Maya, their gifted architect, had created for them three cities fortified with iron, silver and gold and the great lord Brahma himself had decreed that these cities would be indestructible, unless struck by a single arrow. The three cities, known together as Tripura, orbited the earth and only once in a thousand years fell in a straight line, directly one above the other. Would Shiva be waiting to destroy them with a twang of his deadly bow?

    Although he died nearly 200 years ago, something about his work continues to haunt the twenty-first century. What is it about Blake that has so endured? In this illuminating essay, John Higgs takes us on a whirlwind tour to prove that far from being the mere New Age counterculture figure that many assume him to be, Blake is now more relevant than ever.

    It's a book that has remained current for over half a century, fighting off critics and changing tastes in fiction. But do even its biggest fans know all there is to appreciate about The Great Gatsby?Maureen Corrigan, the book critic for "Fresh Air" and a Gatsby lover extraordinaire, points out that while Gatsby may be the novel most Americans have read, it's also the ones most of us read too soon -- when we were "too young, too defensive emotionally, too ignorant about the life-deforming powers of regret" to really understand all that Fitzgerald was saying ("it's not the green light, stupid, it's Gatsby's reaching for it," as she puts it). No matter when or how recently you've read the novel, Corrigan offers a fresh perspective on what makes it so enduringly relevant and powerful. Drawing on her experience as a reader, lecturer, and critic, her book will be a rousing consideration of Gatsby: not just its literary achievements, but also its path to "classic" (its initial lukewarm reception has been a form of cold comfort to struggling novelists for decades), its under-acknowledged debt to hard-boiled crime fiction, its commentaries on race, class, and gender.With rigor, wit, and an evangelistic persuasiveness, Corrigan will leave readers inspired to grab their old paperback copies of Gatsby and re-experience this great novel in an entirely new light.

    With Gimson’s wonderful prose once again complemented by Martin Rowson’s inimitable illustrations, this lively and entertaining aide-memoire and work of satirical genius brings our parliamentary history to life as never before.

    This book investigates not only how feminists understand pornography, but also how feminists do porn—that is, direct, act in, produce, and consume one of the world's most lucrative and growing industries. With original contributions by Susie Bright, Candida Royalle, Betty Dodson, Nina Hartley, Buck Angel, and more, The Feminist Porn Book updates the debates of the porn wars of the 1980s, which sharply divided the women's movement, and identifies pornography as a form of expression and labor in which women and other minorities produce power and pleasure.Tristan Taormino is an award-winning author, columnist, editor, sex educator, and feminist pornographer. She is the author of seven books including The Ultimate Guide to Anal Sex for Women and Opening Up. She runs the adult film production company Smart Ass Productions and is an exclusive director for Vivid Entertainment.Celine Parreñas Shimizu is an associate professor of film and performance studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and founding editor of Camera Obscura. She is the author of Straitjacket Sexualities and the 2009 Cultural Studies Book Award winning, The Hypersexuality of Race.Mireille Miller-Young is assistant professor of feminist studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her forthcoming book, A Taste for Brown Sugar: Black Women, Sex Work, and Pornography (Duke University Press) examines African American women’s sex work in the porn industry.

    She claimed the police had inserted a stick inside her… Swaranpreet realised that she had been cruelly violated; He spoke a single sentence but repeated it twice in chaste Punjabi: ‘Please give me a turban? I want nothing else…’ These are voices begging for deliverance in the aftermath of Indira Gandhi’s assassination in October-November 1984 in which 2,733 Sikhs were killed, burnt and exterminated by lumpens in the country. Nilanjan Mukhopadhyay walks us through one of the most shameful episodes of sectarian violence in post Independent India and highlights the apathy of subsequent governments towards Sikhs who paid a price for what was clearly a state-sponsored riot. Poignant, raw and most importantly, macabre, the personal histories in the book reveal how even after three decades, a community continues to battle for its identity in its own country.

