A modern classic by Nobel Laureate J.M. Coetzee. His latest novel, The Schooldays of Jesus, is now available from Viking. Late Essays: 2006-2016 will be available January 2018. For decades the Magistrate has been a loyal servant of the Empire, running the affairs of a tiny frontier settlement and ignoring the impending war with the barbarians. When interrogation experts arrive, however, he witnesses the Empire's cruel and unjust treatment of prisoners of war. Jolted into sympathy for their victims, he commits a quixotic act of rebellion that brands him an enemy of the state. J. M. Coetzee's prize-winning novel is a startling allegory of the war between opressor and opressed. The Magistrate is not simply a man living through a crisis of conscience in an obscure place in remote times; his situation is that of all men living in unbearable complicity with regimes that ignore justice and decency. Mark Rylance (Wolf Hall, Bridge of Spies), Ciro Guerra and producer Michael Fitzgerald are teaming up to to bring J.M. Coetzee's Waiting for the Barbarians to the big screen.

From one of Italy's most respected literary voices, a manifesto on the state of global culture and how connectivity is changing the way we experience it. For the gatekeepers of traditional high culture, the rise of young ambitious outsiders has indeed seemed like nothing short of a barbarian invasion. In this concise and powerful manifesto, Alessandro Baricco explores a handful of realms that have been "plundered"-wine, soccer, music, and books-and extrapolates that it is not a case of old values against new but a widespread mutation that we are all part of, leading toward a different way of having experiences and creating meaning.

Shao-yun Yang challenges assumptions that the cultural and socioeconomic watershed of the Tang-Song transition (800–1127 CE) was marked by a xenophobic or nationalist hardening of ethnocultural boundaries in response to growing foreign threats. In that period, reinterpretations of Chineseness and its supposed antithesis, “barbarism,” were not straightforward products of political change but had their own developmental logic based in two interrelated intellectual shifts among the literati elite: the emergence of Confucian ideological and intellectual orthodoxy and the rise of neo-Confucian (daoxue) philosophy. New discourses emphasized the fluidity of the Chinese-barbarian dichotomy, subverting the centrality of cultural or ritual practices to Chinese identity and redefining the essence of Chinese civilization and its purported superiority. The key issues at stake concerned the acceptability of intellectual pluralism in a Chinese society and the importance of Confucian moral values to the integrity and continuity of the Chinese state. Through close reading of the contexts and changing geopolitical realities in which new interpretations of identity emerged, this intellectual history engages with ongoing debates over relevance of the concepts of culture, nation, and ethnicity to premodern China.

The next novel in the international publishing phenomenon the Ice Planet Barbarians series, now in a special print edition with a bonus novella! Josie has always dreamed of finding The One, but the hunter chosen for her is nothing like what she expected (or wanted)—but he might be exactly what she needs. “Resonance” is supposed to be a dream—that’s when your soulmate is chosen for you. And every woman on the ice planet has hooked up with a big, hunky soulmate of their own—except me. So do I want a mate? Heck yeah. More than anything, all I’ve ever wanted is to be loved by someone. But the soulmate chosen for me? My least favorite person on the darn ice planet. Haeden’s the most cranky, disapproving, unpleasant, overbearing male alien . . . so why is it that my body sings when he gets close? Why is he working so hard to prove to me that he’s not as awful as I think he is? I hate him . . . don’t I?

Bringing together some of the figures most closely associated with Edward Said and his scholarship, Waiting for the Barbarians looks at Said the public intellectual and literary critic, and his political and intellectual legacy: the future through the lens of his work.

FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD AND THE PEN ART OF THE ESSAY AWARD Over the past decade and a half, Daniel Mendelsohn’s reviews for The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Book Review have earned him a reputation as “one of the greatest critics of our time” (Poets & Writers). In Waiting for the Barbarians, he brings together twenty-four of his recent essays—each one glinting with “verve and sparkle,” “acumen and passion”—on a wide range of subjects, from Avatar to the poems of Arthur Rimbaud, from our inexhaustible fascination with the Titanic to Susan Sontag’s Journals. Trained as a classicist, author of two internationally best-selling memoirs, Mendelsohn moves easily from penetrating considerations of the ways in which the classics continue to make themselves felt in contemporary life and letters (Greek myth in the Spider-Man musical, Anne Carson’s translations of Sappho) to trenchant takes on pop spectacles—none more explosively controversial than his dissection of Mad Men. Also gathered here are essays devoted to the art of fiction, from Jonathan Littell’s Holocaust blockbuster The Kindly Ones to forgotten gems like the novels of Theodor Fontane. In a final section, “Private Lives,” prefaced by Mendelsohn’sNew Yorker essay on fake memoirs, he considers the lives and work of writers as disparate as Leo Lerman, Noël Coward, and Jonathan Franzen. Waiting for the Barbarians once again demonstrates that Mendelsohn’s “sweep as a cultural critic is as impressive as his depth.”

Produced in Italy from the turn of the 20th century, "sword and sandal" or peplum films were well received in the silent era and attained great popularity in the 1960s following the release of Hercules (1959), starring Mr. Universe Steve Reeves. A global craze for Bronze Age fantasy-adventures ensued and the heroic exploits of Hercules, Maciste, Samson and Goliath were soon a mainstay of American drive-ins and second-run theaters (though mainly disparaged by critics). By 1965, the genre was eclipsed by the spaghetti western, yet the 1960s peplum canon continues to inspire Hollywood epics. This filmography provides credits, cast and comments for dozens of films from 1908 through 1990.