They subtly merge the world of reason with the realm of the uncanny and exemplify the period's fascination with the strange and the grotesque. They were also the inspiration for Mizoguchi Kenji's brilliant 1953 film Ugetsu.The title Ugetsu monogatari (literally "rain-moon tales") alludes to the belief that mysterious beings appear on cloudy, rainy nights and in mornings with a lingering moon. In "Shiramine," the vengeful ghost of the former emperor Sutoku reassumes the role of king; in "The Chrysanthemum Vow," a faithful revenant fulfills a promise; "The Kibitsu Cauldron" tells a tale of spirit possession; and in "The Carp of My Dreams," a man straddles the boundaries between human and animal and between the waking world and the world of dreams. The remaining stories feature demons, fiends, goblins, strange dreams, and other manifestations beyond all logic and common sense.The eerie beauty of this masterpiece owes to Akinari's masterful combination of words and phrases from Japanese classics with creatures from Chinese and Japanese fiction and lore. Along with The Tale of Genji and The Tales of the Heike, Tales of Moonlight and Rain has become a timeless work of great significance. This new translation, by a noted translator and scholar, skillfully maintains the allure and complexity of Akinari's original prose.

    At night, music floated out over villages and gorges far into the early hours. Now the General's son has bestowed it upon the disciplined Sisters of Mary. Beginning work in the orchards and opening a school and a dispensary for the mountain people, the small band of Sisters are depended for help on the English agent, Mr Dean. But his charm and insolent candour are disconcerting. When he says bluntly 'This is no place for a nunnery', it is as if he already knows their destiny ...

    Since the 1980s, Eliza Haywood's literary works have been gaining in recognition and interest. She wrote and published over seventy works during her lifetime including fiction, drama, translations, poetry, conduct literature and periodicals. Haywood is a significant figure of the long 18th century as one of the important founders of the novel in English. Her writing career began in 1719 with the first two installments of Love in Excess. Many of her works were published anonymously. Amongst her other works are Fantomina; or, Love in a Maze (1724), The Fortunate Foundlings (1744), Life's Progress Through the Passions; or, The Adventures of Natura (1748) and The History of Miss Betsy Thoughtless (1751).

    The Naxalbari Movement is gathering strength in Bengal. Young men and women have left their homes, picked up arms to free land from the clutches of feudal landlords and the state, and return them to oppressed landless farmers. They are being arrested en masse and thrown into high-security jails. In one such jail, five Naxals are meticulously planning a jailbreak. They must free themselves if the revolution is to continue. But petty thief Bhagoban, much too happy to serve frequent terms for free food and shelter, has been planted by Jailor Bireshwar Mukherjee among them as a mole. Only, Bhagoban seems to be warming up to them. There’s Gunpowder in the Air is a searing investigation into what deprivation and isolation can do to human idealism. And Manoranjan Byapari is perhaps the most refreshing voice to emerge from Bengal in recent times.

    Using his own experiences as a journalist and propagandist with the Red Army during the war against Poland, Babel brings to life an astonishing cast of characters from the exuberant, violent era of early Soviet history: commissars and colonels, Cossacks and peasants, and among them the bespectacled, Jewish writer/intellectual, observing it all and trying to establish his role in the new Russia.Drawn from the acclaimed, award-winning Complete Works of Isaac Babel, this volume includes all of the Red Cavalry cycle; Babel's 1920 diary, from which the material for the fiction was drawn; and his preliminary sketches for the stories—the whole constituting a fascinating picture of a great writer turning life into art.

    Brought together in this volume, these stories represent an unprecedented accomplishment in American literature. In their iconoclasm and needle-sharp irony, their formal and thematic ingenuity and element of surprise, they differ markedly from the fiction admired in Bierce's time. Readers familiar with the classic An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge will want to turn to Bierce's other Civil War stories. Also included here are his horror stories, among them The Death of Halpin Frayser and The Damned Thing, and such tall tales as Oil of Dog and A Cargo of Cat.

