Return to the cozy fantasy world of the #1 New York Times bestselling Legends & Lattes series with a new adventure featuring fan-favorite, foul-mouthed bookseller Fern Fern has weathered the stillness and storms of a bookseller’s life for decades, but now, in the face of crippling ennui, transplants herself to the city of Thune to hang out her shingle beside a long-absent friend’s coffee shop. What could be a better pairing? Surely a charming renovation montage will cure what ails her! If only things were so simple… It turns out that fixing your life isn’t a one-time prospect, nor as easy as a change of scenery and a lick of paint. A drunken and desperate night sees the rattkin waking far from home in the company of a legendary warrior surviving on inertia, an imprisoned chaos-goblin with a fondness for silverware, and an absolutely thumping hangover. As together they fend off a rogue’s gallery of ne’er-do-wells trying to claim the bounty the goblin represents, Fern may finally reconnect with the person she actually is when there isn’t a job to get in the way.

A Novel of High Fantasy and Low Stakes. After a lifetime of bounties and bloodshed, Viv is hanging up her sword for the last time. The battle-weary orc aims to start fresh, opening the first ever coffee shop in the city of Thune. But old and new rivals stand in the way of success—not to mention the fact that no one has the faintest idea what coffee actually is. If Viv wants to put the blade behind her and make her plans a reality, she won't be able to go it alone. But the true rewards of the uncharted path are the travelers you meet along the way. And whether drawn together by ancient magic, flaky pastry, or a freshly brewed cup, they may become partners, family, and something deeper than she ever could have dreamed.

“[ The Rising Sun ] is quite possibly the most readable, yet informative account of the Pacific war.”— Chicago Sun-Times This Pulitzer Prize–winning history of World War II chronicles the dramatic rise and fall of the Japanese empire, from the invasion of Manchuria and China to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Told from the Japanese perspective, The Rising Sun is, in the author’s words, “a factual saga of people caught up in the flood of the most overwhelming war of mankind, told as it happened—muddled, ennobling, disgraceful, frustrating, full of paradox.” In weaving together the historical facts and human drama leading up to and culminating in the war in the Pacific, Toland crafts a riveting and unbiased narrative history. In his Foreword, Toland says that if we are to draw any conclusion from The Rising Sun , it is “that there are no simple lessons in history, that it is human nature that repeats itself, not history.” “Unbelievably rich . . . readable and exciting . . .The best parts of [Toland’s] book are not the battle scenes but the intimate view he gives of the highest reaches of Tokyo politics.”— Newsweek

Proletarian writing dominated the colonial Korean literary scene from the mid-1920s to the mid-1930s and left a lasting legacy in the later, post-1945 literatures of North and South Korea.  Rat Korean Stories  from the Japanese Empire   brings together thirteen short stories by colonial Korean writers, as well as two works written in 1946 under U.S. military occupation. Political cartoons, illustrations, newspaper clippings, and photographs--over sixty included in the volume--place the works of Korean writers in close conversation with the rich history of colonial proletarian visual culture. This anthology moves across verbal and visual media and geographical borders, following characters making their way through disintegrating rural areas and flourishing colonial urban centers, from the alluring margins of the Japanese metropole to the expanding Manchurian frontier.  Rat Korean Stories from the Japanese Empire  broadens and complicates the definition of the colonial Korean proletarian culture movement. In this volume, writers and artists confront the shifting boundaries of ethnicity/race, class, and culture that were reconfiguring both colonial Korea and the Japanese metropolitan center in the context of global imperialism in the first half of the twentieth century. Contributing Ruth Barraclough, Mee Chang, Kimberly Chung, Bruce Fulton, Ju-Chan Fulton, Theodore Hughes, Young-Ji Kang, I Jonathan Kief, Ross King, Jin-kyung Lee, Samuel Perry, Christina Yi

