The story of a lost dog, and the discovery of first love on the streets of Jerusalem are portrayed here with a gritty realism that is as fresh as it is compelling.When awkward and painfully shy sixteen-year-old Assaf is asked to find the owner of a stray yellow lab, he begins a quest that will bring him into contact with street kids and criminals, and a talented young singer, Tamar, engaged on her own mission: to rescue a teenage drug addict.A runaway bestseller in Israel, in the words of the Christian Science Monitor: "It's time for Americans to fall in love with Someone to Run With."

    This anthology has two main objectives: to introduce students to a wide range of poetry in English from the last 400 years, and to provide them with guidance on how to approach poetry examinations. The poems are divided into six collections, not by theme or by historical period, but as satisfying small anthologies of twenty-two poems each. Clear guidance is given on what is expected in an essay for a poetry examination, and actual answers are reproduced which help the student analyse what kind of response gets good marks and why.

    Its popularity owes much to the lyricism of the prose, thepitch-perfect rendition of black vernacular English, and the memorable characters--most notably, Janie Crawford. Collecting the most widely cited and influential essays published on Hurston's classic novel over the last quarter century, this Casebook presents contesting viewpoints by Hazel Carby, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Barbara Johnson, Carla Kaplan, Daphne Lamothe, Mary Helen Washington, and Sherley Anne Williams. The volume also includes a statement Hurston submitted to a reference book on twentieth-century authors in 1942. As it records the major debates the novel has sparked on issues oflanguage and identity, feminism and racial politics, A Casebook charts new directions for future critics and affirms the classic status of the novel.

    Inspired by the poetry of Rumi, the great Sufi mystic, a restless young man heads out on an epic voyage of the heart that takes him from the hills of Florence to the mosques of Konya, Turkey, and into the heart of religious mysticism.

    Bergin.Illustrated with drawings by Aldo Salvadori

    A modern classic of literature in Japan, Supermarket is a novel of the human drama surrounding the management of a supermarket chain at a time when the phenomenon of the supermarket, imported postwar from the US, was just taking hold in Japan.  When Kojima, an elite banker resigns his job to help a cousin manage Ishiei, a supermarket in one of Japan’s provincial cities, a host of problems ensue.  Store employees are stealing products, the books are in disaray, and the workers seem stuck in old ways of thinking.  As Kojima begins to give all his time over to the relentless task of reforming the store’s management, a chance encounter with a woman from his childhood causes him to ask the age-old question: is the all encompassing pursuit of business success really worth it?  Sincere and naive in tone, Supermarket takes us back to a simpler, kinder time, and  skillfully presents the depictions of its characters alongside a wealth of information concerning Japanese post WWII recovery and industrialization.

    The stories are told in a country villa outside the city of Florence by ten young noble men and women who are seeking to escape the ravages of the plague. Boccaccio's skill as a dramatist is masterfully displayed in these vivid portraits of people from all stations in life, with plots that revel in a bewildering variety of human reactions.Translated with an Introduction and Notes by G. H. McWilliam

    Set in a facetious near-future that is both mind-bendingly bizarre and achingly familiar. Sayonara, Gangsters is an inventive novel about language, expression and the creative process that unfolds through hilarious sketches. The peaceful if bizarre life of a poetry teacher is forever transformed by a group of terrorists called "the gangsters" in what is, incredibly, a semi-autobiographical novel. On this literary gonzo trip in which a man of letters finds out, too late, that flirting with extremist politics can have unsavoury consequences for one's mind, we encounter the likes of Virgil, the refrigerator (a memorable three-dimensional character) and "Henry IV" the feline aficionado of books. Endlessly resourceful, relentlessly erudite, but always accessible, Sayonara, Gangsters is a unique masterpiece of literary postmodernism that aims to entertain rather than to intimidate. From the outrageous beginning, which reads like an oblique reference to the war on terror but is no such thing (it was written more than twenty years ago), to the sobering, devastating end, through the lyrical, poignant middle, Takahashi's legendary first novel is candy for your brain. Sayonara, Gangsters is a must-read for all fans of world literature, available for the first time in English.

    The young soldiers discover that the trials of war involve more than just opposing the enemy. The alien climate and terrain, the strange behavior of foreigners, the constant struggle to overcome homesickness and nostalgia, and the emotions stirred by the senselessness of war—all of these forces, new and baffling to the soldiers, contribute to their distress and disorientation.In the midst of these overwhelming challenges, they discover the power of music to make even the most severe situations tolerable—through their commander's ability to lead them in song. Even though they face the inevitability of defeat, singing the songs of their homeland revives their will to live. Through the story of these men and of the music that saw them through the war, Takeyama presents thought-provoking questions about political hostilities and the men who unleash them. Harp of Burma is Japan's classic novel of pathos and compassion in the midst of senseless warfare.Harp of Burma was made into a critically acclaimed movie (The Burmese Harp) by the celebrated director Ichikawa Kon.

    [Penguin Readers Level 6]

    This novel shows how the demands of her family force Else into the realization that everything has a price and morality has a most brittle veneer.

    He seeks to overthrow the old order and become a truly absolute—yet benevolent—dictator. His rival, the humble Yang Wen-li of the Free Planets Alliance, wishes to preserve democracy even if he must sacrifice his political ideals to defeat the Empire. Their political and military battles play out over a galactic chessboard in an epic saga fifteen centuries in the making!

    The world looked upon this monstrous creation of “human bombs” with disbelief but the young patriotic men of Japan who signed up for the terrifying attack missions of the kamikaze program were unstoppable. Women looked on with envy and frustration at their own inadequacies which allowed only men into the program, but did anyone of them really take the daring step of breaking this rule? "Japanese Rose" is a haunting story of the secret life and love of Sayuri Miyamoto, the woman who DID dare to take on the whole Japanese military to follow her dream of becoming a kamikaze pilot and paid dearly for that dream. “No one must ever know there was a female kamikaze pilot to dishonor and disgrace the discipline of the Japanese military so from today, you Sayuri Miyamoto are officially dead!”This book also takes readers on a sad journey through the ravages of war torn Japan seen from the eyes of a young woman who cherished the impossible and forbidden dream of becoming a female kamikaze pilot.“Who is this? And why do you call me by this name? It hasn’t been used for 60 years!” the crisp irritable voice had changed to a soft, quivering whisper like the moaning of an injured animal and it made Mayumi uncomfortable at her intrusion into someone’s obviously painful past.With these words, Sayuri Miyamoto finally broke the silence that had been imposed on her for decades. But History will never admit or accept her existence so was she real or a myth born of the feverish imagination of one woman with an unfulfilled dream?

    Unfolding through a series of letters written by an unnamed narrator, Last Words tells the story of a passionate relationship between two young women—their sexual awakening, their gradual breakup, and the devastating aftermath of their broken love. In a style that veers between extremes, from self-deprecation to pathos, compulsive repetition to rhapsodic musings, reticence to vulnerability, Qiu’s genre-bending novel is at once a psychological thriller, a sublime romance, and the author’s own suicide note.The letters (which, Qiu tells us, can be read in any order) leap between Paris, Taipei, and Tokyo. They display wrenching insights into what it means to live between cultures, languages, and genders—until the genderless character Zoë appears, and the narrator’s spiritual and physical identity is transformed. As powerfully raw and transcendent as Mishima’s Confessions of a Mask, Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, and Theresa Cha’s Dictée, to name but a few, Last Words from Montmartre proves Qiu Miaojin to be one of the finest experimentalists and modernist Chinese-language writers of our generation.