A teenage boy makes the mistake of falling in love with the much-protected daughter of his uncle, mischievously nicknamed after his hero Napoleon Bonaparte, the curmudgeonly self-appointed patriarch of a large and extended Iranian family in 1940s Tehran.

    There they meet all kinds of strange fairytale folk, including Fiona's parents the King and Queen, a wicked Fairy Godmother, and that fierce ogre-hunter, Puss-in-Boots. It's a hilarious adventure that proves that living happily ever after isn't as easy as the storybooks say.Scholastic's SHREK 2 books are sure to be a hit with kids and ogres of all ages--and you don't have to live in a swamp to get in on the fun!LICENSOR APPROVAL PENDING

    Now banned in Iran, this small masterpiece was eventually translated into several languages and introduces U.S. readers to the work of a brilliant Persian writer. With a tone that is stark, and bold, Women Without Men creates an evocative allegory of life for contemporary Iranian women. In the interwoven destinies of five women, simple situations such as walking down a road or leaving the house become, in the tumult of post-WWII Iran, horrific and defiant as women escape the narrow confines of family and society only to face daunting new challenges.Now in political exile, Shahrnush Parsipur lives in the Bay Area. She is the author of several short story collections including Touba and the Meaning of Night.

    With the comprehension of a typical 9-year-old, Liesel Merminger struggles to survive with a foster family in Nazi Germany. Books and the words within become Liesel’s strongest tool as she learns to read and fight for her life. Young adults learning about the Holocaust can gain an insider’s perspective from this fictional portrayal. Readers are taken on an emotional journey narrated by Death. What makes this book stand out against other WWII fiction novels? Markus Zusak focuses on the children who barely understand the changes taking place in the world. A poetic tone enhances the flow of the story, and the characters will haunt your thoughts long after you finish reading. In addition to the positive and negative aspects, this review covers the author’s backstory to give you insight into his knowledge of the era. With a list of awards the book has received and quotes from expert reviewers, you will gain a better idea of how Markus Zusak's The Book Thief will resonate with you.

    On the day of his father's death, Ahmad listens closely as the seemingly immortal elder tells him the tale of a centuries-old family curse . . . and the boy's own fated role in the story.Ahmad grows up to suspect that something must be interfering with his family, as he struggles to hold them together through decades of famine, loss, and political turmoil in Iran. As the world transforms around him, each turn of Ahmad's life is a surprise: from street brawler, to father of two unusually gifted daughters; from radical poet, to politician with a target on his back. These lives, and the many unforgettable stories alongside his, converge and catch fire at the center of the Revolution.Exploring the brutality of history while conjuring the astonishment of magical realism, The Immortals of Tehran is a novel about the incantatory power of words and the revolutionary sparks of love, family, and poetry--set against the indifferent, relentless march of time.

    Once there, he was to copy a three-thousand-year-old cuneiform inscription—an order of the first king of Persia—as a means of freeing himself from his emotional confinement. For the remainder of his life, Aga Akbar used these cuneiform characters to fill a notebook with writings only he could understand. Years later, his son, Ishmael—a political dissident in exile—is attempting to translate the notebook . . . and in the process tells his father's story, his own, and the story of twentieth-century Iran.A stunning and ambitious novel by a singular literary talent, My Father's Notebook is at once a masterful chronicle of a culture's troubled voyage into modernity and the poignant, timeless tale of a son's enduring love.

    These and other hitherto unfamiliar stories of directors belonging to the 100 crore club like Rohit Shetty and Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra; the adventurous Kabir Khan; and the maverick, Mahesh Bhatt take us through the unusual lives of 15 filmmakers of extraordinary films. Sonia Golani achieves the incredible by sitting each director down to candidly discuss the hype around the Oscars; the exclusivity of the 100 crore club ; effect of corporatization and much more. Decoding Bollywood is more about demystifying the world of Bollywood than a mere decoding of 15 directors who have created benchmarks in their respective genres for generations to follow.

