The war between mammal and reptile has hit a temporary lull, but the Kingdom of Sagely does not have time to recover just yet. The Sagely Knights must accompany a mysterious and beautiful dragoness on an epic quest to find and destroy five arcane tomes before the ancestral Dragon Gods return. Their first adventure takes them deep underground, where a danger far more terrifying than venomous, territorial beasts and blinding darkness awaits them.

Gram lives in the long shadow cast by his father, the late-hero, Dorian Thornbear. Struggling to find his place in a world where politics and wizardry appear to have replaced the need for men of might and main, he must make his own mark. Trapped within the seemingly safe confines of Castle Cameron, Gram faces both love and tragedy. His choices will define not only himself, but serve to remind others of his family’s legacy, and the reason only a fool threatens those a Thornbear protects.

Previous translations and descriptions of Li Qingzhao are molded by an image of her as lonely wife and bereft widow formed by centuries of manipulation of her work and legacy by scholars and critics (all of them male) to fit their idea of a what a talented woman writer would sound like. The true voice of Li Qingzhao is very different. A new translation and presentation of her is needed to appreciate her genius and to account for the sense that Chinese readers have always had, despite what scholars and critics were saying, about the boldness and originality of her work. The introduction will lay out the problems of critical refashioning and conventionalization of her carried out in the centuries after her death, thus preparing the reader for a new reading. Her songs and poetry will then be presented in a way that breaks free of a narrow autobiographical reading of them, distinguishes between reliable and unreliable attributions, and also shows the great range of her talent by including important prose pieces and seldom read poems. In this way, the standard image of Li Qingzhao, exemplied by a handful of her best known and largely misunderstood works, will be challenged and replaced by a new understanding. The volume will present a literary portrait of Li Qingzhao radically unlike the one in conventional anthologies and literary histories, allowing English readers for the first time to appreciate her distinctiveness as a writer and to properly gauge her achievement as a female alternative, as poet and essayist, to the male literary culture of her day.

A Buddha from Korea is intended to open a window on Zen Buddhism in old Korea. The book centers on a translation of teachings of the great fourteenth-century Korean Zen adept known as T'aego, who was the leading representative of Zen in his own time and place. This is an account of Zen Buddhism direct from an authentic source.

-- Burton Watson

In On Their Own Terms, Benjamin A. Elman offers a much-needed synthesis of early Chinese science during the Jesuit period (1600-1800) and the modern sciences as they evolved in China under Protestant influence (1840s-1900). By 1600 Europe was ahead of Asia in producing basic machines, such as clocks, levers, and pulleys, that would be necessary for the mechanization of agriculture and industry. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Elman shows, Europeans still sought from the Chinese their secrets of producing silk, fine textiles, and porcelain, as well as large-scale tea cultivation. Chinese literati borrowed in turn new algebraic notations of Hindu-Arabic origin, Tychonic cosmology, Euclidian geometry, and various computational advances. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, imperial reformers, early Republicans, Guomindang party cadres, and Chinese Communists have all prioritized science and technology. In this book, Elman gives a nuanced account of the ways in which native Chinese science evolved over four centuries, under the influence of both Jesuit and Protestant missionaries. In the end, he argues, the Chinese produced modern science on their own terms.

With many scholars and analysts questioning the relevance of deterrence as a valid strategic concept, this volume moves beyond Cold War nuclear deterrence to show the many ways in which deterrence is applicable to contemporary security. It examines the possibility of applying deterrence theory and practice to space, to cyberspace, and against non-state actors. It also examines the role of nuclear deterrence in the twenty-first century and reaches surprising conclusions.

A landmark work of narrative history, Paris 1919 is the first full-scale treatment of the Peace Conference in more than twenty-five years. It offers a scintillating view of those dramatic and fateful days when much of the modern world was sketched out, when countries were created—Iraq, Yugoslavia, Israel—whose troubles haunt us still. Winner of the Samuel Johnson Prize • Winner of the PEN Hessell Tiltman Prize • Winner of the Duff Cooper Prize Between January and July 1919, after “the war to end all wars,” men and women from around the world converged on Paris to shape the peace. Center stage, for the first time in history, was an American president, Woodrow Wilson, who with his Fourteen Points seemed to promise to so many people the fulfillment of their dreams. Stern, intransigent, impatient when it came to security concerns and wildly idealistic in his dream of a League of Nations that would resolve all future conflict peacefully, Wilson is only one of the larger-than-life characters who fill the pages of this extraordinary book. David Lloyd George, the gregarious and wily British prime minister, brought Winston Churchill and John Maynard Keynes. Lawrence of Arabia joined the Arab delegation. Ho Chi Minh, a kitchen assistant at the Ritz, submitted a petition for an independent Vietnam. For six months, Paris was effectively the center of the world as the peacemakers carved up bankrupt empires and created new countries. This book brings to life the personalities, ideals, and prejudices of the men who shaped the settlement. They pushed Russia to the sidelines, alienated China, and dismissed the Arabs. They struggled with the problems of Kosovo, of the Kurds, and of a homeland for the Jews. The peacemakers, so it has been said, failed dismally; above all they failed to prevent another war. Margaret MacMillan argues that they have unfairly been made the scapegoats for the mistakes of those who came later. She refutes received ideas about the path from Versailles to World War II and debunks the widely accepted notion that reparations imposed on the Germans were in large part responsible for the Second World War. Praise for Paris 1919 “It’s easy to get into a war, but ending it is a more arduous matter. It was never more so than in 1919, at the Paris Conference. . . . This is an enthralling book: detailed, fair, unfailingly lively. Professor MacMillan has that essential quality of the historian, a narrative gift.” —Allan Massie, The Daily Telegraph (London)