    The Christians have broken the truce and the Fifth Crusade has begun, the irate Saracens are expelling Christians and Jews from their lands, and desperate refugees are pouring into Jerusalem's port city of Acre which is expected to fall. There are coins to be earned carrying those most favoured by God to safety, meaning those with the most coins to pay for a place on one of the company's galleys. And the French governor of Acre wants to leave his young wife behind and flee with the chests of coins he collected from the city's Saracen merchants before he expelled them despite the bribes they paid him. It is a rollicking good story and a very good read.

    

    Book lovers, rejoice! In this love letter to all things bookish, Jane Mount brings literary people, places, and things to life through her signature and vibrant illustrations. Readers will:• Tour the world's most beautiful bookstores• Test their knowledge of the written word with quizzes• Find their next great read in lovingly curated stacks of books• Sample the most famous fictional meals• Peek inside the workspaces of their favorite authorsA source of endless inspiration, literary facts and recommendations, and pure bookish joy, Bibliophile is sure to enchant book clubbers, English majors, poetry devotees, aspiring writers, and any and all who identify as bookworms.

     A secret cargo is headed for Japan. The Japanese High Command has entrusted it to a veteran destroyer captain - the best in the Imperial Navy - and he will stop at nothing to see that it reaches its final destination... Carrier-based dive bombers could not stop it, nor could the guerilla-commandos of the Philippine Islands. Now, the submarine Wolffish is the last ditch hope of the Allied Command. Still shaken by a recent tragedy, and desperately low on fuel, torpedoes, and morale, the war-weary submarine and her eighty-man crew must pull together to track down and destroy the cargo before it reaches Japan, and changes the course of the war...

    The result is a frame-by-frame examination of the inimitable style that infuses every Kubrick movie, from the pitch-perfect hilarity of Lolita to the icy supremacy of 2001: A Space Odyssey to the baroque horror of The Shining. The book's beautiful design and dynamic arrangement of photographic stills offer a frame-by-frame understanding of how Kubrick constructed a film. What emerges is a deeply human study of one remarkable artist's nature and obsessions, and how these changed and shifted in his four decades as a filmmaker.

    Once seen as a thousand years of warfare, religious infighting, and cultural stagnation, they are now understood to be the vital connection between the past and the present. Along with the battles that helped shape the modern world are a rich heritage of architecture, arts, and literature, of empire and its dissolution. It was the era of the Crusades and the Norman Conquest, the Black Death and the fall of Constantinople. It is a landscape both familiar and foreign, dark and foreboding at times, but also filled with the promise and potential of the future.

    In six years in office he has committed forces to action in Kosovo, Iraq, Sierra Leone and Afghanistan. This work shows how Blair's government has sought to be at the forefront of a new and turbulent world order.

    This ride has legions of devoted fans and influenced tributes, spinoffs and an entire entertainment genre: the seasonal haunted house. Why is this?Boundless Realm is a wry tour of the creaky old house on the hill, brushing aside cobwebs, uncovering obscure corners, and prying up the floorboards in search of the answer. Not just an attraction history, this critical appreciation - written with a connoisseur's eye for detail - encompasses American history, popular culture and folklore, and a sharp understanding of design to make a case for The Haunted Mansion as the 20th century's definitive haunted house. Entertaining and opinionated, Boundless Realm will give you a new appreciation for Disney's ultimate cult attraction.

    It was such a radical idea that almost no one thought it would actually succeed, much less become a force in the worlds of music, television, film, fashion, sports, and even politics. But it did work. MTV became more than anyone had ever imagined.I Want My MTV tells the story of the first decade of MTV, the golden era when MTV's programming was all videos, all the time, and kids watched religiously to see their favorite bands, learn about new music, and have something to talk about at parties. From its start in 1981 with a small cache of videos by mostly unknown British new wave acts to the launch of the reality-television craze with The Real World in 1992, MTV grew into a tastemaker, a career maker, and a mammoth business. Featuring interviews with nearly four hundred artists, directors, VJs, and television and music executives, I Want My MTV is a testament to the channel that changed popular culture forever.