    In spare lines, Abdolmalekian conjures surreal, cinematic images that pan wide as deftly as they narrow into intimate focus. Time is a thread come unspooled: pain arrives before the wound, and the dead wait for sunrise.Abdolmalekian resists definitive separations between cause and effect, life and death, or heaven and hell, and challenges our sense of what is fixed and what is unsettled and permeable. Though the speakers in these poems are witnesses to the deforming effects of grief and memory, they remain alive to curiosity, to the pleasure of companionship, and to other ways of being and seeing. Lean Against This Late Hour illuminates the images we conjure in the face of abandonment and ruin, and finds them by turns frightening, bewildering, ethereal, and defiant. "This time," a disembodied voice commands, "send us a prophet who only listens."

    His tolerant and humanist philosophy wanted to reconcile the religions of his time. It earned him persecution, torment and hatred...

    Following in the maverick mold of Quentin Tarentino, Spike Lee, and Richard Rodriguez, Joe Queenan becomes an auteur and, in the process, funnier than ever, as he tries to master the art of writing, directing, scoring, casting, and marketing a movie--all by himself.

    This literary rendering of the life of Jesus Christ has courted controversy since its publication by depicting a Christ far more human than the one seen in the Bible. He is a figure who is gloriously divine but earthy and human, a man like any other—subject to fear, doubt, and pain. In elegant, thoughtful prose Nikos Kazantzakis, one of the greats of modern literature, follows this Jesus as he struggles to live out God’s will for him, powerfully suggesting that it was Christ’s ultimate triumph over his flawed humanity, when he gave up the temptation to run from the cross and willingly laid down his life for mankind, that truly made him the venerable redeemer of men. “Spiritual dynamite.” —San Francisco Chronicle “A searing, soaring, shocking novel.” —Time

    To her horror, she found herself and her four-year-old daughter, Mahtob, virtual prisoners of a man rededicated to his Shiite Moslem faith, in a land where women are near-slaves and Americans despised. Their only hope for escape lay in a dangerous underground that would not take her child.

    Dawood in Penguin Classics.The tales told by Scheherazade over a thousand and one nights to delay her execution by the vengeful King Shahryar have become among the most popular in both Eastern and Western literature. From the epic adventures of 'Aladdin and the Enchanted Lamp' to the farcical 'Young Woman and her Five Lovers' and the social criticism of 'The Tale of the Hunchback', the stories depict a fabulous world of all-powerful sorcerers, jinns imprisoned in bottles and enchanting princesses. But despite their imaginative extravagance, the Tales are also anchored to everyday life by their bawdiness and realism, providing a full and intimate record of medieval Eastern world.In this selection, N.J. Dawood presents the reader with an unexpurgated translation of the finest and best-known tales, preserving their spirited narrative style in lively modern English. In his introduction, he discusses their origins in the East and their differences from Classical Arabic literature, and examines English translations of the tales since the eighteenth century.If you enjoyed Tales from the Thousand and One Nights, you might like Snorri Sturlson's The Prose Edda, also available in Penguin Classics.

    The title novella, "Raise the Red Lantern," which became a critically acclaimed film, tells the story of Lotus, a young woman whose father's suicide forces her to become the concubine of a wealthy merchant. Crushed by loneliness, despair, and cruel treatment, Lotus finds her descent into insanity both a weapon and a refuge."Nineteen Thirty-Four Escapes" is an account of a family's struggles during one momentous year; plagued by disease, death, and the shady promise of life in a larger town, the family slowly disintegrates.Finally, "Opium Family" details the last years of a landowning clan whose demise is brought about by corruption, lust, and treachery -- fruits of the insidious crop they harvest.

    He was one of the colonels closest to the Supreme Commander. When they meet, years later, far from their country of birth, a strange, equivocal relationship develops between them. Both their shared past of suffering and old romantic passions come rushing back accompanied by recollections of the perverse logic of violence that dominated the dicatorship under which they lived. The Man Who Snapped His Fingers is a novel of ideas, exploring power and memory by an important female writer from a part of the world where female voices are routinely silenced.