Few memoirs have the concision, modesty, and charm that mark this late-life work by Donald Keene, America’s most renowned scholar and interpreter of Japan. As a Columbia University humanities student in 1941, nineteen-year-old Donald... Read More

Those far-sighted enough to have snapped up Overlook Press’s 2005 re-issue of the *Mortdecai Trilogy—*Kyril Bonfiglioli’s powerfully comedic, high-octane send-ups of the bon-viveur-cum-sleuth detective story—may have hoped that... Read More

The Middle East is unstable, war-torn, and generally hostile to the West; religious and/or civil strife, fanaticism, and militias are ever more dangerous; America is a clumsy meddler—and soaring oil prices a worldwide threat. Just how... Read More

Iran has for several decades projected a dismal image—repression of political and human rights; crippling censorship in the press, literature, the arts, and self-expression; the ideological distortion of education; and the increasing... Read More

In her eloquent retelling of this evocative selection of Chinese myths and legends, Victoria Cass (a retired professor of Chinese) transports us into a marvelous, disturbing, and often magical realm. There is a refreshing lack of... Read More

A near-encyclopedic history of the fires, looting, and other assaults that have destroyed or damaged many great libraries—public and private—may not strike many as a “must-read” book. But those who work through "Books on Fire"... Read More

Lynne Viola, professor of history at Toronto University and a highly respected historian of the Soviet Union of the 1930s, has written a searing book on an immense and all too neglected human tragedy. It will leave no reader unshocked or... Read More

This delightful book of folktales is the product of a very successful collaboration. The illustrator, born in 1960, began life in exile in Bhutan, and from an early age yearned for his lost homeland of Tibet. In 1969, he moved to... Read More