    An accomplished Kshatriya princess who falls in love with and dares to choose the sutaputra over Arjun, Uruvi must come to terms with the social implications of her marriage and learn to use her love and intelligence to be accepted by Karna and his family. Though she becomes his mainstay, counselling and guiding him, his blind allegiance to Duryodhana is beyond her power to change. The story of Uruvi and Karna unfolds against the backdrop of the struggle between the Pandavas and the Kauravas. As events build up leading to the great war of the Mahabharata, Uruvi is a witness to the twists and turns of Karna's fate; and how it is inextricably linked to divine design. A splendid saga from the pages of the Mahabharata, Karna's Wife: The Outcast s Queen brings its characters alive in all their majesty.

    Since she left home, Sonya has lived on the run, free of any ties, while her soft-spoken sister, Trisha, has created a perfect suburban life, and her ambitious sister, Marin, has built her own successful career. But as these women come together, their various methods of coping with a terrifying history can no longer hold their memories at bay.Buried secrets rise to the surface as their father—the victim of humiliating racism and perpetrator of horrible violence—remains unconscious. As his condition worsens, the daughters and their mother wrestle with private hopes for his survival or death, as well as their own demons and buried secrets. Told with forceful honesty, Trail of Broken Wings reveals the burden of shame and secrets, the toxicity of cruelty and aggression, and the exquisite, liberating power of speaking and owning truth.

    The story recounts the love between his new sister-in-law Jamilia and a local crippled young man, Daniyar, while Jamilia's husband, Sadyk, is away at the front during World War II.Based on clues in the story, it takes place in northwestern Kyrgyzstan, presumably Talas Province. The story is backdropped against the collective farming culture which was early in its peak in that period.Chingiz Aïtmatov was born in Kyrgyzstan in 1928. His work appeared in over one hundred languages, and received numerous awards, including the Lenin Prize. He was the Kyrgyz ambassador to the European Union, NATO, UNESCO and the Benelux countries.Translated by James Riordan.

    The professional meeting explodes into an intense, passionate relationship. Prague in winter is a beautiful and moody setting to the feverish love affair. The complicated and inevitably short-lived romance is poignant and deeply moving in its telling by the master of the modern Hindi novel, Nirmal Verma.This book is translation of original novel in Hindi, called Ve Din.

    At the heart of Chang's achievement is her short fiction—tales of love, longing, and the shifting and endlessly treacherous shoals of family life. Written when Chang was still in her twenties, these extraordinary stories combine an unsettled, probing, utterly contemporary sensibility, keenly alert to sexual politics and psychological ambiguity, with an intense lyricism that echoes the classics of Chinese literature. Love in a Fallen City, the first collection in English of this dazzling body of work, introduces American readers to the stark and glamorous vision of a modern master.

    Forced to work as a servant in the home of her uncle, a rich rug designer in the court of the Shah, the young woman blossoms as a brilliant designer of carpets. But while her talent flourishes, her prospects for a happy marriage grow dim, and she finds herself faced with a daunting decision--to forsake her own dignity or to risk everything in an effort to maintain it.Both a sweeping love story and a luminous portrait of a city, The Blood of Flowers is the mesmerizing historical novel of an ill-fated young woman whose gift as a rug designer transforms her life. Illuminated with glorious detail of Persian rug-making, and brilliantly bringing to life the sights sounds and life of 17th-century Isfahan, The Blood of Flowers has captured readers' imaginations everywhere as a timeless tale of one woman's struggle to live a life of her choosing.

    Some of her most acclaimed work is set there. Collected in this volume are "The Light in the Piazza, " which is her signature piece, and six other Italian tales in which her American characters encounter and respond to the mysteries of Italian mores. Her plots are so alluring and enigmantic that the great Boccaccio would have been charmed by their delightful ironies and their sinister contrasts of dark and light. Elizabeth's Spencer's exceptional artisty has merited renown for her as one of America's best writers of short stories.

    This magnificent novel juxtaposes geographically distant places, brilliant and playful reflections, and a variety of styles, to take its place as perhaps the major achievement of one of the world’s truly great writers.

    This edition includes extensive notes on Indian myths, religion, social customs, and the Independence movement which fill out the background for the American reader's more complete understanding and enjoyment.