Vikram Seth's novel is, at its core, a love story: Lata and her mother, Mrs. Rupa Mehra, are both trying to find—through love or through exacting maternal appraisal—a suitable boy for Lata to marry. Set in the early 1950s, in an India newly independent and struggling through a time of crisis, A Suitable Boy takes us into the richly imagined world of four large extended families and spins a compulsively readable tale of their lives and loves. A sweeping panoramic portrait of a complex, multiethnic society in flux, A Suitable Boy remains the story of ordinary people caught up in a web of love and ambition, humor and sadness, prejudice and reconciliation, the most delicate social etiquette and the most appalling violence.

50th Anniversary Edition, with a new introduction by David Mitchell and a new afterword by Charlie Jane Anders Ursula K. Le Guin’s groundbreaking work of science fiction—winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards. A lone human ambassador is sent to the icebound planet of Winter, a world without sexual prejudice, where the inhabitants’ gender is fluid. His goal is to facilitate Winter’s inclusion in a growing intergalactic civilization. But to do so he must bridge the gulf between his own views and those of the strange, intriguing culture he encounters... Embracing the aspects of psychology, society, and human emotion on an alien world, The Left Hand of Darkness stands as a landmark achievement in the annals of intellectual science fiction.

Karl Glogauer is a disaffected modern professional casting about for meaning in a series of half-hearted relationships, a dead-end job and a personal struggle. His questions of faith surrounding his father's run-of-the-mill Christianity and his mother's suppressed Judaism lead him to a bizarre obsession with the idea of the messiah. After the collapse of his latest affair and his introduction to a reclusive physics professor, Karl is given the opportunity to confront his obsession and take a journey that no man has taken before, and from which he knows he cannot return. Upon arriving in Palestine, AD 29, Glogauer finds that Jesus Christ is not the man that history and faith would like to believe, but that there is an opportunity for someone to change the course of history by making the ultimate sacrifice. First published in 1969, Behold the Man broke through science fiction's genre boundaries to create a poignant reflection on faith, disillusion and self-sacrifice. This is the classic novel that established the career of perhaps contemporary science fiction's most cerebral and innovative author.

Karl Glogauer is a disaffected modern professional casting about for meaning in a series of half-hearted relationships, a dead-end job and a personal struggle. His questions of faith surrounding his father's run-of-the-mill Christianity and his mother's suppressed Judaism lead him to a bizarre obsession with the idea of the messiah. After the collapse of his latest affair and his introduction to a reclusive physics professor, Karl is given the opportunity to confront his obsession and take a journey that no man has taken before, and from which he knows he cannot return. Upon arriving in Palestine, AD 29, Glogauer finds that Jesus Christ is not the man that history and faith would like to believe, but that there is an opportunity for someone to change the course of history by making the ultimate sacrifice. First published in 1969, Behold the Man broke through science fiction's genre boundaries to create a poignant reflection on faith, disillusion and self-sacrifice. This is the classic novel that established the career of perhaps contemporary science fiction's most cerebral and innovative author.

Envisioning the first book of the Bible like no one before him, R. Crumb, the legendary illustrator, retells the story of Genesis in a profoundly honest and deeply moving way. Now, readers of every persuasion can gain astonishing new insights from these stories. Crumb's Book of Genesis reintroduces us to the bountiful tree-lined garden of Adam and Eve, the massive ark of Noah with beasts of every kind, the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah destroyed by brimstone and fire, and the Egypt of the Pharaoh. Using clues from the text and peeling away the theological and scholarly interpretations that have often obscured the Bible's most dramatic stories, Crumb fleshes out a parade of biblical originals: from the serpent in Eden, the humanoid reptile appearing like an alien out of a science fiction movie, to Jacob, a 'kind of depressed guy who doesn't strike you as physically courageous', and his bother, Esau, 'a rough and kick-ass guy', to God himself, 'a standard Charlton Heston-like figure with long white hair and a flowing beard'. Crumb's Book of Genesis, the culmination of five years of painstaking work, is a tapestry of masterly detail and storytelling that celebrates the astonishing diversity of one of our greatest artistic geniuses.

