Passing through a glowing mirror, they gather in a magnifcent castle which becomes their playground and refuge during school hours. The students are tasked with locating a key, hidden somewhere in the castle, that will allow whoever finds it to be granted one wish. At this moment, the castle will vanish, along with all memories they may have of their adventure. If they fail to leave the castle by 5 pm every afternoon, they will be eaten by the keeper of the castle, an easily provoked and shrill creature named the Wolf Queen.Delving into their emotional lives with sympathy and a generous warmth, Lonely Castle in the Mirror shows the unexpected rewards of reaching out to others. Exploring vivid human stories with a twisty and puzzle-like plot, this heart-warming novel is full of joy and hope for anyone touched by sadness and vulnerability.

    He does not have friends—the two almond-shaped neurons located deep in his brain have seen to that—but his devoted mother and grandmother aren’t fazed by his condition. Their little home above his mother’s used bookstore is decorated with colorful post-it notes that remind him when to smile, when to say "thank you," and when to laugh. Yunjae grows up content, even happy, with his small family in this quiet, peaceful space.Then on Christmas Eve—Yunjae’s sixteenth birthday—everything changes. A shocking act of random violence shatters his world, leaving him alone and on his own. Struggling to cope with his loss, Yunjae retreats into silent isolation, until troubled teenager Gon arrives at his school and begins to bully Yunjae. Against all odds, tormentor and victim learn they have more in common than they realized. Gon is stumped by Yunjae’s impassive calm, while Yunjae thinks if he gets to know the hotheaded Gon, he might learn how to experience true feelings. Drawn by curiosity, the two strike up a surprising friendship. As Yunjae begins to open his life to new people—including a girl at school—something slowly changes inside him. And when Gon suddenly finds his life in danger, it is Yunjae who will step outside of every comfort zone he has created to perhaps become a most unlikely hero. The Emissary meets The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Nighttime in this poignant and triumphant story about how love, friendship, and persistence can change a life forever.

    Now he delivers Second Sister, an up-to-the-minute tale of a Darwinian digital city where everyone from tech entrepreneurs to teenagers is struggling for the top.A schoolgirl—Siu-Man—has committed suicide, leaping from her twenty-second floor window to the pavement below. Siu-Man is an orphan and the librarian older sister who’s been raising her refuses to believe there was no foul play—nothing seemed amiss. She contacts a man known only as N.—a hacker, and an expert in cybersecurity and manipulating human behavior. But can Nga-Yee interest him sufficiently to take her case, and can she afford it if he says yes?What follows is a cat and mouse game through the city of Hong Kong and its digital underground, especially an online gossip platform, where someone has been slandering Siu-Man. The novel is also populated by a man harassing girls on mass transit; high school kids, with their competing agendas and social dramas; a Hong Kong digital company courting an American venture capitalist; and the Triads, market women and noodle shop proprietors who frequent N.’s neighborhood of Sai Wan. In the end it all comes together to tell us who caused Siu-Man’s death and why, and to ask, in a world where online and offline dialogue has increasingly forgotten about the real people on the other end, what the proper punishment is.

    One impossible choice. Her daughter or her happiness ...When Caroline meets Kamal the attraction is instant. He's enchanting, charismatic and she can't wait to set up a new life with him in India. Both their families are against the union but Caroline is convinced they'll come round, especially when she gives birth to a beautiful daughter, Asha.Asha is an adorable child but Caroline, homesick and beginning to hate the remote Indian village they live in, struggles with motherhood. Kamal is hardly ever there and she feels more and more isolated. In the grips of severe depression, Caroline flees back to America, leaving Asha behind. Ten years later ...Caroline recovered from her illness, is consumed by thoughts of the daughter she abandoned. Desperate to find Asha, she reunites with Kamal, intent on tracking her down. Will they ever be able to find their lost daughter? If they have any chance, they must confront the painful truths of the past and a terrible secret that has been kept for many years, until now.

