The King Is Naked

After the lion, king of beasts, takes off his fur coat on a very hot day, the other animals make fun of him, and someone even steals his fur coat.

Hans Christian Andersen was a Danish author best known for writing children's stories including "The Little Mermaid" and "The Ugly Duckling." But he didn't just write short stories, and his intended audience wasn't restricted to children. In addition to his fairy tales, Andersen wrote poems, plays, novels, travel books, essays, and more. He hungered for recognition at home (Denmark) and abroad-and he got it! Eventually. Today, his stories can be read in over one hundred languages. But no matter what language they're in, Andersen's tales have got something for everyone. In them, you'll find beauty, tragedy, nature, religion, artfulness, deception, betrayal, love, death, judgment, penance, and-occasionally-a happy ending. They're complex tales, but since Andersen himself was pretty complex, we like to think that art imitates life. Or something like that. "The Emperor's New Clothes" (Danish: Kejserens nye Kl?der) is a short tale by Hans Christian Andersen about two weavers who promise an Emperor a new suit of clothes that is invisible to those who are unfit for their positions, stupid, or incompetent. When the Emperor parades before his subjects in his new clothes, no one dares to say that he doesn't see any suit of clothes until a child cries out, "But he isn't wearing anything at all!" The tale has been translated into over a hundred languages. Includes a unique illustration!

Fiction. Asian & Asian American Studies. Short Stories. A young translator living in Toronto frequently travels abroad-to Hong Kong, Macau, Prague, Tokyo-often with his unnamed lover. In restaurants and hotel rooms, the couple begin telling folk tales to each other, perhaps as a way to fill the undefined space between them. Theirs is a comic and enigmatic relationship in which emotions are often muted and sometimes masked by verbal play and philosophical questions, and further complicated by the woman's frequent unexplained disappearances. YOU ARE EATING AN ORANGE. YOU ARE NAKED. is an intimate novel of memory and longing that challenges Western tropes and Orientalism. Embracing the playful surrealism of Haruki Murakami and the atmospheric narratives of filmmaker Wong Kar-wai, Sheung-King's debut is at once lyrical and punctuated, and wholly unique, and marks the arrival of a bold new voice in Asian-Canadian literature. Sheung-King has written a wonderfully unexpected and maverick love story but also a novel of ideas that hopscotches between Toronto, Macau, Hong Kong, Tokyo, and Prague. It is enchanting, funny, and a joy to read.-Kyo Maclear

A marriage-resistant intellectual tries to escape a sham engagement with a rogue in this delightful Regency romance by the author of The Naked Gentleman. Indiscretion Is Just the Beginning . . . One night of slight overindulgence—oh, all right, he was drunk—and Stephen Parker-Roth finds he must betroth himself to prevent yet another scandal. But his “intended” is lovely, a redheaded beauty under her horrendous, unfashionable bonnet, and before long, he’s congratulating himself on compromising such an excellent candidate—and anticipating what other naughtiness they’ll get caught at before the wedding . . . Lady Anne Marston has long since given up any thought of marriage. That is the price she pays for the mistakes of her past. But one little conversation with a handsome rogue should never have led to a sham engagement. Even if it did end in a rather shocking kiss…in broad daylight…on the front step of London’s premier gossip. Now, trapped between a secret and a lie, Anne must somehow disentangle herself from this charming, maddening man before the truth comes out—or her heart gives in . . . Praise for the writing of Sally MacKenzie “The romance equivalent of chocolate cake . . . Every page is an irresistible delight!” —Lisa Kleypas “Plenty of sexy sizzle and charming wit.” —Booklist “Plenty of heat and hilarity.” —Publishers Weekly

A collection of three popular folk tales; Emperor's new clothes, Steadfast tin soldier and Puss in boots.

The invention of the nation-state was the crowning achievement of the Sykes–Picot Agreement between the United Kingdom and France in 1916. As a geostrategic move to divide, defeat, and dismantle the Ottoman Empire during World War I, it was a great success and the modern colonial borders of the Arab nation-states eventually emerged in the course of World War II. Today, as nations are reconceiving their own postcolonial interpolated histories, Arab and Muslim states are becoming total states on the model of ISIS with Iran, Syria, Turkey and Egypt, among others, violently manufacturing their legitimacy. And yet simultaneously, examples such as the Nobel Peace Prize winning formation of a civil society 'Quartet' in Tunisia allude to a growing transnational public sphere across the Arab and Muslim world. In The Emperor is Naked, Hamid Dabashi boldly argues that the category of nation-state has failed to produce a legitimate and enduring unit of post-colonial polity. Considering what this liberation of nations and denial of legitimacy to ruling states will actually unfurl, Dabashi asks: What will replace the nation-state, what are the implications of this deconstruction on global politics and, crucially, what is the meaning of the post-colonial subject within this moment?

“Propulsive . . . The novel’s chaotic sprawl, black humor and madcap digressions make it a thrilling rejoinder to the tidy story arcs [of] most crime fiction.” —The Wall Street Journal Winner of the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Best Debut Novel Named a Best Book of the Year in the Wall Street Journal, Houston Chronicle, and Philadelphia City Paper A Naked Singularity tells the story of Casi, born to Colombian immigrants, who lives in Brooklyn and works in Manhattan as a public defender—one who, tellingly, has never lost a trial. Never. In the book, we watch what happens when his sense of justice and even his sense of self begin to crack—and how his world then slowly devolves. A huge, ambitious novel in the vein of DeLillo, Foster Wallace, Pynchon, and even Melville, it’s told in a distinct, frequently hilarious voice, with a striking human empathy at its center. Its panoramic reach takes readers through crime and courts, immigrant families and urban blight, media savagery and media satire, scatology and boxing, and even a breathless heist worthy of any crime novel. If Infinite Jest stuck a pin in the map of mid-90s culture and drew our trajectory from there, A Naked Singularity does the same for the feeling of surfeit, brokenness, and exhaustion that permeates our civic and cultural life today. In the opening sentence of William Gaddis’s A Frolic of His Own, a character sneers, “Justice? You get justice in the next world. In this world, you get the law.” A Naked Singularity reveals the extent of that gap, and lands firmly on the side of those who are forever getting the law. “A great American novel.” —Toronto Star