Chinese prose poetry today is engaged with a series of questions that are fundamental to the modern Chinese language: What is prose? What is it good for? How should it look and sound? Millions of Chinese readers encounter prose poetry every year, both in the most official of state-sponsored magazines and in the unorthodox, experimental work of the avant-garde. Recite and Refuse makes the answers to our questions about prose legible by translating, surveying, and interpreting prose poems, and by studying the people, politics, and contexts that surround the writing of prose poetry. Author Nick Admussen argues that unlike most genres, Chinese prose poems lack a distinct size or shape. Their similarity to other prose is the result of a distinct process in which a prose form is recited with some kind of meaningful difference—an imitation that refuses to fully resemble its source. This makes prose poetry a protean, ever-changing group of works, channeling the language of science, journalism, Communist Party politics, advertisements, and much more. The poems look vastly different as products, but are made with a similar process. Focusing on the composition process allows Admussen to rewrite the standard history of prose poetry, finding its origins not in 1918 but in the obedient socialist prose poetry of the 1950s. Recite and Refuse places the work of state-sponsored writers in mutual relationship to prose poems by unorthodox and avant-garde poets, from cadre writers like Ke Lan and Guo Feng to the border-crossing intellectual and poet Liu Zaifu to experimental artists such as Ouyang Jianghe and Xi Chuan. The volume features never-before seen English translations that range from the representative to the exceptional, culminating with Ouyang Jianghe’s masterpiece “Hanging Coffin.” Reading across the spectrum enables us to see the way that artists interact with each other, how they compete and cooperate, and how their interactions, as well as their creations, continuously reinvent both poetry and prose.

The Sacrament of Penance and Religious Life in Golden Age Spain explores the practice of sacramental confession in Spain between roughly 1500 and 1700. One of the most significant points of contact between the laity and ecclesiastical hierarchy, confession lay at the heart of attempts to bring religious reformation to bear upon the lives of early modern Spaniards. Rigid episcopal legislation, royal decrees, and a barrage of prescriptive literature lead many scholars to construct the sacrament fundamentally as an instrument of social control foisted upon powerless laypeople. Drawing upon a wide range of early printed and archival materials, this book considers confession as both a top-down and a bottom-up phenomenon. Rather than relying solely upon prescriptive and didactic literature, it considers evidence that describes how the people of early modern Spain experienced confession, offering a rich portrayal of a critical and remarkably popular component of early modern religiosity.

I have written many books and articles on various topics but since 2013, I have devoted myself fully in writing the interpretation of the Holy Quran in English and with the grace of Allah, I have completed the whole Quran on 29th October 2020 with 84 books. I believe there is a great need in the whole world for the correct interpretation of the Holy Quran to be written in English. Currently, there is a great misunderstanding about Islam among Muslims and non-Muslims globally. The misunderstanding of the meaning of the Holy Quran among Muslims will lead to the wrong practice of Islam which leads to the wrong actions of Muslims. The wrong actions of Muslims will lead to misunderstandings about Islam among Muslims and non-Muslims. The wrong actions of the Muslims have led to many miseries and wars among Muslims. The wrong actions of Muslims have also led to many wars and clashes between Muslims and non-Muslims. In order to avoid miseries, wars and clashes from taking place between the whole mankind in the whole world, the whole mankind in the whole world need to understand the true teaching of Islam. There is no other way for the whole mankind to understand the true teaching of Islam unless the whole mankind is able to read and understand the correct interpretation of the Holy Quran. The whole mankind is only able to read and understand the correct interpretation of the Holy Quran when it is written in the universal language of the world (English). For this very reason I have written the interpretation of the Holy Quran in English. Prof. Nasoha Bin Saabin