If you want to discover the history of the Rape of Nanking, then keep reading...Between December 13th, 1937, and the beginning of February 1938, Japanese soldiers entered the Chinese city of Nanjing following a very brief fight for the city. For over six weeks, they committed some of the worst atrocities, first against the Chinese soldiers after they surrendered, then against the civilians. The Westerners who did not flee from the city prior to the Japanese arrival set up a safety zone in the weeks leading up to the Imperial Army entering the city. This was the only place where there was relative safety, and many of the Chinese citizens tried to find refuge there. While Japanese soldiers did enter the safety zone to remove citizens, their actions and behavior in the rest of the city were far worse. The primary war crimes for which they would eventually be charged were rape, looting, arson, and the execution of soldiers and civilians. In less than two months, they killed hundreds of thousands of Chinese people and destroyed roughly a third of the buildings within the city. After World War II ended, the commanders and officers would be put on trial for the atrocities that had been committed, with many of them being condemned by documentation that emerged after the fighting had stopped. In the years since the tribunal and conviction, memorials have been built to honor those who died during those few weeks between 1937 and 1938.In this book, you’ll learn about the A brief history of the historically important Chinese city of NanjingThe Japanese invasion of ChinaThe Marco Polo Bridge IncidentThe Battle of ShanghaiThe march to NanjingThe establishment of the Safety ZoneWestern perception and reaction to the massacreThe war crimes committed in NanjingThe Far East TribunalAnd much more!Scroll up and click the “add to cart” button to learn more about the Rape of Nanking.

*Includes pictures*Includes a bibliography for further readingOn October 29, 1937, a large crowd of people gathered on the bank of the Wusong River in Shanghai to watch a spectacle, a life and death struggle unfolding directly in front of them across the river. The crowd was a curious blend of Chinese, European, and American civilians and journalists. Their focus was on the Sihang Warehouse across the river, but it wasn't the warehouse itself that fascinated the onlookers. Instead, it was the men inside the warehouse, the men of the 524th Regiment, the 88th Division of the Chinese Nationalist Army. The soldiers were elite, and they were widely considered the best of the Nationalist Army. They proudly called themselves "the Generalissimo's Own," after Jiang Jieshi, the generalissimo of the Nationalist government and leader of China. The Chinese soldiers were prepared to fight and die to the last man, and they were making their last stand there. By then, the city of Shanghai was in shambles. The Imperial Japanese Military had invaded Shanghai on August 13, 1937, rapidly reducing the once-prosperous city to a pile of burning rubble after three months of brutal urban combat. Countless blazing fires raged throughout the city, some of which had been caused by the fighting, but most had been set by the retreating Chinese Army in a futile effort to stall the Japanese invaders. The Chinese Nationalist Army had fought valiantly against the Japanese, but the Chinese were hopelessly outgunned. Possessing few heavy weapons, aircraft, and artillery, the Nationalist Army could not hope to defeat the Japanese, who possessed superior firepower in every engagement against the Chinese troops. Causality rates for the Nationalist Army were horrific, with some units being completely wiped out in the fighting. Many Nationalist Army units would be completely annihilated in the three months of house-to-house fighting. As spectators watched from across the river, a barrage of Japanese artillery slammed the warehouse, creating enormous craters on the walls and sending shockwaves throughout the building. The Sihang Warehouse was six stories tall and made from thick concrete, making it the ideal building to defend against an enemy with superior firepower, but the Chinese soldiers could only hope to hold out for so long. The bulk of their army had already retreated, leaving the 524th the only Chinese unit left in the city. Rubble and the smell of cordite filled the air around the warehouse as the Japanese pressed their attack. Light tanks supported waves of infantry as the might of Imperial Japan focused its rage against a single Chinese warehouse. People watched nervously from across the river as the Japanese soldiers advanced. Some bystanders put up large signs bearing Chinese characters large enough to be seen across the river like some bizarre sporting event. They were mean to warn the soldiers in the warehouse of any approaching Japanese attacks. There were whispers among the people watching that the soldiers in the warehouse were called "The Lost Battalion." The Western newspapers had dubbed the battle for the warehouse the Chinese Alamo. The Battle of Shanghai was a brutal testament to a new era of modern warfare which, according to many historians, signified the beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War, and hence World War II. Despite the stand, China was a nation broken into petty warlord fiefdoms and wracked by civil war between Nationalist and Communist forces. This civil war became inextricably intertwined with the Second Sino-Japanese War and World War II, and the sheer scale of the horrors of the conflict remain hard to believe today, even as action in that theater is often overlooked because of events in Europe. Indeed, the Japanese launched a brutal campaign across the fragmented realms that made up China, committing atrocities just as horrendous as their Axis ally in Europe.

