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

    

    Included are extensive notes, a preface by renowned translator Red Pine, a findings list, and photographs of the cave and surrounding area where Han Shan (“Cold Mountain”) lived.Cold Mountain is one of the most revered poets in China. He was a Taoist/Buddhist hermit who begged for food at temples, often sang and drank with cowherds, and became an immortal figure in the history of Chinese literature and Zen. His poems were written twelve-hundred years ago on the rocks, trees, and temple walls of China’s Tientai Mountains. This revised edition also includes poems by Han Shan’s colleagues, Pickup (Shih-te) and Big Stick (Feng-kan), translated here for the first time.As Red Pine begins his Preface, “If China’s literary critics were put in charge of organizing a tea for their country’s greatest poets of the past, Cold Mountain would not be on many invitation lists. Yet no other poet occupies the altars of China’s temples and shines, where his statue often stands alongside immortals and bodhisattvas. He is equally revered in Korea and Japan. And when Jack Kerouac dedicated The Dharma Bums to him in 1958, Cold Mountain became the guardian angel of a generation of Westerners as well.”Reviews of Red Pine's Collected Songs of Cold Mountain:”The translator’s preface describes his rendition of the life of Cold Mountain, offering an excellent historical and philosophical context for the simple yet profound poems attributed to the poet."—Library Journal“These are poems one must taste fully and drink whole... The poems of Han-shan read like a journal or memoir, and they often work as Zen koans, challenging the mind to go beyond the words and reason.”—Parabola“Red Pine... has given us the first full collection of Han Shan’s songs in an idiom that is clear, graceful, and neutral enough to last... His translations are accurate and mirror the music of the originals... The Collected Songs of Cold Mountain is a considerable performance and a truly valuable book. Thanks to Copper Canyon's high standards of bookmaking, it is beautiful to hold and behold; thanks to Red Pine’s care, it will survive as the definitive text of Han Shan in English for many years. It belongs on the shelf of everyone with an interest in poetry and... should be opened often."—The Bloomsbury Review“An exquisite publication that captures the Taoist practice of passionate attention, of being still inside and relaxed in the comforts and discomforts around you, going nowhere else... We discover this in the poet’s vision and spirit, in the precision and balance of the translator’s scholarship and heart, and in the elegant wilderness of the bookmaker’s art around them. On every level this is a beautiful book.”—Judges’ comments on awarding the WESTAF Award in Translation“Cold Mountain’s colloquial poetry...sound like inspired raps—marvelously direct, with skips, jumps, verbal nudges and abrupt revelations... The volume is beautifully produced, with a long and careful introduction... This is an indispensable book.”—The Berkeley Monthly“More than anyone else, Red Pine has made [Han Shan’s] spontaneous poems accessible to Western readers... In this new, expanded edition, invaluable notes and an extensive new critical preface provide a contextual awareness, not just for the poems, but for their sources in Buddhist and Confucian culture.”—Inquiring MindRed Pine is one of the world’s leading translators of Chinese literary and religious texts. His other translations include Lao-tzu’s Taoteching (isbn 9781556592904) and Poems of the Masters: China’s Classic Anthology of T’ang and Sung Dynasty Verse (isbn 9781556591952).

    Pushing her boundaries with more challenging technical poetry writing, she hopes her readership would appreciate Daylight Dialogues as much as they did Midnight Monologues.Paperback is already available in Malaysia, Singapore and the Philippines and has reached the Best seller's list.

    The poem started out as a simple observation of the snow in moonlight, and turned into a poem with more to offer. I'm offering it free to my readers. I've had it on my blog, where it's gotten much response, and wanted to give everyone another way to access it.

    He ate idiosyncratically. He became increasingly sexually promiscuous as he aged. He would stay up much of the night, sleep during much of the day, and at times he would postpone sleep, remaining awake for thirty-six hours or more, until tension and exhaustion overcame him.Yet many people who met Mao came away deeply impressed by his intellectual reach, originality, style of power-within-simplicity, kindness toward low-level staff members, and the aura of respect that surrounded him at the top of Chinese politics. It would seem difficult to reconcile these two disparate views of Mao. But in a fundamental sense there was no brick wall between Mao the person and Mao the leader. This biography attempts to provide a comprehensive account of this powerful and polarizing historical figure.

    Everytime, he looked at me, it broke my heart a little bit more.Everytime he went away, I wrote.When he came back, I lived again.And in the end it fell apart.

    "Mr. Tate is an elegant and anarchic clown. A lord of poetic misrule with a serious, subversive purpose."-John Ash, New York Times Book Review "Tate brings to his work an extravagantly surrealistic imagination and a willingness to let his words take him where they will. Nonchalant in the midst of radical uncertainty, he handles bizarre details as though they were commonplace facts. [Tate's poetry draws upon] so rich a fund of comic energy that is may well prove an antidote to the anxiety some readers feel with poems that refuse to lend themselves to instant analysis."-David Lehman, Washington Post Book World

    Apart from superior military power, close coordination between the political leadership and the military and the ability to take quick decisions, China has potent anti-satellite and cyber warfare capabilities. Even more shockingly, regardless of popular opinion, India today is not even in a position to win a war against Pakistan. This has nothing to do with Pakistan’s nuclear weapons. It is because while India has been focused on building military force (troops and materiel needed to wage war) Pakistan has built military power (learning how to optimally utilize its military force). In this lies the difference between losing and winning. Far from being the strong Asian power of its perception, India could find itself extremely vulnerable to the hostility of its powerful neighbors. In Dragon On Our Doorstep, Pravin Sawhney and Ghazala Wahab analyse the geopolitics of the region and the military strategies of the three Asian countries to tell us exactly why India is in this precarious position and how it can transform itself through deft strategy into a leading power.The most populous countries and fastest growing economies in the world—India and China—have cultural and economic relations that date back to the second century bc. But over the years, despite the many treaties and agreements between the two nations, border clashes (including the disastrous 1962 war) and disagreements over Tibet and Jammu and Kashmir have complicated the relationship. For decades China kept a low profile. However, since 2008, when it was recognized as an economic power, China has become assertive. Today, this Himalayan balancing act of power is clearly tilted towards China, in whose view there is room for only one power in Asia. In this rise, Pakistan has emerged as China’s most trusted and crucial partner. The partnership between China and Pakistan, whether in terms of military interoperability (ability to operate as one in combat), or geostrategic design (which is unfolding through the wide-sweeping One Belt One Road project), has serious implications for India. The best that India can do is try and manage the relationship so that the dragon’s rise is not at the cost of India.

    The book teaches that a person's softness is their biggest strength and that having a big heart is not always a bad thing and that a glimmer of light can be found in the darkest places.A Handful of Stars is raw and unapologetic, soft and kind, reflective and inspirational all at the same time. Some of Ruby's most loved poems are shared within the pages of this book, in hope that they will have the same effect on readers the second time as they did the first.

    From falling in love to overcoming adversity, celebrating a new born or learning to live with dignity: here is a book to inspire and to thrill through life's most magical moments. From William Shakespeare to Carol Ann Duffy, our most popular and best loved poets and poems are gathered in one essential collection, alongside many lesser known treasures that are waiting to be discovered. These are poems that help you to see the miraculous in the commonplace and turn the everyday into the exceptional - to discover, in Kipling's words, that yours is the Earth and everything that's in it.

    Give yourself a Chinese name, see how to haggle in the shops and test yourself to see if you know the key characters.

    Divided into four sections: love, loss, acceptance, and growth- the content serves the purpose of making you feel and finding the light at the end of the tunnel.