The Arain/Rain is an agrarian tribe mainly settled in Punjab and parts of Sindh (now Pakistan). The estimated population of the tribe is more than 10 million. With the partition of India, the bulk of the community moved from East Punjab to West Punjab. The book elaborates all theories related to the origin of the community that has been proposed in last hundred years citing oriental and British accounts. During 18th & 19th centuries, the area was widely popular as Rohilkhand after the name of “Rohilla Afghans” once ruled the region in the 18th century. Its a story of the diasporic community formed in late 18th and early 19th century by few hundred Arain families immigrated from Punjab. The Terai plains provided an opportunity to thrifty, hardworking skilled agrarian immigrants to rose as a most disciplined zamindar of British governed districts of Pilibhit and Bareilly of United Province (British India). Interestingly, the members of the diasporic community were integrated with the social movement started as Anjuman-e- Arain, Hind in 1890 AD under the leadership of “Mian Family of Baghbanpura, Lahore” in Punjab. The social movement of the community gained the impetus when Sir Mian Mohammad Shafi accepted the leadership of his tribe as President of Anjuman-e-Arain, Hind in 1915 AD. An active member of Muslim League, All India Mohammedan Educational Conference, and President of All India Urdu association marked him as one of the most distinguished faces of Muslim Politics in Colonial India. In corridors of Colonial bureaucracy, he was elected as vice-president of Viceroy Executive Council in 1922 AD, a position attained by few Indian at that time. The leadership of Sir Mian Mohammad Shafi had a significant impact on the social structure of Arains even in Rohilkhand, the geographically far off place from Lahore. With changing backdrop of Indian politics, the small diaspora of Rohilkhand Arains also faced the brunt Indian partition and then abolishment of colonial zamindari system in 1952 AD. The confiscation of large zamindari estates compelled the young educated descendants to take a route to the newly created state of Pakistan. Around fifty percent of the youngster of the Arain population from District Pilibhit and Bareilly moved to Pakistan. The remaining half of the Indian side tried to integrate them with the fastest growing country delivering the growth rate of more than eight percent in last two decades. The tribe on the other side although prospered in the sixties and seventies but find themselves in a difficult situation in last two decades as a part of Urdu-speaking community in Sindh. The last chapter and appendix include selected biographical accounts, their affiliations, political participation from early 20th century up to the post-independent India & Pakistan. The globalization provided an opportunity for educated families to relocate to western countries mainly Canada and United States. One can find Rohilkhand Arains both from Indian and Pakistan side in South Asian hubs of Mississauga and Houston carrying interesting folklores of their history and background. The nucleus of the community still dwells in the villages of District Pilibhit, Bareilly, and Nainital. Their language, cuisine, and customs reflected the unique blend created as a mix of Punjabi and local influences in last two centuries. The book will provide an evidence-based articulation to the history, culture and social background of the Arain community of Rohilkhand where youngsters are relying on multiple verbal narratives of history coming from previous generations. In Pakistan, the larger Arain tribe of Punjab will find a historical relationship with Rohilkhand Arains that are now labeled as Urdu-speaking Muhajirs from United province.

"No book before or since has ever had such an impact upon my imagination," declared Arthur C. Clarke of Last and First Men. This masterpiece of science fiction by British philosopher and writer Olaf Stapledon (1886–1950) is an imaginative, ambitious history of humanity's future that spans billions of years. Together with its follow-up, Star Maker, it is regarded as the standard by which all earlier and later future histories are measured. The protagonist of this compelling novel is humanity itself, stripped down to sheer intelligence. It evolves through the ages: rising to pinnacles of civilization, teetering on the brink of extinction, surviving onslaughts from other planets and a decline in solar energy, and constantly developing new forms, new senses, and new intellectual abilities. From the present to five billion years into the future, this romance of humanity abounds in profound and imaginative thought.

Vikram Seth's novel is, at its core, a love story: Lata and her mother, Mrs. Rupa Mehra, are both trying to find—through love or through exacting maternal appraisal—a suitable boy for Lata to marry. Set in the early 1950s, in an India newly independent and struggling through a time of crisis, A Suitable Boy takes us into the richly imagined world of four large extended families and spins a compulsively readable tale of their lives and loves. A sweeping panoramic portrait of a complex, multiethnic society in flux, A Suitable Boy remains the story of ordinary people caught up in a web of love and ambition, humor and sadness, prejudice and reconciliation, the most delicate social etiquette and the most appalling violence.