    The firstborn, the ‘original’ scion of Ikshvaku, the daughter of Dasharatha and Kaushalya, who came before Rama, Lakshmana, Bharata and Shatrughana. Shanta, as her named suggested, preferred solitude to her royal status of the princess of Ayodhya. She yearned for love—from her parents, who were obsessed with producing a male heir for their kingdom. After the passing of many years, when Dasharatha lies on his death bed pining for his son, Rama who has been banished to the forest for 14 long years, it is Shanta who is besides her father, but watches helplessly as Dasharatha doesn’t even recognize her. In this fascinating and hitherto unknown account, Shanta: The Story of Rama’s Sister, Anand Neelakantan tells the story of a woman who makes sacrifice her life’s mission, propelled by love, affection and a commitment to the land of her birth, Ayodhya.

     "Song of Praise for a Flower" traces a century of Chinese history through the experiences of one woman and her family, from the dark years of World War II and China’s civil war to the tragic Great Leap Forward, Cultural Revolution, and beyond. It is a window into a faraway world, a sweeping epic about China’s tumultuous transformation and a harrowing yet ultimately uplifting story of a remarkable woman who survives it all and finally finds peace and tranquility. Chu’s story begins in the 1920s in an idyllic home in the heart of China’s rice country. Her life is a struggle from the start. At a young age, she defies foot-binding and an arranged marriage and sneaks away from home to attend school. Her young adulthood is thrown into turmoil when the Japanese invade and ransack her village. Later her family is driven to starvation when Mao Zedong’s Communist Party seizes power and her husband is branded a ‘bad element.’ After Mao’s death in the 1970s, as China picks up the pieces and moves in a new direction, Chu eventually finds herself in a glittering city on the sea adjacent to Hong Kong, worlds away in both culture and time from the place she came from. “Fengxian Chu’s first-person account of growing up female in feudal rural China is ultimately as uplifting as it is heart wrenching. Beautiful and bravely written. Bravo.” – Michael J. Totten, author of Where the West Ends

    The five weird and wonderful tales collected here each unlock the many-tongued language of desire, whether it takes the form of hunger, lust, sudden infatuation or the secret longings of the heart.Selected from Haruki’s Murakami’s short story collections The Elephant Vanishes, Blind Willow Sleeping Woman and Men Without Women.

    Slight of build, shy by nature, prone to fits of depression, the 28-year-old Beijing photographer was nonetheless at the forefront of Chinese artists' battle for creative freedom. Like his champion Ai Weiwei, Ren was controversial in his homeland and wildly popular in the rest of the world. He said, -I don't really view my work as taboo, because I don't think so much in cultural context, or political context. I don't intentionally push boundaries, I just do what I do.- Why? Because his models, friends, and increasingly, fans, are naked, often outdoors, high in the trees or on the terrifyingly vertiginous rooftops of Beijing, stacked like building blocks, heads wrapped in octopi, body cavities sprouting phone cords and flowers, whatever enters his mind at the moment. He denies his intentions are sexual, and there is a clean detachment about even his most extreme images: the urine, the insertions, the many, many erections. In a 2013 interview VICE magazine asked, -there are a lot of dicks ... do you just like dicks?- Ren responded, -It's not just dicks I'm interested in, I like to portray every organ in a fresh, vivid and emotional way.- True though that may be, the penises Ren photographed are not just fresh and vivid, but unusually large, making one wonder just where he met his friends. In the same piece, Hang also stated, -Gender isn't important when I'm taking pictures, it only matters to me when I'm having sex, - making him a pioneer of gender inclusiveness. Young fans still eagerly flock to his website, Facebook, Instagram, and Flickr accounts. His photographs, all produced on film, have been the subject of over 20 solo and 70 group shows in his brief six-year career, in cities as disparate as Tokyo, Athens, Paris, New York, Copenhagen, Frankfurt, Vienna, and yes, even Beijing. He self-published 16 monographs, in tiny print runs, that now sell for up to $600. TASCHEN's Ren Hang is his only international collection, covering his entire career, with well-loved favorites and many never-before-seen photos of men, women, Beijing, and those many, many erections. We take solace remembering Ren's joy when he first held the book, shared by his long-time partner Jiaqi, featured on the cover.Text in English, French, and German