If you want to discover the captivating history of the Second Sino-Japanese War, then keep reading...Free History BONUS Inside!Many people in the West look upon the Second Sino-Japanese War, which took place in the 1930s and 1940s, as a sort of sideshow to the larger Second World War, but there is no separating the two. Imagine the Pacific War, the theater of World War II that took place in the Pacific. If the Japanese were not busy fighting on another front, they would have had millions of more troops available to fight the Americans and the British. In all likelihood, World War II would have ended the same way, but it would have taken much longer and cost that many more lives. To understand the conflict between these two Asian powers, we have to travel back in time quite a ways, for the story of what is known by many as the Second Sino-Japanese War is long and rooted deep in history.In The Second Sino-Japanese A Captivating Guide to Military Conflict That Began between China and Japan, Including Events Such as the Japanese Invasion of Manchuria and the Nanjing Massacre, you will discover topics such The Roots of the ConflictJapan before the WarManchuria/ManchukuoChina ProperAnother “Incident”The OpponentsThe Tragedy of NanjingThey Were ExpendableThe War Drags OnHorrors Mostly UnknownFriendsAnd much, much more!So if you want to learn more about the Second Sino-Japanese War, scroll up and click the "add to cart" button!

The UK is grappling with big questions about belonging, equality, and the legacies of Empire and Colonialism. We've been here before. Embracing a broader history that encompasses all British people, The Shoulders We Stand On is fundamental to a better understanding of the past and gives many more people who fought for our future a voice in the present.Have you heard of the Indian Workers' Association? The Grunwick Strike? The Brixton Black Women's Group? The Battle of Brick Lane? If the answer is no, you're not alone. The Shoulders We Stand On tells the stories of ten remarkable movements, campaigns and organisations led by Black and Brown people across Britain from the sixties to the eighties that fought against racism and capitalism and impacted the way we live now.Researcher and historian Preeti Dhillon wants us to reclaim the history that has been kept from us, and use these vital movements and inspirational moments to better understand the UK we live in today and how change happens.There is a long and deep history of activism by Black and Brown people spanning the UK. Their stories can inspire all of us to make a difference, just as they did. The Shoulders We Stand On is a book of hope. Hope that together we can make a difference, that together we are powerful, and that we don't have to tackle society's challenges alone.We're not alone, we've been here before and this is the book we all need now.Filled with inspiring narratives, Preeti Dhillon uncovers crucial moments from our history. If you loved the books Natives and Brit(ish), the TV series Small Axe or the film Pride, don't miss The Shoulders We Stand On.

In December 1972, Jean McConville, a thirty-eight-year-old mother of ten, was dragged from her Belfast home by masked intruders, her children clinging to her legs. They never saw her again. Her abduction was one of the most notorious episodes of the vicious conflict known as The Troubles. Everyone in the neighborhood knew the I.R.A. was responsible. But in a climate of fear and paranoia, no one would speak of it. In 2003, five years after an accord brought an uneasy peace to Northern Ireland, a set of human bones was discovered on a beach. McConville's children knew it was their mother when they were told a blue safety pin was attached to the dress--with so many kids, she had always kept it handy for diapers or ripped clothes. Patrick Radden Keefe's mesmerizing book on the bitter conflict in Northern Ireland and its aftermath uses the McConville case as a starting point for the tale of a society wracked by a violent guerrilla war, a war whose consequences have never been reckoned with. The brutal violence seared not only people like the McConville children, but also I.R.A. members embittered by a peace that fell far short of the goal of a united Ireland, and left them wondering whether the killings they committed were not justified acts of war, but simple murders. Patrick Radden Keefe writes an intricate narrative about a notorious killing in Northern Ireland and its devastating repercussions.

Dividing the century into the Age of Catastrophe, 1914-1950, the Golden Age, 1950-1973, and the Landslide, 1973-1991, Hobsbawm marshals a vast array of data into a volume of unparalleled inclusiveness, vibrancy, and insight, a work that ranks with his classics The Age of Empire and The Age of Revolution. Includes 32 pages of photos.

Americans call the Second World War “The Good War.” But before it even began, America’s wartime ally Josef Stalin had killed millions of his own citizens—and kept killing them during and after the war. Before Hitler was finally defeated, he had murdered six million Jews and nearly as many other Europeans. At war’s end, both the German and the Soviet killing sites fell behind the iron curtain, leaving the history of mass killing in darkness. Bloodlands is a new kind of European history, presenting the mass murders committed by the Nazi and Stalinist regimes as two aspects of a single history, in the time and place where they occurred: between Germany and Russia, when Hitler and Stalin both held power. Assiduously researched, deeply humane, and utterly definitive, Bloodlands will be required reading for anyone seeking to understand the central tragedy of modern history. From Booklist If there is an explanation for the political killing perpetrated in eastern Europe in the 1930s and 1940s, historian Snyder roots it in agriculture. Stalin wanted to collectivize farmers; Hitler wanted to eliminate them so Germans could colonize the land. The dictators wielded frightening power to advance such fantasies toward reality, and the despots toted up about 14 million corpses between them, so stupefying a figure that Snyder sets himself three goals here: to break down the number into the various actions of murder that comprise it, from liquidation of the kulaks to the final solution; to restore humanity to the victims via surviving testimony to their fates; and to deny Hitler and Stalin any historical justification for their policies, which at the time had legions of supporters and have some even today. Such scope may render Snyder’s project too imposing to casual readers, but it would engage those exposed to the period’s chronology and major interpretive issues, such as the extent to which the Nazi and Soviet systems may be compared. Solid and judicious scholarship for large WWII collections.