Patrick Bateman is twenty-six and works on Wall Street. He is handsome, sophisticated, charming and intelligent. He is also a psychopath. Taking us to head-on collision with America's greatest dream—and its worst nightmare—American Psycho is a bleak, bitter, black comedy about a world we all recognize but do not wish to confront.

The Aeneid – thrilling, terrifying and poignant in equal measure – has inspired centuries of artists, writers and musicians. Virgil’s epic tale tells the story of Aeneas, a Trojan hero, who flees his city after its fall, with his father Anchises and his young son Ascanius – for Aeneas is destined to found Rome and father the Roman race. As Aeneas journeys closer to his goal, he must first prove his worth and attain the maturity necessary for such an illustrious task. He battles raging storms in the Mediterranean, encounters the fearsome Cyclopes, falls in love with Dido, Queen of Carthage, travels into the Underworld and wages war in Italy.

With a compassionate realism and narrative sweep that recall the work of Charles Dickens, this magnificent novel captures all the cruelty and corruption, dignity and heroism, of India. The time is 1975. The place is an unnamed city by the sea. The government has just declared a State of Emergency, in whose upheavals four strangers--a spirited widow, a young student uprooted from his idyllic hill station, and two tailors who have fled the caste violence of their native village--will be thrust together, forced to share one cramped apartment and an uncertain future. As the characters move from distrust to friendship and from friendship to love, A Fine Balance creates an enduring panorama of the human spirit in an inhuman state.

"I COULD NOT BELIEVE THAT I HAD NEVER HEARD OF THIS BOOK. IT FELT AS IMPORTANT AS ANNE FRANK'S DIARY." —Steve McQueen, from the foreword Perhaps the best written of all the slave narratives, 12 Years a Slave is a harrowing memoir about one of the darkest periods in American history. It recounts how Solomon Northup, born a free man in New York, was lured to Washington, D.C., in 1841 with the promise of fast money, then drugged and beaten and sold into slavery. He spent the next twelve years of his life in captivity on a series of Louisiana plantations. After his rescue, Northup published this exceptionally vivid and detailed account of slave life. It became an immediate bestseller and today is recognized for its unusual insight and eloquence as one of the very few portraits of American slavery produced by someone as educated as Solomon Northup, or by someone with the dual perspective of having been both a free man and a slave.

A masterpiece of rebellion and imprisonment where war is peace freedom is slavery and Big Brother is watching Thought Police Big Brother Orwellian These words have entered our vocabulary because of George Orwell s classic dystopian novel 1984 The story of one man s nightmare odyssey as he pursues a forbidden love affair through a world ruled by warring states and a power structure that controls not only information but also individual thought and memory 1984 is a prophetic haunting tale More relevant than ever before 1984 exposes the worst crimes imaginable the destruction of truth freedom and individuality With a foreword by Thomas Pynchon With a foreword by Thomas Pynchon A masterpiece of rebellion and imprisonment where war is peace freedom is slavery and Big Brother is watching View our feature on George Orwell s 1984 Thought Police Big Brother Orwellian These words have entered our vocabulary because of George Orwell s classic dystopian novel 1984 The story of one man s nightmare odyssey as he pursues a forbidden love affair through a world ruled by warring states and a power structure that controls not only information but also individual thought and memory 1984 is a prophetic haunting tale More relevant than ever before 1984 exposes the worst crimes imaginable the destruction of truth freedom and individuality This beautiful paperback edition features deckled edges and french flaps a perfect gift for any occasion Alternate cover edition can be found here.

The Punjab A Hundred Years Ago Garrett 9693508122 HISTORY

A national bestseller, Dictionary of the Khazars was cited by The New York Times Book Review as one of the best books of the year. Written in two versions, male and female (both available in Vintage International), which are identical save for seventeen crucial lines, Dictionary is the imaginary book of knowledge of the Khazars, a people who flourished somewhere beyond Transylvania between the seventh and ninth centuries. Eschewing conventional narrative and plot, this lexicon novel combines the dictionaries of the world's three major religions with entries that leap between past and future, featuring three unruly wise men, a book printed in poison ink, suicide by mirrors, a chimerical princess, a sect of priests who can infiltrate one's dreams, romances between the living and the dead, and much more.