    But Ruttie was just sixteen and her outraged father forbade the match. But when Ruttie turned eighteen, they married and Bombay society, its riches and sophistication notwithstanding, was scandalized. Everyone sided with the Petits and Ruttie and Jinnah were ostracized. It was an unlikely union that few thought would last. But Jinnah, in his undemonstrative, reserved way was unmistakably devoted to his beautiful, wayward child-bride—as proud of her fashionable dressing as he was of her intelligence, her wide reading and her fierce commitment to the nationalist struggle. Ruttie, on her part, worshipped him and could tease and cajole the famously unbending Jinnah, whom so many people found intimidating and distant. But as the tumultuous political events increasingly absorbed him, Ruttie felt isolated and alone, cut off from her family, friends and community. The unremitting effort of submitting her personality to Jinnah’s, his frequent coldness, his preoccupation with politics and the law, took its toll. Ruttie died at twenty-nine, leaving her daughter, Dina and her inconsolable husband, who never married again. Sheela Reddy, well-known journalist and former books editor of Outlook magazine, uses never-before-seen personal letters of Ruttie and her close friends as well as accounts left by contemporaries and friends to portray this marriage that convulsed Indian society, with a sympathetic, discerning eye. A product of intensive and meticulous research in Delhi, Bombay and Karachi and based on first-person accounts and sources, Reddy brings the solitary, misunderstood Jinnah and the lonely, wistful Ruttie to life. A must-read for all those interested in politics, history and the power of an unforgettable love story.

    Raised around diasporic Korean communities, E. J. Koh describes her work as deeply influenced by the idea of jeong, which can be translated as a deep attachment, bond, and reciprocity for places, people, and things. The spirit of jeong permeates this collection as each poem draws astonishing connections and illuminates the bonds that hold across time and place.With evocative lyricism, Koh mixes the languages of science and emotion to compose some poems like chemistry equations that convert light into "reasonable dioxide" and then further transmogrify the formula into a complex understanding of the parent-child relationship. Through this alchemy the poet allows readers to see through the eyes of mothers, fathers, daughters, aunts, friends, and lovers: we see the tragedy of a sinking ferry, the hypocrisies of government agencies, the aftermath of war, and a very wide view through the Hubble space telescope. Demonstrating an ability to elicit profound emotional intensity, Koh crafts a book of poems that challenge, delight, and enrich.

    Korea continues to grapple with the shared memory of its Japanese and US occupations. The poems in ORDINARY MISFORTUNES incorporate actual testimony about cruelty against vulnerable bodies--including the wianbu, euphemistically known as "comfort women"--as the poet seeks to find places where brutality is overcome through true human connections. Emily Jungmin Yoon asks, Why do we write poems amid such violence? What can I, and what can poetry, do? Her response to those tough questions is a sequence of reverberating poems that blend documentary precision with impassioned witness, bringing to bear both scholarship and artistry.

    In his Introduction, Memon traces the evolution of the Urdu short story from its origins in the work of writers like Munshi Premchand the first professional short story writer in Urdu through the emergence of the Progressives in the late 1930s, whose writings were unabashedly political and underpinned their Marxist ideologies, to the post-Independence Modernist era, and today s generation of avant-garde, experimental writers of Urdu fiction. Every story in the anthology illustrates one or the other facet of the form in the Urdu literary tradition. But even more than for their formal technique and inventiveness, these stories have been included because of their power and impact on the reader. Death and poverty face off in Premchand's masterpiece The Shroud. In Khalida Asghar's The Wagon, a mysterious redness begins to cloak the sunset in a village by the Ravi. Behind closed doors and cracks in the windows lies desire but also a sense of queer foreboding in Naiyer Masud's Obscure Domains of Fear and Desire. The tragedy and horror of Partition are brought to life by Saadat Hasan Manto's lunatic (in Toba Tek Singh ) and the eponymous heroine of Rajinder Singh Bedi's Laajwanti. Despairing, violent, passionate, humorous, ironic and profound the fiction in The Greatest Urdu Stories Ever Told will imprint itself indelibly on your mind. M. U. Memon is a translator without parallel and this book, which brings together the best of short fiction in the literary Urdu tradition, is sure to be classic. This collection spans the entire spectrum of the Urdu literary tradition from Premchand, who is considered the first Urdu short-story writer, to contemporary writers like S. M. Ashraf and Tassaduq Sohail. In The Greatest Urdu Stories Ever Told, you will find much-loved gems like Premchand's Kafan , Rajinder Singh Bedi's Laajwanti , Saadat Hasan Manto's Toba Tek Singh as well as new classics like Sajid Rashid's Fable of a Severed Head and Anwer Khan's The Pose . This book is part of a continuing series that gave us the highly popular The Greatest Bengali Stories Ever Told.