The momentous new book from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Gulag and Iron Curtain. In 1932-33, nearly four million Ukrainians died of starvation, having been deliberately deprived of food. It is one of the most devastating episodes in the history of the twentieth century. With unprecedented authority and detail, Red Famine investigates how this happened, who was responsible, and what the consequences were. It is the fullest account yet published of these terrible events. The book draws on a mass of archival material and first-hand testimony only available since the end of the Soviet Union, as well as the work of Ukrainian scholars all over the world. It includes accounts of the famine by those who survived it, describing what human beings can do when driven mad by hunger. It shows how the Soviet state ruthlessly used propaganda to turn neighbours against each other in order to expunge supposedly 'anti-revolutionary' elements. It also records the actions of extraordinary individuals who did all they could to relieve the suffering. The famine was rapidly followed by an attack on Ukraine's cultural and political leadership - and then by a denial that it had ever happened at all. Census reports were falsified and memory suppressed. Some western journalists shamelessly swallowed the Soviet line; others bravely rejected it, and were undermined and harassed. The Soviet authorities were determined not only that Ukraine should abandon its national aspirations, but that the country's true history should be buried along with its millions of victims. Red Famine, a triumph of scholarship and human sympathy, is a milestone in the recovery of those memories and that history. At a moment of crisis between Russia and Ukraine, it also shows how far the present is shaped by the past.

Based on classified documents and first-person interviews, a startling history of the American war on Vietnamese civilians Americans have long been taught that events such as the notorious My Lai massacre were isolated incidents in the Vietnam War, carried out by “a few bad apples.” But as award-winning journalist and historian Nick Turse demonstrates in this groundbreaking investigation, violence against Vietnamese noncombatants was not at all exceptional during the conflict. Rather, it was pervasive and systematic, the predictable consequence of orders to “kill anything that moves.” Drawing on more than a decade of research in secret Pentagon files and extensive interviews with American veterans and Vietnamese survivors, Turse reveals for the first time how official policies resulted in millions of innocent civilians killed and wounded. In shocking detail, he lays out the workings of a military machine that made crimes in almost every major American unit all but inevitable. Kill Anything That Moves takes us from archives filled with Washington’s long-suppressed war crimes investigations to the rural Vietnamese hamlets that bore the brunt of the war; from boot camps where young American soldiers learned to hate all Vietnamese to bloodthirsty campaigns like Operation Speedy Express, in which a general obsessed with body counts led soldiers to commit what one participant called “a My Lai a month.” Thousands of Vietnam books later, Kill Anything That Moves, devastating and definitive, finally brings us face-to-face with the truth of a war that haunts Americans to this day.

From the acclaimed author of Brothers and To a major new novel that limns the joys and sorrows of life in contemporary China.   Yang Fei was born on a moving train. Lost by his mother, adopted by a young switchman, raised with simplicity and love, he is utterly unprepared for the tempestuous changes that await him and his country. As a young man, he searches for a place to belong in a nation that is ceaselessly reinventing itself, but he remains on the edges of society. At age forty-one, he meets an accidental and unceremonious death. Lacking the money for a burial plot, he must roam the afterworld aimlessly, without rest. Over the course of seven days, he encounters the souls of the people he’s lost.   As Yang Fei retraces the path of his life, we meet an extraordinary cast of his adoptive father, his beautiful ex-wife, his neighbors who perished in the demolition of their homes. Traveling on, he sees that the afterworld encompasses all the casualties of today’s China—the organ sellers, the young suicides, the innocent convicts—as well as the hope for a better life to come. Yang Fei’s passage maps the contours of this vast nation—its absurdities, its sorrows, and its soul. Vivid, urgent, and panoramic, The Seventh Day affirms Yu Hua’s place as the standard-bearer of modern Chinese fiction.