A reluctant heir. An insidious power. What is privilege when his own magic threatens to take him under? Meran Durante is distraught. An unwilling heir to a bitter and critical father, the young Durante now fears he is also the beneficiary of the oft anticipated, seldom true, seer-sight that has flickered through his mother’s family for centuries. Nightly, a single tragic spectre fills his dreams, driving him to the edge of sanity, until one fateful night his plight is discovered. Acceding to his friend’s unconventional distraction from his woes, Meran finds fleeting relief sheltered within the unique magic forged from the unexpected liaison. But realising his own agency is in peril, he searches out an alternative solution to fend off the dreamland’s insidious call before his mind is shattered forever. When his friend goes missing, can Meran wrest control of his magic before it is too late to save either of them? Meran’s Reproach is the tempestuous second book in the Legend of the Ancients – Books of Locurnia Fantasy series. If you like emotionally charged fantasy, tortured heroes and magical awakenings mixed with high heat, then you’ll love Deonne Dane’s tale of one young man coming into his legacy.

Two rites stand before him. Fail one and he will be powerless, fail the other and he will likely be dead. Falric Mislan is torn. Born of a magical Voce and a mundane Dracan, he stands at a crossroads. One direction leads him to the magic he craves, the other to a warriors recognition and status. Stung by his first abortive attempt at awakening his power, Falric throws himself into Dracan life, and inadvertently unearths a perilous talisman. Watching slip away the last chance of his mother aiding his ambition, Falric accepts that his father’s people, and his passing of their Moon Rite, are his only path. But in the aftermath of his find, Falric now faces a bitter enemy who is determined to see him fail. Spending a month alone in the southern desert for his ‘Moon of Solitude’ is dangerous enough, but can he survive his own doubts, his unrequited desire for the magic that alludes him…and a man who dreams of deadly vengeance? Moon Rite is the exhilarating first book in the LGBTQ+ Legend of the Ancients, Books of Locurnia Fantasy series. If you like deep friendship, dangerous trials, and lethal enemies, all with a touch of heated passion, then you’ll love Deonne Dane’s gripping adventure.

Scholars have long accepted the belief that a Theravada Buddhist Mon kingdom, Rāmaññadesa, flourished in coastal Lower Burma until it was conquered in 1057 by King Aniruddha of Pagan—which then became, in essence, the new custodian and repository of Mon culture in the Upper Burmese interior. This scenario, which Aung-Thwin calls the "Mon Paradigm," has circumscribed much of the scholarship on early Burma and significantly shaped the history of Southeast Asia for more than a century. Now, in a masterful reassessment of Burmese history, Michael Aung-Thwin reexamines the original contemporary accounts and sources without finding any evidence of an early Theravada Mon polity or a conquest by Aniruddha. The paradigm, he finds, cannot be sustained. How, when, and why did the Mon Paradigm emerge? Aung-Thwin meticulously traces the paradigm's creation to the merging of two temporally, causally, and contextually unrelated Mon and Burmese narratives, which were later synthesized in English by colonial officials and scholars. Thus there was no single originating source, only a late and mistaken conflation of sources. The conceptual, methodological, and empirical ramifications of these findings are significant. The prevalent view that state-formation began in the maritime regions of Southeast Asia with trade and commerce rather than in the interior with agriculture must now be reassessed. In addition, a more rigorous look at the actual scope and impact of a romanticized Mon culture in the region is required. Other issues important to the field of early Burma and Southeast Asian studies, including the process of "Indianization," the characterization of "classical" states, and the advent and spread of Theravada Buddhism, are also directly affected by Aung-Thwin’s work. Finally, it provides a geo-political, cultural, and economic alternative to what has become an ethnic interpretation of Burma’s history. An electronic version of this book is freely available thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched, a collaborative initiative designed to make high-quality books open access for the public good. The open-access version of this book is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0), which means that the work may be freely downloaded and shared for non-commercial purposes, provided credit is given to the author. Derivative works and commercial uses require permission from the publisher.

First published in Germany in 1929, The End and the Beginning is a lively personal memoir of a vanished world and of a rebellious, high-spirited young woman's struggle to achieve independence. Born in 1883 into a distinguished and wealthy aristocratic family of the old Austro-Hungarian Empire, Hermynia Zur Muhlen spent much of her childhood travelling in Europe and North Africa with her diplomat father. After five years on her German husband's estate in czarist Russia she broke with both her family and her husband and set out on a precarious career as a professional writer committed to socialism. Besides translating many leading contemporary authors, notably Upton Sinclair, into German, she herself published an impressive number of politically engaged novels, detective stories, short stories, and children's fairy tales. Because of her outspoken opposition to National Socialism, she had to flee her native Austria in 1938 and seek refuge in England, where she died, virtually penniless, in 1951. This revised and corrected translation of Zur Muhlen's memoir - with extensive notes and an essay on the author by Lionel Gossman - will appeal especially to readers interested in women's history, the Central European aristocratic world that came to an end with the First World War, and the culture and politics of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.