    Molasky, University of MinnesotaIn the Woods of Memory is a powerful, thought-provoking novel that focuses on two incidents during the Battle of Okinawa, 1945: the sexual assault on Sayoko, 17, by four US soldiers and her friend Seiji’s attempt at revenge. Narrations through nine points of view, Japanese and American, from 1945 to the present day reveal the full complexity of events and how war trauma inevitably ripples through the generations.Akutagawa Prize–winner and activist Shun Medoruma was born in Okinawa. This is his first full-length work in English translation.

    In 2011, following an attack on his offices by the Pakistani Taliban, he took a five-year sabbatical to write books and worked as a political risk consultant. He has been widely quoted and regularly featured in major news outlets like The New York Times, USA Today, The Wall Street Journal, The Times, Le Monde, DW, Bloomberg, Reuters, CNN, BBC and NPR. His first novel, The Prisoner (2013), was longlisted for the DSC Prize for South Asian Literature 2015 and is now being adapted for a feature film. His second novel is The Spinner’s Tale (2015). In 2016, Omar returned to active duty as a Counter Terrorism Officer.

    

    It redraws the boundaries of working-class poetry for the new millennium by incorporating at its center issues like migration, globalization, and rank-and-file resistance. We hear in these poems what Zheng Xiaoqiong calls “a language of callouses.”  This isn’t a book about the lost industrial past; it’s a fervent testimony to the horrific, hidden histories of the 21st century’s working-class and a clarion call for a more cooperative and humane future.”—Mark Nowak, author of Coal Mountain ElementaryEleanor Goodman is a writer and translator. Her translation of work by Wang Xiaoni, Something Crosses My Mind, won the Lucien Stryk Translation Prize. Her first poetry collection is Nine Dragon Island.

    Nida, intelligent and lonely, has married into an affluent political family and is desperately searching for some meaning in her existence; and impulsive, lovely Sasha, from the ordinary middle-class, whose longing for designer labels and upmarket places is so frantic that she willingly consorts with rich men who can provide them. Nida and Sasha meet at the famous Daata Sahib dargah and connect-their need to understand why their worlds feel so alien and empty, bringing them together. On her frequent visits to the dargah, Nida meets the gentle, flute-playing hijra Bhanggi, who sits under a bargadh tree and yearns for acceptance and affection, but is invariably shunned. A friendship-fragile, tentative and tender-develops between the two, both exiles within their own lives; but it flies in the face of all convention and cannot be allowed. Faiqa Mansab's accomplished and dazzling debut novel explores the themes of love, betrayal and loss in the complex, changing world of today's Pakistan.

     Author William Craig traveled to three different continents, reviewed thousands of documents, and interviewed hundreds of survivors to write these New York Times–bestselling histories, bringing the Eastern Front and the Pacific Theater of World War II to vivid life.  The Fall of Japan masterfully recounts the dramatic events that brought an end to the Pacific War and forced a once-mighty nation to surrender unconditionally. From the ferocious fighting on Okinawa to the all-but-impossible mission to drop the second atom bomb, and from Franklin D. Roosevelt’s White House to the Tokyo bunker where tearful Japanese leaders first told the emperor the war was lost, Craig draws on Japanese and American perspectives to capture the pivotal events of these climactic weeks with spellbinding authority.  Enemy at the Gates chronicles the bloodiest battle of the war and the beginning of the end for the Third Reich. On August 5, 1942, giant pillars of dust rose over the Russian steppe, marking the advance of Hitler’s 6th Army. The Germans were supremely confident; in three years, they had not suffered a single defeat. The siege of Stalingrad lasted five months, one week, and three days. Nearly two million men and women died, and the 6th Army was completely destroyed. The Soviet victory foreshadowed Nazi Germany’s downfall and the rise of a communist superpower. Heralded by Cornelius Ryan, author of The Longest Day, as “the best single work on the epic battle of Stalingrad,” Enemy at the Gates was the inspiration for the 2001 film of the same name, starring Joseph Fiennes and Jude Law.

