In the twilight hours of a day in March, Biru Laut was ambushed by four unknown men. Together with his friends, Daniel, Sunu and Alex, he was taken to an unknown location. For months they were held captive, interrogated, beaten and tortured into answering one sole question: Who stood behind the rebellious student movements at that time?
Biru Laut’s younger sister, who, along with other family members of kidnapped student activists, struggled to put the pieces of the puzzle together and to find answers to their never-ending questions.
While her parents appear to be in denial and remain hopeful that Biru Laut will one day come back to sit at the family table again, Asmara Jati engages alongside the Missing Persons Commission Team led by Aswin Pradana in order to strive to find traces of those who went missing and to record the testimonies of those who returned.
This stirring story of Biru Laut and his friends is the story of the desaparecidos of Indonesia. It is the story of a momentous-and still seldom written about-period of Indonesian history that led to the end of dictatorship in Indonesia.
Winter Blue is a fairy-child. She leads parallel lives in two worlds – the world of
humans, and another, secret, wondrous world – Magic-Land.
As an ordinary thirteen-year-old girl she attends school every day, does her
homework, and spends time with her friends, none of whom know her secret.
Each night, she turns into a fairy and flies to Magic-Land where she meets other
fairies, dwarflings, wonder-horses, fixit moles, pink babies, and other magic beings.
One day, a series of strange events starts taking place -events that disrupt the
tranquil lives of all Magic-Land dwellers. A wonder-horse falls into the human world,
dangerous pits are torn in the ground, and the fairies’ gems of power begin to
vanish, one after another…
Winter and her friends, other fairy-children, set out to investigate the mystery. They
experience a series of adventures, face numerous dangers, and expose a conspiracy
that threatens the very existence of Magic-Land.
The plot takes place simultaneously in both realms, sweeping readers into a fantastic,
gripping and mysterious story.
Keix wakes up in an underground prison-weak, emaciated, and battling partial memory loss. Her rescuers and long-time friends, Zej and Pod, tell her she’s been put in a coma for two years. Her captor: Atros, the organization she had joined as a trainee soldier since she was fourteen. Keix doesn’t want to believe them but the evidence just keeps stacking up. Vile beasts called Odats, engaged by Atros as mercenaries, attack her as she makes her escape from the prison. And she finds out that Atros is also keeping her best friend Vin locked up.
Keix’s ancestry (her father is a Kulcan, a fierce race of warriors) helps her regain her lost memories and strength quickly under her friends’ care. Soon, she gets handed proof that Atros is building a ghost army-the very enemies the organization has been tasked to protect the people from. To make matters even more complicated, Ifarls, a race with mysterious magical powers, try to influence her to attempt a dangerous mission to break Vin out. They also tell Keix they want to close the portal between the living and the dead, to end decades of misery that the underworld has brought.
Swept into the undercurrents of distrust and differing agendas between the races, will Keix, who considers herself as an outsider because of her mixed bloodline, be able to walk her own path?
Classical Sanskrit literature boasts an exquisite canon of poetry devoted to erotic love. In Erotic Poems from the Sanskrit, noted translator and scholar R. Parthasarathy curates a selection in a new verse translation that introduces readers to Sanskrit poetry in a modern English vernacular. The volume features works by seventy-two poets, including seven women poets and thirty-five anonymous poets, primarily composed between the fourth and seventeenth centuries. It includes a detailed introduction that guides readers through Sanskrit poetic forms and explains how to read and appreciate the poems in English.
Erotic Poems from the Sanskrit seeks to represent the breadth of Sanskrit poetry through the ages and to present a cohesive, thematically unified selection when read as a whole. The works in this volume depict licit and illicit love, speaking to the joys
and sorrows of consummation and separation and a broader cultural celebration of the pleasures of the flesh. Often sexually explicit, they are replete with recurrent scenarios and striking tactile, visual, and olfactory images, whose resonance and
use as motifs across eras are expertly explained. Parthasarathy shows that Sanskrit poets are our contemporaries despite the centuries that separate us, as they speak simply and passionately to a wide range of human experience. Erotic Poems from the Sanskrit offers English-speaking readers an enticing and tantalizing initiation into the riches and beauty of this venerable poetic tradition.
