The Things They Carried

The Things They Carried
by Tim O'Brien

A classic work of American literature that has not stopped changing minds and lives since it burst onto the literary scene, The Things They Carried is a ground-breaking meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling.

The Things They Carried depicts the men of Alpha Company: Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and the character Tim O’Brien, who has survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at the age of forty-three.

Taught everywhere—from high school classrooms to graduate seminars in creative writing—it has become required reading for any American and continues to challenge readers in their perceptions of fact and fiction, war and peace, courage and fear and longing.

Asian Tales and Tellers

Asian Tales and Tellers

edited by Cathy Spagnoli

In this abundant and kaleidoscopic collection, Spagnoli includes stories from Japan, India, Korea, Vietnam, Cambodia, the Philippines, Bangladesh, Laos, Tibet, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, China, Indonesia, Taiwan, Burma, and Nepal. After profiling modern Asian storytellers practicing traditional storytelling styles, she arranges the stories around dominant Asian themes such as Harmony and Friendship

"What is carved on rocks will wear away in time, What is told from mouth to mouth will live forever." Spagnoli, herself a storyteller, uses this epigraph of Vietnamese origin to launch a glittering collection of tales. Here are stories from Laos, Cambodia, India, Pakistan, Nepal, Korea, Malaysia - the list goes on. Some of the stories carry ancient wisdoms, others bring us contemporary belly-laughs with equal flair. Prefatory chapters contain information on storytellers and storytelling from different regions of the continent, as well as on tools and techniques of this unique performing art. Stories are thematically grouped. Also included are notes, a glossary, and resources both online and print.

Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce

Southeast Asia in the Age of Commerce, 1450-1680, Volume One: The Lands below the Winds

by Anthony Reid

The history of Southeast Asian societies, like those of East Asia, had developed greatly before European seafarers arrived. It was a region that ``was subject to many of the same climatic, physical, and commercial pressures and thus developed a very similar set of material cultures.'' Reid gives numerous contemporary foreign accounts of life in Southeast Asia on the eve of western imperialism and colonialism in a skillful, analytical, and critical way.

In The Lands Below the Winds--the first volume of a two-volume set chronicling the rise of Southeast Asian culture during the years from 1450 to 1680--Anthony Reid vividly explored everyday life in the different societies of the region, from diet, housing, commerce, and law to sexual and family relations, patterns of warfare, and popular entertainment. In doing so he enables us to perceive the underlying coherence and splendid variety in the complex mosaic of Southeast Asia.