Books by Jim Gold

Books by Jim Gold

Running Wild on the Lawn. . .2026

Dancing Beyond Covid. . .2023-24
Dancing Out Of Covid. . .2022-23
Dancing Through Covid. . . 2019-22

Carlos the Cloud. . . 2020

A Treasury of International Folk Dances. . .2019

Handfuls of Air. . .2013

Zany. . . 2012

A New Leaf. . .2007
New Leaf Journal (5 Volumes). . .2001-2005

Mad Shoes. . . 1987

Running Wild on the Lawn
2026

A celebration of freedom, imagination,
memory, and the irrepressible desire
to shine (remain) fully alive

There comes a time when the sensible path no longer seems sufficient. The lawn is waiting. The gate is open. And somewhere within us, the child who once ran without hesitation is still ready to begin again.

Running Wild on the Lawn is Jim Gold’s newest book—an invitation to step beyond caution, habit, and limitation and rediscover the energy, humor, beauty, and wonder that make life worth living.

About the Book
In Running Wild on the Lawn, Jim Gold reflects on the struggle between restraint and freedom, age and vitality, fear and movement, seriousness and delight. With warmth, honesty, humor, and imagination, he explores what it means to keep moving toward life—even when the body hesitates, the mind worries, or the world encourages us to become smaller.

This is a book about more than running. It is about awakening. It is about refusing to disappear.

It is about the moments when the spirit suddenly breaks free and remembers that it was born to move, create, laugh, love, and participate in the world.

An Invitation to Live More Fully
Running Wild on the Lawn asks: What remains possible when we stop measuring life only by what we can no longer do?  What happens when we choose delight over perfection? Can imagination restore movement? Can beauty become a source of strength? Can we grow older without becoming smaller?

Jim Gold approaches these questions not as abstract philosophy, but through the living experience of a writer, musician, traveler, teacher, entrepreneur, and lifelong seeker.

From the Book
“The lawn was never merely a lawn. It was an open country, a stage, a kingdom, and an invitation. To run across it was to announce that life was still here—and so was I.”[REPLACE WITH AN ACTUAL EXCERPT FROM THE BOOK WHEN READY]

For Readers Who Believe That Life Is Still Calling
This book is for anyone who has ever felt confined by fear, age, illness, expectation, or habit. It is for readers who want to recover a sense of possibility. It is for those who know that joy may disappear for a while—but never entirely. And it is for anyone who still feels, somewhere within, the desire to throw open the door and run wildly toward life.

About Jim Gold
Jim Gold is a writer, folk dance teacher and choreographer, classical and folk guitarist, cultural-tour organizer, and founder of Jim Gold International. For decades, he has brought people together through dance, music, travel, writing, culture, and friendship. His books explore creativity, movement, aging, humor, struggle, beauty, and the art of living fully. Running Wild on the Lawn is his newest book.

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Or contact:

Jim Gold International
jimgold@jimgold.com
(201) 836-0362

Welcome to the World of Jim Gold
Discover Jim Gold’s books, international folk-dance and cultural tours, music, writing, and creative projects.

Dancing Beyond Covid. . . 2023-24

IN THIS THIRD AND FINAL VOLUME of his memoirs
of the Covid years, Jim Gold considers how the pandemic
changed him in ways he barely realized when he wrote Dancing Out Of Covid. Then, overjoyed by the realization, not only that he had survived the plague, but that his livelihood of leading folk tours of the world had recuperated as well. Then, little by little,
Jim came to understand how the impact
of Covid-19 had transformed all his activities—his leadership of folkdance groups, his relationship to the guitar, his esoteric studies, and his writing. Join him on this absorbing journey and discover
how the pandemic altered his thinking, his passion,
and his understanding of his life’s path.

Dancing Out Of Covid…2022-23

When Jim Gold published Dancing Through Covid, 
millions of people had already died of the pandemic,
his folk-dance tours had ground to a halt,
and no one knew when-or if-life
would get back to normal.
This book shows how Jim’s career survived,
and how, during those dark months,
he emerged as a more complete human being than ever.
It’s a deeply inspiring tale
of renewal and growth.

Read sample pages
Purchase at Amazon.com
Kindle $5.99   Paperback $16.95

Dancing Through Covid. . .2019-22

Like so many of us,
Jim Gold spent
the Covid-19 pandemic years
in enforced isolation,
with most of his professional life
on hold or vanished with no foreseeable end in sight.
But he’s also written five volumes of New Leaf journals,
as his fans all know,
and he continued to write them
in his intense, personal way,
straight through this gloomy period, with surprisingly uplifting results-
finding in our despair a clear light
of emotional transcendence.
Read this book and join him.

Read sample pages
Purchase at Amazon.com
Kindle $5.99   Paperback $14.95

Carlos the Cloud

                 Carlos the Cloud

Jim Gold excels as a writer in the joys of improbability. His stories seize upon the most unlikely of heroes and heroines, and plunge them into situations none of us could ever imagine. They come to us with a hilarious assortment of odd backgrounds, very strange attitudes, and utterly surprising needs and ambitions. Some of them are people. Some are animals, and others plants. There are guys and gals who worry about their sex lives or their deaths, a talking turnip, a cloud with Oedipal problems, a whole world of vivid creations. And they’re all inescapable, irresistible–a tangle of living neurons and flesh we can’t help but be drawn to because they so often, and so surprisingly, remind us of ourselves. These invented souls hint of our own needs, our own frailties. . .and our own triumphs. They will leave you a happier soul.

Zany!

                            Zany!

Wildly off-beat, whimsical, humorous, and philosophical, here is an adventure story to engross the mind, warm the heart, and quicken the imagination.  World-renowned concert violinist Zoltan Zany has been sitting in his living room armchair for an entire year, contemplating—with the help of his unconventional friends and Austrian housekeeper—the future direction of his life. Meanwhile, his etymologist son, Attila, along with an Israeli linguist and archaeologist named Isaac Mashugi, is traveling—in search of the first word uttered by man—to eastern Turkey’s Mount Ararat, where they believe this original ur-word can be found by discovering Noah’s ark. they are joined there by the elder Zany. They discover the word and, on a quest for further adventure, return to America to launch a new kind of travel business—Posthumous tours, specializing in dead customers and raising funds by selling reincarnation insurance. Here is an adventure story to engross the mind, warm the heart, and quicken the imagination. 

Read sample pages 
Purchase at Amazon.com   
Kindle $9.99   Paperback $15.95

Mad Shoes
The Adventures of Sylvan Woods from Bronx Violinist to Bulgarian Folk Dancer

Mad Shoes

THIS BOOK IS A GAS—a carbonated novel whose bubbly mirth and flagrant lunacies mask a deeper aim. Will Sylvan Woods, it asks, ever manage to shed his callow cynicism and become a fully realized innocent? He is, to be sure, the least likely of heroes, and the road before him is murky and perilous. Demons await him at every turn. He will be tempted by money, fame, common sense, even by truth. Will he transcend them? You’ll have to read Mad Shoes to learn the answer.

Handfuls of Air

Handfuls of Air

Crusader Tours, stories, songs, and poems

Light fiction with a zany edge—here’s a book
that does the hardest thing a book can do:
make you smile.
Jim Gold offers an enlarged second edition
of a book that has made life funnier for his readers for years.

A Treasury of International Folk Dances
A Step-by-Step Guide
Choreographed by Jim Gold

New Leaf Journals
Adventures in the Creative Life

A New Leaf: Volume 1
A New Leaf: Volume 2
A New Leaf: Volume 3
A New Leaf: Volume 4
A New Leaf: Volume 5
A New Leaf: Selected  Readings