Riding The East Wind

A Japanese-American pilot in the days before Pearl Harbor is the hero of this novel which illuminates the tensions between the U.S. and Japan as war between them became inevitable. The hero, Ken Kurushima, is torn by his loyalty to both countries.

The classic coming-of-age novel about a young Chinese woman torn between Eastern and Western cultures by the Nobel Prize–winning author of The Good Earth. Kwei-lan is a traditional Chinese girl—taught by her mother to submit in all things, “as a flower submits to sun and rain alike.” Her marriage was arranged before she was born. As she approaches her wedding day, she’s surprised by one aspect of her anticipated life: Her husband-to-be has been educated abroad and follows many Western ideas that Kwei-lan was raised to reject. When circumstances push the couple out of the family home, Kwei-lan finds her assumptions about tradition and modernity tested even further. East Wind: West Wind is a sensitive, early exploration of the cross-cultural themes that went on to become a hallmark of Buck’s acclaimed novels. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Pearl S. Buck including rare images from the author’s estate.

Otohiko Kaga’s Marshland is an epic novel on a Tolstoyan scale, running from the pre-World War II period to the turbulence of 1960s Japan. At forty-nine, Atsuo Yukimori is a humble auto mechanic living an almost penitentially quiet life in Tokyo, where his coworkers know something of his military record but nothing of his postwar criminal past. Out of curiosity he accompanies his nephew to a demonstration at a nearby university, and is gradually drawn into a friendship, then a romance, with Wakaka Ikéhata, the brilliant but mentally unstable daughter of a university professor. As some of the student radical groups turn to violence and terrorism, Atsuo and Wakaka find themselves framed for the lethal bombing of a Tokyo train. During their long imprisonment the novel becomes a Kafkaesque procedural, revealing the corrupt intricacies of the police and judicial system of Japan. At the end of their hard pilgrimage to exoneration, Atsuo and Wakaka are finally able to return to his original hometown, Nemuro, on the eastern-most peninsula of Hokkaido island. Here is the marshland of the title, a remote and virtually unspoiled region of Japan where Kaga sets a large number of extraordinarily beautiful pastoral scenes. Marshland is a revelation of modern Japanese history and culture, a major novel from the hand of a master well-known in his own country, but virtually unheard-of—so far—in the United States and Anglophone world in general.

Unudurti Sudhakar is in his home ground when telling stories from north-coastal Andhra Pradesh. With his deep knowledge of the region’s culture, he sets his stories in specific historical situations and contexts. His stories span a long period from antiquity to the present day - from declining Buddhist viharas and bustling sea-ports of the first millennium to the days of the colonialists and zamindars and finally to the tragedies of the Naxalite revolt in Srikakulam. His characters, tragic and comic, are caught up in a society going through the throes of change. A vivid introduction to a part of India that is not well represented in literature.

From every “beautiful mornin’” to “some enchanted evening,” the songs of Oscar Hammerstein II are part of our daily lives, his words part of our national fabric. Born into a theatrical dynasty headed by his grandfather and namesake, Oscar Hammerstein II breathed new life into the moribund art form of operetta by writing lyrics and libretti for such classics as Rose-Marie (music by Rudolf Friml), The Desert Song (Sigmund Romberg), The New Moon (Romberg) and Song of the Flame (George Gershwin). Hammerstein and Jerome Kern wrote eight musicals together, including Sweet Adeline, Music in the Air, and their masterpiece, Show Boat. The vibrant Carmen Jones was Hammerstein’s all-black adaptation of the tragic opera by Georges Bizet. In 1943, Hammerstein, pioneer in the field of operetta, joined forces with Richard Rodgers, who had for the previous twenty-five years taken great strides in the field of musical comedy with his longtime writing partner, Lorenz Hart. The first Rodgers and Hammerstein work, Oklahoma!, merged the two styles into a completely new genre—the musical play—and simultaneously launched the most successful partnership in American musical theater. Over the next seventeen years, Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote eight more Broadway musicals: Carousel, Allegro, South Pacific, The King and I, Me and Juliet, Pipe Dream, Flower Drum Song, and The Sound of Music. They also wrote a movie musical (State Fair) and one for television (Cinderella). Collectively their works have earned dozens of awards, including Pulitzers, Tonys, Oscars, Grammys, and Emmys. Throughout his career, Hammerstein created works of lyrical beauty and universal feeling, and he continually strove—sometimes against fashion—to seek out the good and beautiful in the world. “I know the world is filled with troubles and many injustices,” he once said. “But reality is as beautiful as it is ugly . . . I just couldn’t write anything without hope in it.” All of his lyrics are here—850, more than a quarter published for the first time—in this sixth book in the indispensable Complete Lyrics series that has also brought us the lyrics of Cole Porter, Lorenz Hart, Ira Gershwin, Irving Berlin, and Frank Loesser. From the young scribe’s earliest attempts to the old master’s final lyric—“Edelweiss”—we can see, read, and, yes, sing the words of a theatrical and lyrical genius.