Being stranded in the past with no means to return to her own time, Zhang unwittingly embroiled in a power struggle among the emperor's sons, as well as being entangled in complicated romantic relationships with them. (from Wikipedia)白领俪人若曦独立自主，聪明醒目，意外穿越到清朝康熙年间。穿越、情仇、宫斗、浪漫、残酷……若曦带着对清史的洞悉卷入这场九王夺嫡的争斗中，不断地与命运抗争或妥协。她知道历史的走向，也知道站在谁一边才是明智的选择，可这里有她深爱之人，于是， 她只能处处为营，步步惊心。　　男人的成王败寇之间，会容得下一个女人的烙印吗？若曦离开后，那些她牵挂的人又发生了怎样的故事？请跟随桐华一同进入这个爱也惊心、恨也惊心的故事。

    Her no-nonsense aunt, a nun, appears by her side and suggests Yu-Jung accompany her on a charitable visit to death row. At her lowest ebb, Yu-Jung is resistant. But something compels her to go to the prison. There she meets Yun-Soo, a convicted murderer who will soon be put to death. Though she is repulsed by his crimes, something about the depth of his suffering strikes a chord in her. Shaken by their encounter, she returns to visit him the next week. And the next…Through their weekly, hour-long meetings, Yu-Jung and Yun-Soo slowly reveal to each other the dark secrets of their pasts and the hidden traumas that have shaped their lives. In doing so they form a deep, unbreakable bond, helping one another overcome their demons. But Yun-Soo’s hands are always in cuffs, the prison officers are always in the background, and they can never lose sight of the fact that their happy time together is tragically brief.Gracefully poetic and ideal for fans of Kyung-Sook Shin’s Please Look After Mother, Our Happy Time is a passionate and heartbreaking love story as well as an important, hard-hitting, and compassionate fable.

    Yu Hua, award-winning author of To Live, gives us a surreal tale of two brothers riding the dizzying roller coaster of life in a newly capitalist world. As comically mismatched teenagers, Baldy Li, a sex-obsessed ne’er-do-well, and Song Gang, his bookish, sensitive stepbrother, vow that they will always be brothers--a bond they will struggle to maintain over the years as they weather the ups and downs of rivalry in love and making and losing millions in the new China. Their tribulations play out across a richly populated backdrop that is every bit as vibrant: the rapidly-changing village of Liu Town, full of such lively characters as the self-important Poet Zhao, the craven dentist Yanker Yu, the virginal town beauty (turned madam) Lin Hong, and the simpering vendor Popsicle Wang.With sly and biting humor, combined with an insightful and compassionate eye for the lives of ordinary people, Yu Hua shows how the madness of the Cultural Revolution has transformed into the equally rabid madness of extreme materialism. Both tragic and absurd by turns, Brothers is a monumental spectacle and a fascinating vision of an extraordinary place and time.

    In this rich, astonishing collection, Yiyun Li illuminates how mythology, politics, history, and culture intersect with personality to create fate. From the bustling heart of Beijing, to a fast-food restaurant in Chicago, to the barren expanse of Inner Mongolia, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers reveals worlds both foreign and familiar, with heartbreaking honesty and in beautiful prose.“Immortality,” winner of The Paris Review’s Plimpton Prize for new writers, tells the story of a young man who bears a striking resemblance to a dictator and so finds a calling to immortality. In “The Princess of Nebraska,” a man and a woman who were both in love with a young actor in China meet again in America and try to reconcile the lost love with their new lives. “After a Life” illuminates the vagaries of marriage, parenthood, and gender, unfolding the story of a couple who keep a daughter hidden from the world. And in “A Thousand Years of Good Prayers,” in which a man visits America for the first time to see his recently divorced daughter, only to discover that all is not as it seems, Li boldly explores the effects of communism on language, faith, and an entire people, underlining transformation in its many meanings and incarnations.These and other daring stories form a mesmerizing tapestry of revelatory fiction by an unforgettable writer.From the Hardcover edition.

    Set in a poor village in Henan province, it is a deeply moving and beautifully written account of a blood-selling ring in contemporary China. Based on a real-life blood-selling scandal in eastern China, Dream of Ding Village is the result of three years of undercover work by Yan Lianke, who worked as an assistant to a well-known Beijing anthropologist in an effort to study a small village decimated by HIV/AIDS as a result of unregulated blood selling. Whole villages were wiped out with no responsibility taken or reparations paid. Dream of Ding Village focuses on one family, destroyed when one son rises to the top of the Party pile as he exploits the situation, while another son is infected and dies. The result is a passionate and steely critique of the rate at which China is developing and what happens to those who get in the way.