    In this powerful book, twelve survivors share their stories and the steps they took in their journey towards healing by breaking the silence. Their accounts expose the harsh realities of child sexual abuse and the pain it causes, while offering hope and encouragement to everyone who has been sexually abused as a child – and those who care about them.Compassionate and sensitively written, Survivors is a useful and inspiring tool for those who have been sexually abused as children. It also equips family, friends and caregivers to help survivors move forward with courage and confidence in their respective healing journeys.

    Kyoto's Zen heritage represents one of mankind's greatest achievements—recognized by the large number which have been declared UNESCO World Heritage Sites. Millions of visitors travel to Kyoto yearly in search of their secrets, and here for the first time is a comprehensive overview of every major site. Over 50 Japanese temples and gardens—including all World Heritage Sites—are captured in sensitive photos by acclaimed Kyoto-based photographer John Einarsen. A detailed introduction to each temple by local expert John Dougill includes information about special opportunities for visitors to the temples—such as early morning meditation sessions, temple food offerings and special green tea sets provided to enhance the contemplative experience—along with other "insider" information that no other guide provides. The foreword by Takafumi Kawakami, the deputy head priest of the respected Shunkoin Temple in Kyoto, serves to place the book in the context of eastern and western Buddhist thought and practice. His widely viewed TED Talk "How mindfulness can help you to live in the present" has been viewed by over 100,000 people.

    Japan, with all her treachery and greed, remains unsubdued. We must now devote all our strength and resources to the completion of our task, both at home and abroad.”Arthur knows that he is not, like many of his fellow conscripted airmen, about to be demobbed. He is to be sent to the Far East as a member of 31 Squadron RAF, which is equipped with a fleet of battered Dakotas ferrying supplies into remote jungle bases and bringing out a wretched human cargo from Japanese internment camps.Even after the Japanese surrender, it’s grim work for Brownlow and fellow crew members. They keep a stiff upper lip, but harmony is threatened with the arrival of a subversive Glaswegian docker Jock Patterson and his mutinous message.However, life is not without its lighter moments – and wireless operator Freddie falls in love with Nelli who, following her release from internment, is working with the RAF. Her Dutch origins hint at the country’s history under colonial rule. Resentment at centuries of colonisation, first by the West then by the Japanese, is coming to the surface, and the RAF men are soon to feel the backlash in the most horrific way possible.Freddie is dropped off by ‘U for Uncle’ at a base near where Nelli’s father has been detained, but the Dak fails to return to pick him up.What shocking news is about to emerge from Bekasi, where 'Uncle' forced landed? Can Wing Commander Brian Macnamara deal with the poisonous Patterson and get the squadron’s mission completed? How do men react when they discover a loved one at home has betrayed them? Will the conscripted men of 31 Squadron ever be able to cope in Civvy Street again?Ian Hall’s impressive Storm at Sunset portrays the RAF’s little-appreciated work in the aftermath of the Second World War – its all-too human face and the political and military backlash that affected even their essentially humanitarian mission.

    

    Now a college freshman, he falls in love for the first time. If it’s true that love conquers all, then will Caleb finally find the courage to reveal his secret?In this tale about family, friendship and self-discovery, find out how Caleb discovers the path to the freedom he’s always longed for. Here’s a hint: it involves doing things outside his comfort zone, such as joining a spoken word group!

    In his sixty-five years of unchallenged dominance as the most-loved Hindi film star, Dev Anand gave us several memorable hits like Guide, Taxi Driver, Hum Dono, Johny Mera Naam, and Hare Rama Hare Krishna.He was not only an exceptionally handsome and stylish hero. His ‘man of the future’ philosophy is worth emulating by persons of all generations. He neither celebrated his successes nor lamented over his failures. A Karma Yogi, in the true sense of the term, he produced, directed, and acted in a lead role in a movie at the age of eighty-eight, which is without parallel in the history of Bollywood.The book attempts to analyse why his philosophy of life is a source of inspiration for all. It also gives a detailed filmography from Hum Ek Hain to Charge Sheet, with a separate chapter on Guide, and a special write-up on his genius brother Vijay Anand.

