problem? Read more from A Small Furry Prayer.

Read reviews of A Small Furry Prayer

Join Steven in support of Small Furry Prayer. Click here for dates and locations of his 2010 Book Tour.

My earliest childhood belief was a sneaking suspicion that the world was more mysterious than people were letting on. It's hard to say how much of this was suburban boredom and how much heartfelt sentiment, and in the end it didn't matter. By the time I got to college, that little notion had grown into a bad case of Jonathan Livingston Seagull-itis. When two semesters of philosophy failed to satisfy, I dropped out and moved to Santa Fe because the New Age was booming. Read more from West of Jesus.

Read reviews of West of Jesus

He came west, traveling in a long pocket of dawn that never strays far from a sallow gray. Behind him a set of mountains reaches high into a wide sky and on certain peaks are footprints and patches of grass pressed flat against the earth where he had made his camp. Behind these places are other camps and other footsteps and a long walk without a good reason and somewhere back there are his parents, alone now, in a house too big for them, wondering where their son has gone.Read more from The Angle Quickest for Flight.

Read reviews of The Angle Quickest for Flight