As he lay dying, his priest, family, and friends offered him a last chance to confess his mendacity, and Marco, it is said, replied "I have not told the half of what I saw and did." Now Gary Jennings has imagined the half that Marco left unsaid as even more elaborate and adventurous than the tall tales thought to be lies. From the palazzi and back streets of medieval Venice to the sumptuous court of Kublai Khan, from the perfumed sexuality of the Levant to the dangers and rigors of travel along the Silk Road, Marco meets all manner of people, survives all manner of danger, and, insatiably curious, becomes an almost compulsive collector of customs, languages and women.In more than two decades of travel, Marco was variously a merchant, a warrior, a lover, a spy, even a tax collector - but always a journeyer, unflagging in his appetite for new experiences, regretting only what he missed. Here - recreated and reimagined with all the splendor, the love of adventure, the zest for the rare and curious that are Jennings's hallmarks - is the epic account, at once magnificent and delightful, of the greatest real-life adventurer in human history.

    Sionil Jose begins his five-novel Rosales Saga, which the poet and critic Ricaredo Demetillo called "the first great Filipino novels written in English." Set in the 1880s, Dusk records the exile of a tenant family from its village and the new life it attempts to make in the small town of Rosales. Here commences the epic tale of a family unwillingly thrown into the turmoil of history. But this is more than a historical novel; it is also the eternal story of man's tortured search for true faith and the larger meaning of existence. Jose has achieved a fiction of extraordinary scope and passion, a book as meaningful to Philippine literature as One Hundred Years of Solitude is to Latin American literature.

    Their dream was to "liberate" the whole of Asia, and their starting point was British India, the richest of all imperial possessions.The bloody struggle that ensued, the full story of which has never been told, marked a dramatic new twist in the Great Game. Among the players were British Indian intelligence officers and the armed revolutionaries of the Communist International. There were also Muslim visionaries and Chinese warlords-as well as a White Russian baron who roasted his Bolshevik captives alive.Pieced together from secret archives, intelligence reports, and the long-forgotten memoirs of the players involved, here is an extraordinary tale of intrigue and treachery. Like Hopkirk's bestselling The Great Game, its theme is ominously topical in view of the violent events that still grip this turbulent region-from the Caucasus to Afghanistan-where the Great Game never really ended.

    O'Hanlon, accompanied by friend and poet James Fenton and three native guides brings wit and humor to a dangerous journey.

    

    It is also an important addition to a thin historical record.... Her account of the revolutionary rhetoric, set against the reality of what the revolutionaries were actually doing, is as macabre as any of the descriptions of bodies." --The Wall Street Journal"This is a powerful and compelling story of terror, struggle and death sprinkled with moments of tenderness, written by a woman who writes not of politics but only of what she experienced." --New York Times Book ReviewIn 1975, Molyda Szymusiak (her adoptive name), the daughter of a high Cambodian official, was twelve years old and leading a relatively peaceful life in Phnom Penh. Suddenly, on April 17, Khmer Rouge radicals seized the capital and drove all its inhabitants into the countryside. The chaos that followed has been widely publicized, most notably in the movie The Killing Fields. Murderous brutality coupled with raging famine caused the death of more than two million people, nearly a third of the population. This powerful memoir documents the horror Cambodians experienced in daily life.

    Now considered a classic, this is an eloquent and compellingly told account of the Dalai Lama's exile from Tibet after its conquest by China.

    

    To survive, he must find a deep strength greater than all the events that surround him.Shanghai, 1941 — a city aflame from the fateful torch of Pearl Harbor. In streets full of chaos and corpses, a young British boy searches in vain for his parents. Imprisoned in a Japanese concentration camp, he is witness to the fierce white flash of Nagasaki, as the bomb bellows the end of the war...and the dawn of a blighted world.Ballard's enduring novel of war and deprivation, internment camps and death marches, and starvation and survival is an honest coming-of-age tale set in a world thrown utterly out of joint.

    It includes an epilogue written, just before the author's death, in the light of recent events in Afghanistan.

    Amy rescues these children and provides a safe, healthy home for them.

    It includes selections from the Book of Odes, the oldest anthology of Chinese poetry compiled around the seventh century B.C., and covers the succeeding generations down to the end of the Sung dynasty in A.D. 1279. A general introduction discusses the major characteristics and forms of traditional Chinese poetry, while introductory essays to the individual chapters outline the history of poetic development in China over the centuries

    

    Adapted from Francis Woodman Cleaves' erudite translation, it is presented here as a narrative poem in colloquial English. An overview of medieval Asia, maps, lineage charts, a glossary of proper names, and a bibliography are included.

    

    

    The plot unfolds during a time of great turmoil: the rise of Iraqi nationalism and anti-Jewish sentiment fueled by Nazi propaganda; the Far�d, a bloody pogrom carried out against Jewish residentsof Baghdad in 1941; and the founding of Israel in 1948. These pivotal events profoundly affected Muslim-Jewish relationships, forever changing the nature of the Jewish experience in Iraq and eventually leading to a mass exodus of Iraqi Jews to Israel in 1951.Tenants and Cobwebs deftly narrates the lives of Jewish characters who refuse to leave Baghdad despite these tumultuous times as well as those who are compelled to leave but nonetheless cling to the life they know. While the Jewish residents appear to live peacefully and harmoniously in the same Baghdadapartment complex as their Muslim neighbors, Naqqash gives voice to theirconflicting thoughts and feelings, revealing the deepening tensions between the two groups. His innovative use of Baghdadi Jewish and Muslim dialects captures the complex and nuanced emotions of his characters. Masliyah's skillful translation gives English-language readers access to one of the most imaginativeand ambitious Middle Eastern authors of the twentieth century.

    Haiku are not very amenable to a chronological treatment. Haiku are moments of vision, and the history of moments is hardly possible. If we were to choose verses which are typical of each poet, it would not be so difficult to make out some sort of development, but if it is the best verses which we select, there must a sameness throughout, a more or less constant level of excellence in which it is difficult to distinguish one writer from another.A compromise has been effected by choosing the best of as many writers as possible, thus illustrating the ups and downs of haiku history. The religious naturalism and profound simplicity of Basho, the versatility of Buson, the artfully artless art of Issa, the objective dryness yet pregnancy of Shiki, and the decadence of all later writers is thus not obscured. A fair number of not first-class verses being inevitably included, the reader, making a virtue of necessity, may actually learn more about the nature of haiku by considering the failures and near-hits rather than the successes.

    In this profound and sensitive study, Maurice Pinguet carefully reconstructs this tradition of voluntary death and relates it to other aspects of Japanese culture and society.

    

    Describes the teachings of the Buddha, looks at Buddhism in India, Burma, Thailand, China, Korea, and Japan, and looks at Buddhist history, sects, shrines, and temples.

    

    Please use Authors Guild/BIP specs. author photo box: author has submitted photo to be used, on floppy disk, file name: doug1.tif author bio box: Douglas Valentine lives with his wife Alice in western Massachusetts. He is the author of The Phoenix Program, a shattering account of the most ambitious and closely guarded operation of the Vietnam War. book description box: In this extraordinary story of World War II, the author's father, who enlisted in the army at age 16, describes the experiences that would affect the course of his life. Douglas Valentine tells of his capture by the Japanese in the fetid jungle of New Guinea, as well as his internment with Australian and British prisoners-of-war in the Hotel Tacloban a place where no mercy was shown or expected, and from which few came home alive. A celebration of camaraderie and a testament to "the soldier's faith", this is a story of murder, mutiny and an incredible military cover-up.