    From loss and love to achievement and finding your way back to your family, everything is gloriously depicted as the protagonists navigate through incidents that have had a profound effect on their lives.Experience pessimism with 'Despondent', achievement with 'Dream Come True', laziness with 'Inertia', the bonds of family with 'Reins of Steel', and return where you belong with 'Always Home'.There is something in there for everyone!

    Bentley]The Island Mystery [George A. Birmingham]Four Max Carrados Detective Stories [Ernest Bramah Smith]The Wisdom of Father Brown, The Innocence of Father Brown [G.K Chesterton]The Secret Adversary [Agatha Christie]The Mysterious Affair at Styles [Agatha Christie]No Name [Wilkie Collins]The Woman in White [Wilkie Collins]Hunted Down [Charles Dickens]The Trial for Murder [Charles Dickens]The Mystery of Cloomber [Arthur Conan Doyle]The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes [Arthur Conan Doyle]The Spider [Hanns Heinz Ewers]The Middle Temple Murder [Joseph Smith Fletcher]Dead Men's Money [Joseph Smith Fletcher]The Red Thumb Mark [R. Austin Freeman]The Cat's Eye [R. Austin Freeman]The Honor of the Name [Émile Gaboriau]The Man Who Ended War [Hollis Godfrey]The Rome Express [Arthur Griffiths]Arson Plus [Samuel Dashiell Hammett]Desperate Remedies [Thomas Hardy]Green Tea [Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu]The Seven Secrets [William Le Queux]Eight Strokes of the Clock [Maurice Leblanc]The Phantom of the Opera [Gaston Leroux]The Lodger [Marie Adelaide Lowndes]The Affair at the Semiramis Hotel [A. E. W. Mason]The Mysterious Card Unveiled [Cleveland Moffett]The Mysterious Card [Cleveland Moffett]The Evil Shepherd [Edward Phillips Oppenheim]The Double Four [Edward Phillips Oppenheim]The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective [Catherine Louisa Pirkis]The Mystery of Marie Rogêt [Edgar Allan Poe]The Murders in the Rue Morgue [Edgar Allan Poe]The Black Cat [Edgar Allan Poe]The Green Eyes of Bâst [Sax Rohmer]Whose Body? [Dorothy Leigh Sayers]The Lady, or the Tiger? [Frank R. Stockton]Catherine: A Story [William Makepeace Thackeray]Tom Sawyer, Detective [Mark Twain]and more...

    After the near-fatal suicide attempts, the survivors are in the care of the Freudian Psychoanalyst Doctor Dev who works in a Break-up Clinic to accomplish his mission of providing succor to emotionally wounded persons.Will Doctor Dev be able to help Ajay, Karan and Nisha to come out of the emotional quagmire and move on?The Break-Up Clinic makes an attempt to answer the question: Why do some people suffer so much in love?

    From radically different backgrounds yet with a common legacy, having grown up in post-handover Hong Kong, these young people have little attachment to the era of British colonial rule or today's China. Instead, they see themselves as Hong Kongers, an identity both reinforced and threatened by the rapid expansion of Beijing's influence. Amid great political and social uncertainty, Generation HK is trying to build a brighter future. Theirs is a truly captivating coming-of-age story that reflects the bitter struggles beneath the gleaming facade of modern Hong Kong.

    A young woman finds the secret to save their doomed generation ship inside a children’s primer. Residents of Bukit Batok face a slow-motion disaster that threatens to turn them into living mathematical equations. Three Filipino siblings enter a black hole to save humanity from an enemy that uses words as weapons.The seventeen stories in this loosely-connected collection push the limits of form and trope, from realism to genre and experimental fiction. All speak of the unease of being between two worlds, of not quite fitting in, and also of the comfort of words and books, which illuminate our way through the darkness.