    The rain and snow have weathered me, and I too have weathered them’.At the end of the twentieth-century an old woman sits among the birch trees and thinks back over her life, her loves, and the joys and tragedies that have befallen her family and her people. She is a member of the Evenki tribe who wander the remote forests of north-eastern China with their herds of reindeer, living in close sympathy with nature at its most beautiful and cruel.An idyllic childhood playing by the river ends with her father’s death and the growing realisation that her mother’s and uncle’s relationship is not as simple as she thought. Then, in the 1930s, the intimate, secluded world of the tribe is shattered when the Japanese army invades China. The Evenki cannot avoid being pulled into the brutal conflict which marks the first step towards the end of their isolation…In The Last Quarter of the Moon, prize-winning novelist Chi Zijian, creates a dazzling epic about an extraordinary woman bearing witness not just to the stories of her tribe but also to the transformation of China.

    Published in 1925, Azaleas is the only collection Kim Sowol (1902-1934) produced during his brief life, yet he remains one of Korea's most beloved and well-known poets. His work is a delightful and sophisticated blend of the images, tonalities, and rhythms of traditional Korean folk songs with surprisingly modern forms and themes. Sowol is also known for his unique and sometimes unsettling perspective, expressed through loneliness, longing, and a creative use of dream imagery-a reflection of Sowol's engagement with French Symbolist poetry.Azaleas recounts the journey of a young Korean as he travels from the northern P'yongyang area near to the cosmopolitan capital of Seoul. Told through an array of voices, the poems describe the young man's actions as he leaves home, his experiences as a student and writer in Seoul, and his return north. Although considered a landmark of Korean literature, Azaleas speaks to readers from all cultures. An essay by Sowol's mentor, the poet Kim Ok, concludes the collection and provides vital insight into Sowol's work and life. This elegant translation by David R. McCann, an expert on modern Korean poetry, maintains the immediacy and richness of Sowol's work and shares with English-language readers the quiet beauty of a poet who continues to cast a powerful spell on generations of Korean readers.

    By inlcuding stories from neglected female, North Korean, and wolbuk writers (those who migrated to the North after 1945 and whose works were widely banned in South Korea) and by bringing politically engaged works together with experimental ones, this anthology articulates the ruptures and resolutions that have makred the peninsula.From sketches of desperate peasants in straitened circumstances to fast-moving, visceral tales of contemporary South Korea, the works in this collection bear witness to the dramatic transformations and events in twentieth-century Korean history, including Japanese colonial rule, civil war, and economic modernization in the South. The writers explore these developments through a variety of literary and political lenses, revealing wtih precision and poignancy their impact on Korean society and the lives of ordinary Koreans. This anthology includes an introduction, which synthesizes the key developments in modern Korean literature, and a comprehensive bibliography of Korean fiction in translation.

    756-c. 815), the bad boy of Abbasid poetry. One of the greatest of Arabic poets -- indeed, the greatest in the opinion of some critics -- Abu Nuwas wrote accomplished verse that demonstrated his technical mastery of all the major genres. However, his poems on wine (khamriyyat), homosexual love (mudhakkarat) and ribaldry (majouniyyat) are his best known and have earned him his notoriety. These poems often landed him in trouble and prison during his lifetime and, even today, are still subject to censorship by the guardians of public morality. As his talent makes him difficult to ignore, he is frequently subject to misrepresentation. Abu Nuwas' poetry is characterised by an astonishing lack of inhibition and one of the most attractive features of his diwan is the extent to which his verse reveals its author's personality. What emerges is a likeable, if rather louche, character with an outrageous sense of humour, sharp wit, unaccompanied by malice, and considerable sensibility who let no convention save, on occasion, the order of the caliph, restrain him in his pursuit of life's sensual pleasures. In his khamriyyat, Abu Nuwas offers a glimpse of the hedonistic and dissipated world he inhabited: the world of Baghdad high society at the zenith of the Abbasid caliphate. Yet there is also a modern and up-to-date feel about his poetry that makes it ideal for presentation to an English-speaking readership, some twelve centuries after his death.

