Over the last decade, Yan Lianke has been continually heralded as one of the “best contemporary Chinese writers” (The Independent) and “one of the country’s fiercest satirists” (The Guardian). Among many awards and honors, he has been twice a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize and he was awarded the prestigious Franz Kafka Prize for his impressive body of work. Now, for the first time, his two most acclaimed novellas are being published in English. “Timeless” and “marvelous” (Asian Review of Books), Marrow is a haunting story of a widow who goes to extremes to provide a normal life for her four physically and mentally disabled children. When she finds out that bones “the closer from kin the better” can cure their illnesses and prevent future generations from the same fate, she feeds them a medicinal soup made from the bones of her dead husband. But after running out of bones, she resorts to a measure that only a mother can take. A luminous, moving fable, The Years, Months, Days—a bestselling classic in China and winner of the prestigious Lu Xun Literary Prize—tells of an elderly man who stays in his small village after a terrible drought forces everyone to leave. Unable to make the grueling march through the mountains, he becomes the lone inhabitant, along with a blind dog. Tending to a single ear of corn, and fending off the natural world from overtaking the village, every day is a victory over death. With touches of the fantastical, these two novellas—masterpieces of the form—reflect the universality of mankind’s will to live, live well, and live with purpose.

A NEW YORK TIMES BEST POETRY BOOK OF 2018 A transfiguration of Mennonite hymns into heartbreaking lyric poems, Years, Months, and Days is a moving “meditation on the possibility of translation.” Bridging secular spirituality and holy reverence with the commonalities of life, death, love, and hope, Jernigan explores the connection between hymn and poem, recalling the spare beauty of Marilynne Robinson’s novels or the poems of Jan Zwicky and Robert Bringhurst. The sparse and tender phrasing of Years, Months, and Days is “an offering of words to music,” made in the spirit of a shared love—for life, for a particular landscape and its rhythms—that animates poem and prayer alike.

The release of Java SE 8 introduced significant enhancements that impact the Core Java technologies and APIs at the heart of the Java platform. Many old Java idioms are no longer required and new features like lambda expressions will increase programmer productivity, but navigating these changes can be challenging. Core Java® for the Impatient is a complete but concise guide to Java SE 8. Written by Cay Horstmann—the author of Java SE 8 for the Really Impatient and Core Java™, the classic, two-volume introduction to the Java language—this indispensable new tutorial offers a faster, easier pathway for learning the language and libraries. Given the size of the language and the scope of the new features introduced in Java SE 8, there’s plenty of material to cover, but it’s presented in small chunks organized for quick access and easy understanding. If you’re an experienced programmer, Horstmann’s practical insights and sample code will help you quickly take advantage of lambda expressions (closures), streams, and other Java language and platform improvements. Horstmann covers everything developers need to know about modern Java, including Crisp and effective coverage of lambda expressions, enabling you to express actions with a concise syntax A thorough introduction to the new streams API, which makes working with data far more flexible and efficient A treatment of concurrent programming that encourages you to design your programs in terms of cooperating tasks instead of low-level threads and locks Up-to-date coverage of new libraries like Date and Time Other new features that will be especially valuable for server-side or mobile programmers Whether you are just getting started with modern Java or are an experienced developer, this guide will be invaluable for anyone who wants to write tomorrow’s most robust, efficient, and secure Java code.

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Three Proofs for the Existence of God gives scientific, historic, and prophetic proofs for the existence of God. If we do not think that a computer, or even a bicycle, could have come up by chance, without a designer, could we think that man who made the computer could have come up by chance, without a designer? Chance and design are mutually exclusive: the disproof of the one is the proof of the other. There is no third option! In biogenesis, genetics, dendrochronology, geophysics, and thermodynamics, evolution theory has been disproved experimentally and observationally. By default, therefore, design has been proven! Any attempt by evolutionists to experimentally disprove design, or prove chance, ends up proving design: The one conducting the experiment is the designer of that experiment, and the result is his design. If the experiment is left to chance, nothing happens! With historic data from the Bible added up, we show the year God created man and other things. Acts and relationships between God and his creation show up in other chapters to remind us that the Creator, God, lives and wills. One of these chapters, "Black History in Scripture," disproves the saying that "Christianity is the white man's religion." We show that the scriptures were translated into three African languages, for ten centuries, before there was an English Bible-among other facts. Did Jesus not live in Israel and Africa only?