This powerful novel of a nation in social and moral crisis in the early postwar years probes the transition from a feudal Japan to an industrial society. The influence of this book, often considered Dazai's masterpiece, made the term 'people of the setting sun' -- the declining aristocracy -- a permanent part of the Japanese language. Dazai's heroine, Kazuko, the strong-willed young aristocrat who deliberately abandons her class, stands as a symbol of the anomie that pervades so much of the modern world. The distinguished translator Donald Keene has said of the author's work: 'His world...suggest Chekhov or possibly postwar France...but there is a Japanese sensibility in the choice and presentation of the material. A Dazai novel is at once immediately intelligible in Western terms and quite unlike any Western book.'

The surprising story of how George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson came to despair for the future of the nation they had created Americans seldom deify their Founding Fathers any longer, but they do still tend to venerate the Constitution and the republican government that the founders created. Strikingly, the founders themselves were far less confident in what they had wrought, particularly by the end of their lives. In fact, most of them—including George Washington, Alexander Hamilton, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson—came to deem America’s constitutional experiment an utter failure that was unlikely to last beyond their own generation. Fears of a Setting Sun is the first book to tell the fascinating and too-little-known story of the founders’ disillusionment. As Dennis Rasmussen shows, the founders’ pessimism had a variety of sources: Washington lost his faith in America’s political system above all because of the rise of partisanship, Hamilton because he felt that the federal government was too weak, Adams because he believed that the people lacked civic virtue, and Jefferson because of sectional divisions laid bare by the spread of slavery. The one major founder who retained his faith in America’s constitutional order to the end was James Madison, and the book also explores why he remained relatively optimistic when so many of his compatriots did not. As much as Americans today may worry about their country’s future, Rasmussen reveals, the founders faced even graver problems and harbored even deeper misgivings. A vividly written account of a chapter of American history that has received too little attention, Fears of a Setting Sun will change the way that you look at the American founding, the Constitution, and indeed the United States itself.

Moving and provocative short stories that explore the strained relations between parent and child, husband an wife, brothers, and friends, as traditional values of rural Africa clash with ambitions of urban life.

Padrón reveals the evolution of Spain’s imagining of the New World as a space in continuity with Asia. Narratives of Europe’s westward expansion often tell of how the Americas came to be known as a distinct landmass, separate from Asia and uniquely positioned as new ground ripe for transatlantic colonialism. But this geographic vision of the Americas was not shared by all Europeans. While some imperialists imagined North and Central America as undiscovered land, the Spanish pushed to define the New World as part of a larger and eminently flexible geography that they called las Indias, and that by right, belonged to the Crown of Castile and León. Las Indias included all of the New World as well as East and Southeast Asia, although Spain’s understanding of the relationship between the two areas changed as the realities of the Pacific Rim came into sharper focus. At first, the Spanish insisted that North and Central America were an extension of the continent of Asia. Eventually, they came to understand East and Southeast Asia as a transpacific extension of their empire in America called las Indias del poniente, or the Indies of the Setting Sun. The Indies of the Setting Sun charts the Spanish vision of a transpacific imperial expanse, beginning with Balboa’s discovery of the South Sea and ending almost a hundred years later with Spain’s final push for control of the Pacific. Padrón traces a series of attempts—both cartographic and discursive—to map the space from Mexico to Malacca, revealing the geopolitical imaginations at play in the quest for control of the New World and Asia.

Epic in scope, intimate in detail, heartbreaking in its human drama, Former People is the first book to recount the history of the nobility caught up the maelstrom of the Bolshevik Revolution and the creation of Stalin’s Russia. It is a book filled with chilling tales of looted palaces, burning estates, of desperate flights in the night from marauding bands of thugs and Red Army soldiers, of imprisonment, exile, and execution. It is the story of how a centuries’-old elite famous for its glittering wealth, its service to the empire, its promotion of the arts and culture, was dispossessed and destroyed along with the rest of old Russia. Drawing on the private archives of two great families – the Sheremetovs and the Golitsyns – it is also a story of survival and accommodation, of how many of the tsarist ruling class, so-called 'former people', managed to find a place for themselves and their families in the hostile world of the Soviet Union. It reveals, too, how even at the darkest depths of the terror, daily life went on - men and women fell in love, children were born, friends gathered. Ultimately, Former People is a testament to the resilience of the human spirit.

“Richly detailed and well-researched,” this story of one Native American chief’s resistance to American expansionism “unfolds like a political thriller” (Publishers Weekly). Toward the Setting Sun chronicles one of the most significant but least explored periods in American history—the nineteenth century forced removal of Native Americans from their lands—through the story of Chief John Ross, who came to be known as the Cherokee Moses. Son of a Scottish trader and a quarter-Cherokee woman, Ross was educated in white schools and was only one-eighth Indian by blood. But as Cherokee chief in the mid-nineteenth century, he would guide the tribe through its most turbulent period. The Cherokees’ plight lay at the epicenter of nearly all the key issues facing America at the time: western expansion, states’ rights, judicial power, and racial discrimination. Clashes between Ross and President Andrew Jackson raged from battlefields and meeting houses to the White House and Supreme Court. As whites settled illegally on the Nation’s land, the chief steadfastly refused to sign a removal treaty. But when a group of renegade Cherokees betrayed their chief and negotiated their own agreement, Ross was forced to lead his people west. In one of America’s great tragedies, thousands died during the Cherokees’ migration on the Trail of Tears. “Powerful and engaging . . . By focusing on the Ross family, Hicks brings narrative energy and original insight to a grim and important chapter of American life.” —Jon Meacham

"Self Portraits" by Dazai Osamu is a collection of short stories, essays, and personal reflections that offer insight into the mind and struggles of the author. These pieces blend fiction and autobiography, reflecting Dazai’s inner conflicts, including his lifelong battle with depression, addiction, and a sense of alienation. The stories in this collection often present characters that mirror Dazai himself—outsiders grappling with societal expectations, guilt, and shame. Themes of human imperfection, self-destruction, and existential despair are common throughout. Dazai's writing style is deeply introspective, marked by irony and dark humor, as he explores the contradictions of the human spirit. "Self Portraits" provides a raw and intimate look into the author’s life, making it an essential read for those interested in understanding Dazai’s psyche and the experiences that shaped his literary voice. The collection complements his other major works, such as No Longer Human and The Setting Sun, by revealing more personal aspects of his worldview.