    We journey with her as she recounts a lifetime of comforting rituals, tantalizing textures, colors, and fragrances, exquisite jewels and adornments, and assorted beauty and health secrets passed through generations of women by word of mouth.In Almond Eyes, Lotus Feet, Sharada Dwivedi, a native of India, and Shalini Devi Holkar, an Indian princess by marriage, draw on the oral histories of privileged Indian women to capture and revive their many wonderful and wise beauty traditions. The result is a rich cultural tapestry, filled with ancient remedies, recipes, and tonics used to soften skin, silken hair, enrich the body, and lift the spirit like no store-bought products can. Additionally, the book offers a glossary of plants, flowers, spices, and grains and simple home remedies for women in all stages of life—from puberty to pregnancy to menopause—including:Almond-Saffron for cleansing and exfoliationPapaya-Mint-Tea for acne and pimplesCream & Honey for dry skin and wrinklesCress & Rosewater for post-natal strengthTulsi Kadha (Basil Tea) for coughs or morning sicknessReplete with gorgeous photos and illustrations from a bygone era, Almond Eyes, Lotus Feet is a treasure trove of time-honored health and beauty customs that will delight the senses of modern women everywhere.

    It is also the city of poets, the city of love, longing, sin and splendour. This anthology brings together verse and prose: essays, stories, chronicles and profiles by people who have shared a relationship with Lahore. From the mystical poems of Madho Lal Hussain and Bulleh Shah to Iqbal’s ode and Faiz’s lament, from Maclagan and Aijazuddin’s historical treatises and Kipling’s ‘chronicles’ to Samina Quraeshi’s intricate portraits of the Old City and Irfan Husain’s delightful account of Lahori cuisine, City of Sin and Splendour is a marriage of the sacred and profane.While Pran Nevile paints a vivid sketch of Lahore’s Hira Mandi, Shahnaz Kureshy brings alive the legend of Anarkali and Khalid Hasan pays a tribute to the late ‘melody queen’ Nur Jehan. Mohsin Hamid’s essay on exile, Bina Shah’s account of the Karachi vs Lahore debate and Emma Duncan’s piece on elections are essential to the understanding of modern-day Lahore.But the city is also about Lahore remembered. Ved Mehta and Krishen Khanna write about ‘going back’ as Khushwant Singh writes about his pre-Partition years in Lahore. Sara Suleri’s memories of her hometown, the landscapes of Bapsi Sidhwa’s fiction, Khaled Ahmed’s homage to Intezar Hussain and Urvashi Butalia’s Ranamama are tributes to memory as much as they are tributes to remarkable lives and unforgettable places.Including fiction old and new—from Manto and Chughtai to Ashfaq Ahmed and Zulfikar Ghose; Saad Ashraf and Sorayya Khan to Mohsin Hamid and Rukhsana Ahmad, City of Sin and Splendour is a sumptuous collection that reflects the city it celebrates.

    Translators include Jadunath Sarkar, C.F. Andrews and Surendranath Tagore.Shesh Lekha is the last testament of Tagore. In most of these untitled poems the language is bare, the imagery striking and the expression spartan. The translator is the noted poet, media person and Member of Parliament, Pritish Nandy.Unlike a conventional autobiography, My Reminiscences (1911) is a series of 'memory pictures'. W.B. Yeats called it 'a rich and most valuable work.' Written with wit, wisdom and more than a little self-mockery, it gives a unique and enduring insight into the life of the great literary genius.

    He was dedicated to the study of Plato and Aristotle, writing comprehensive commentaries on the great Greek philosophers who introduced Europe to the breadth of Greek philosophy. Known as one of the greatest interpreters of Aristotle, he provided a link between ancient and modern thought. Supports history-social science context standards mandating exploration of intellectual exchanges and contributions of Muslim scholars, and their influence on the science, geography, mathematics, philosophy, and medicine of later civilizations.

    Japan Style introduces 20 special residences. With more than 200 color photographs, this book showcases the stunning beauty of old homes, and reveals how they are cared for by their owners.Traditional Japanese homes, with superbly crafted fine wood, great workmanship and seasonal interior arrangements, have an aesthetic of infinite simplicity. Unlike Japanese inns and historical buildings, the houses featured in this book are private property and are not open to public viewing. Japan Style offers a rare glimpse into the intimate world of the everyday Japanese and fascinating insight into the traditional architecture of Japan.