The stories in this collection are works of personal gratification, nostalgia, and reverence and they serve as an homage to the author’s hometown and her favorite horror writers.
They take place in various timelines and are written as stories within stories ranging from a headless ghost that returns as a grim reaper, a bird-like creature on the loose, a were-tiger out to seek vengeance, a vampire that decimated an entire village and other restless paranormal entities that walk among us.
If eleven-year-old Ferg Gottin had been bought from a store, his parents would have
returned him and demanded a refund. Because, you see, for the Gottins, parenting
is an experiment gone badly wrong. So when they find a school where you can
dump your kids and forget about them, they decide that Horrid High is the perfect
place for Ferg. But there’s nothing perfect about Horrid High—it’s quite unlike the
boarding schools Ferg has read about in storybooks. Ferg soon realizes that this isn’t
just a school for orphans, runaways and rejects. Horrid High is a training ground for
horrid teachers who are being sent out into the world to spread horridness! If that’s
not enough, Principal Perverse has a Grand Plan that he plans to reveal to every
horrid teacher everywhere. Ferg and his friends are the only hope that the children
of the world now have. Will they manage to save the day? Open the gates of Horrid
High and find out!
This book is for all those who’ve loved The Monk Who Sold his Ferrari.
Stop going through life, Start growing through life!
While navigating their way through horrendous traffic, Gaur Gopal Das and his wealthy young friend Harry get talking, delving into concepts ranging from the human condition to finding one’s purpose in life and the key to lasting happiness. In his debut book Life’s Amazing Secrets, Gaur Gopal Das takes us on an unforgettable journey with his precious insights on certain areas of life. Whether you are looking at strengthening your relationships, discovering your true potential, understanding how to do well at work or even how you can give back to the world, this thought-provoking and light-hearted book by one of the most popular and sought-after monks will help you align yourself with the life you want to live.
Which is the most ‘stolen’ book in the world? How can one marry a
dead person? How did the word ‘dude’ originate?
True stories. Soul-baring moments. No apologies.
Two schoolgirls in Yemen skip class, and wander into a yellow circus tent, empty except for one rusty cage. A Jordanian man spends a maddening summer in his sweaty apartment cursing his loud, ignorant neighbours. A woman in Beirut is heartsick, waiting for her kidnapped parrot to return. A young Bangladeshi-American argues with her father about her choice of boyfriend. A lady discovers the secret about the Pakistani neighbour who had stolen her birthday gifts. And an Iraqi soldier pines for an American journalist obsessed with someone else.
This ambitious collection is a four-year quest to find diverse stories from many Muslim worlds that build bridges between each of us, through intimate, and incredibly human experiences of love, loss, laughter and everything in between.
Thought provoking and persuasive, Renovating Democracy serves as a point of departure that deepens and expands the discourse for positive change in governance. The rise of populism in the West and the rise of China in the East have stirred a rethinking of how democratic systems work—and how they fail. The impact of globalism and digital capitalism is forcing worldwide attention to the starker divide between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots,’ challenging how we think about the social
contract.
With fierce clarity and conviction, Renovating Democracy tears down our basic structures and challenges us to conceive of an alternative framework for governance. To truly renovate our global systems, the authors argue for empowering participation without populism by integrating social networks and direct democracy into the system with new mediating institutions that complement representative government. They outline steps to reconfigure the social contract to protect workers instead of jobs, shifting from a ‘redistribution’ after wealth to ‘pre-distribution’ with the aim to enhance the skills and assets of those less welloff. Lastly, they argue for harnessing globalization through ‘positive nationalism’ at home while advocating for global cooperation—specifically with a partnership with
China—to create a viable rules-based world order.