When a letter from an Indian historian arrives out of the blue and informs leading academic Bart Moore-Gilbert that his beloved deceased father, a member of the Indian Police before Independence, took part in the abuse of civilians, his world is shaken as cherished childhood memories are challenged. He sets out in search of the truth-discovering much about the end of empire, the state of India today, and whether his father, as one of the many characters on his quest claims, really was a terrorist. Crisscrossing western India, and following leads from bustling Mumbai to remote rural locations, Moore-Gilbert pieces together the truth, discovering that the story of his father's life links today's politics with the past's, colonial India with its modern incarnation, terrorism across the ages, and father with son. The Setting Sun is at once an extraordinary meditative voyage across India, a story of the dying days of an empire, and a gripping family history.

Most Americans don't look far beyond Christopher Columbus when it comes to the discovery of America, yet the simple fact that we bear the name of Amerigo Vespucci suggests there is more to the story. And indeed, there is: a trio of young Italian pioneers who were merchants more than explorers and who, while in search of glory and vast profits, battled to become the first to cross the western ocean. David Boyle reveals in Toward the Setting Sun, that the race for America was as much about commerce as it was about discovery and conquest. When Constantinople fell to the Ottoman Empire in 1453, the long established trade routes to the East became treacherous and expensive forcing merchants of all sorts to find new ways of obtaining and trading their goods. Enterprising young men took to the sea in search of new lands, new routes, and of course, new fortune. The careers of three young men--Columbus, Vespucci and Giovanni Caboto (known to us as John Cabot) would change not only their personal destinies, but that of the New World. Contrary to popular belief, the three not only knew of each other, they were well acquainted--Columbus and Vespucci at various times worked closely together; Cabot and Columbus were born in Genoa about the same time and had common friends who were interested in Western trade possibilities. They collaborated, knew of each other's ambitions and followed each other's progress. The intersection of their dreams and business ventures led the way to our modern world and ushered in the end of the medieval age. David Boyle skillfully brings together for the first time the three stories that shaped the race for America and in doing so adds a unique economic and business dimension to the earliest days of our country.

Just Left of the Setting Sun is a collection of non-fiction essays by a young Chamoru scholar-activist from the island of Guam. These essays reflect the present-day reality of the indigenous people of the island of Guam. This book is framed in the context of an island that exists amidst the many conflicts and contradictions of being "freed from colonialism" by another colonial power in 1898 and "liberated from wartime aggression" by a country that put in under a Naval Administration until the 1960s and who worked to eliminate the culture of the local people through forced assimilation and nominal citizenship. It is written to articulate the reality of the Chamoru people of Guam as an indigenous Pacific Island culture, an American minority group, and an island people threatened by the encroachment of globalization into their lives. These essays will cause the reader to think critically on the subjects of globalization, sustainable development, sustainable governance, cultural reclamation, and self-determination on Guam, amongst the indigenous and colonized peoples in the world, question the value of democracy if it is involuntarily imposed on a people. This book is especially relevant for the present state of the world. Just Left is included in an academic series that we publish, 'The 1898 Consciousness Studies Series'. This series is a varied collection of essays on consciousness today in areas affected by the Spanish-American War and consequent possession by the U.S. These include The Philippines, Guam, Puerto Rico, and Cuba. Praise for Just Left of the Setting Sun "Fierce and compassionate, bold and resolute, Just Left of the Setting Sun is at once a coming into consciousness as it is a conch-shell blare for action by and for a new generation of Chamorros, the indigenous people of an island and archipelago long colonized by Spain, Japan and the United States of America. As critical towards fellow Chamorros who aid and abet the colonizer as he is of the colonizers themselves, Aguon also importantly situates the need for Native Struggles for Political and Cultural Self-Determination and Sovereignty within Feminist/Womanist critiques and global struggles for economic, social, and environmental justice, thereby providing a glimpse into the possibilities for local struggle informed and articulated to global movements beyond pan-indigenous movements per se, and for keeping global movements and political theory grounded in Indigenous traditions." Vicente M. Diaz Associate Professor of American Culture University of Michigan, Ann Arbor "Aguon re-introduces us to the principles of international law as a guiding framework to the resolution of the dilemma brought about by the present non self-governing arrangements which provide the trappings of democratic governance, but in reality are rather democratically deficient by any objective examination. Indeed, an important component of new millennium colonialism is the existence, but not the recognition, of this democratic deficit... ..."Just Left of the Setting Sun" should be required reading for the people in the remaining territories, young and old, who need to discover/re-discover the fire within, that they might further move the process forward, if only by a few steps further along the continuum. In a very real sense, as Aguon observes, "inside the heart of the Chamoru is still an ocean of latent potentialities waiting to surge." Dr. Carlyle Corbin Advisor on Governance and Political Development St. Croix, Virgin Islands