Long considered a masterpiece of the eerie & fantastic, Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio is a collection of supernatural-themed tales compiled from ancient Chinese folk stories by Songling Pu in the eighteenth century. These tales of ghosts, magic, vampirism, & other things bizarre & fantastic are an excellent Chinese companion to Lafcadio Hearn`s well-known collections of Japanese ghost stories Kwaidan & In Ghostly Japan. Already a true classic of Chinese literature & of supernatural tales in general, this new edition of the Herbert A. Giles translation converts the work to Pinyin for the first time &

Includes:: a new foreword by Victoria Cass that properly introduces the book to both readers of Chinese literature & of hair-raising tales best read with the lights turned low on a quiet night. Some of the stories found in these pages include: The Tiger of Zhaocheng The Magic Sword Miss Lianziang, the Fox-Girl The Quarrelsome Brothers The Princess Lily A Rip Van Winkle The Resuscitated Corpse Taoist Miracles A Chinese Solomon.

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When Daniel Kalder, acclaimed author of Lost Cosmonaut, descended into the sewers of Moscow in pursuit of the mythical lost city of tramps, he didn`t realise that he was embarking on a bizarre, year-long odyssey that would lead him thousands of miles across Russia to the Arctic Circle via the heart of Asia. After exploring the depths of Moscow`s ` Underground Planet`, Kalder chases down demons & exorcists in a post-Orange Revolution Ukraine, meets Vissaron Christ, one-time traffic cop, now messiah to thousands of followers in Siberia, enters the only wooden skyscraper on the planet & encounters a man with a bizarre secret that may explain everything... ...

Tsukiko is in her late 30s & living alone when one night she happens to meet one of her former high school teachers, ` Sensei`, in a bar. He is at least thirty years her senior, retired &, she presumes, a widower. After this initial encounter, the pair continue to meet occasionally to share food & drink sake, & as the seasons pass
- from spring cherry blossom to autumnal mushrooms
- Tsukiko & Sensei come to develop a hesitant intimacy which tilts awkwardly & poignantly into love. Perfectly constructed, funny, & moving, Strange Weather in Tokyo is a tale of modern Japan & old-fashioned romance.

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Astor, Ontario. 1904.A boy staggers out of the forest covered in blood & collapses at the feet of 16-year-old Emmy. While others are suspicious & afraid, Emmy is drawn to him. Is he really the monster the townsfolk say he is? Astor, Ontario. 1994. Megan arrives from London for her great grandmother Emmy`s 105th birthday. It should be a happy family occasion, but Megan is nursing a broken heart & carrying a secret she fears might consume her. One family. Two women. A century of secrets. A timeless love story. ...

Gershom Scholem, the great humanist thinker & founder of modern Kabbalah, is all but forgotten today. But here, in a biography as daring & inquisitive as its subject, George Prochnik goes in search of Scholem, restoring the reputation of a vital intellectual & finding in his work a vision with the power to reinvigorate contemporary religious & political thought. Tracing Scholem`s life from his upbringing in Berlin, where he experienced a close & transformative friendship with Walter Benjamin, Prochnik reveals how Scholem`s frustration with the bourgeois ideology of Germany during WWI led him to discover mystic Judaism, Kabbalah, &, finally, Zionism. But having emigrated to what was to become Israel, Scholem again found himself a `stranger in a strange land`, ill at ease with a prevailing conservative form of Zionism. Prochnik follows Scholem to the modern Holy Land
- only to find that he too is disillusioned by the state politics he encounters. But through his profound study of Scholem & his own experience of Jerusalem, Prochnik not only questions the ideological & religious constructs of Jerusalem, but finds an ethical way forward, showing how a new form of pluralism might energize Jewish thought.
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A bilingual fiction title for children who are independent readers. The parallel text, speech bubbles & pictures by different, talented illustrators provide a child-friendly bridge to reading
- & speaking
- in another language. There is a quiz at the end of each story to help comprehension & revise vocabulary.

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A bilingual fiction title for children who are independent readers. The parallel text, speech bubbles & pictures by different, talented illustrators provide a child-friendly bridge to reading
- & speaking
- in another language. There is a quiz at the end of each story to help comprehension & revise vocabulary.

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More a memoir than a travelogue, Stranger on a Train is Jenny Diski’s account of daydreaming & smoking around America with interruptions
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As a child, all Aatish Taseer ever had of his father was his photograph in a browning silver frame. Raised by his Sikh mother in Delhi, his father, a Pakistani Muslim, remained a distant figure. It was a fractured upbringing which left Aatish with many questions about his own identity. Stranger to History is the story of the journey Aatish made to try to understand what it means to be Muslim in the twenty-first century. Starting from Istanbul, Islam`s once greatest city, he travels to Mecca, its most holy, & then home through Iran & Pakistan. Ending in Lahore, at his estranged father`s home, on the night Benazir Bhutto was killed, it is also the story of Aatish`s own divided family over the past fifty years. ...

` He was haunted by a feeling of invisibility, as if he were a mere spectator of his own life, with no one to identify him in the barren circumstances of the here & now.` Paul Sturgis is a retired banker manager who lives alone in a dark little flat. He walks alone & dines alone, seeking out & taking pleasure in small exchanges with strangers: the cheerful Australian girl who cuts his hair, the lady at the drycleaners. His only relative, & only acquaintance, is a widowed cousin by marriage
- herself a virtual stranger
- to whom he pays ritualistic visits on a Sunday afternoon. Trying to make sense of his current solitary state, & fearing that his destiny may be to die among strangers, Sturgis trawls through memories of his failed relationships & finds himself longing for companionship, or at the very least a conversation. But then a chance encounter with a stranger
- a recently divorced & demanding younger woman
- shakes up his routine & when an old girlfriend appears on the scene, Sturgis is forced to make a decision about how (and with whom) he wants to spend the rest of his days.. .` Each book is a prayer bead on a string, & each prayer is a secular, circumspect prayer, a prayer & a protest & a charm against encroaching night` Hilary Mantel, Guardian ` No one writes with more skill & honesty about the human condition & this book is possibly her finest` Julie Myerson, Observer `A novel of great stylistic beauty & psychological truth. As great a reflection on fear & regret as Philip Larkin or Beckett` Guardian ` Like Graham Greene, she draws the reader into a world that has a character & signature all of its own.. . Strangers is a novel of sober brilliance, & the unerring, unflinching Brookner is still a much underestimated novelist` Helen Dunmore, The Times Anita Brookner was born in south London in 1928, the daughter of a Polish immigrant family. She trained as an art historian, & worked at the Courtauld Institute of Art until her retirement in 1988. She published her first novel, A Start in Life, in 1981 & her twenty-fourth, Strangers, in 2009. Hotel du Lac won the 1984 Booker Prize. As well as fiction, Anita Brookner has published a number of volumes of art criticism.



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