Now back in print, these witty, insightful ssays on fashion, cinema, wartime, and everyday life demonstrate why Eileen Chang was and is a major icon of twentieth-century Chinese literature. Eileen Chang is one of the most celebrated and influential modern Chinese novelists and cultural critics of the twentieth century. First published in 1944, and just as beloved as her fiction in the Chinese-speaking world, Written on Water collects Chang’s reflections on art, literature, war, urban culture, and her own life as a writer and woman, set amid the sights and sounds of wartime Shanghai and Hong Kong. In a style at once meditative and vibrant, Chang writes of friends, colleagues, and teachers turned soldiers or wartime volunteers, and her own experiences as a part-time nurse. She also reflects on Chinese cinema, the aims of the writer, and the popularity of the Peking Opera. Chang engages the reader with her sly and sophisticated humor, conversational voice, and intense fascination with the subtleties of everyday life. In her examination of Shanghainese food, culture, and fashions, she not only reveals but also upends prevalent attitudes toward women, presenting a portrait of a daring and cosmopolitan woman bent on questioning pieties and enjoying the pleasures of modernity, even as the world convulses in war and a revolution looms.

The very word "culture" has traditionally evoked the land. But when such writers as William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, and, later, Matthew Arnold developed what would become the idea of modern culture, they modeled that idea on Britain's imperial command of the sea. Instead of locating the culture idea’s beginnings in the dynamic between the country and the city, Samuel Baker insists on taking into account the significance of water for that idea’s development. For the Romantics, figures of the island, the deluge, and the sundering tide often convey the insularity of cultures understood to stand apart from the whole; yet, Baker writes, the sea also stands in their poetry of culture as a reminder of the broader sphere of circulation in which the poet's work, if not the poet's subject, inheres. Although other books treat the history of the idea of culture, none synthesizes that history with the literary history of maritime empire. Written on the Water tracks an uncanny interrelationship between ocean imagery and culturalist rhetoric of culture forward from the late Augustans to the mid-Victorians. In so doing, it analyzes Wordsworth's pronounced ambivalence toward the sea, Coleridge's sojourn as an imperial functionary in Malta, Byron's cosmopolitan seafaring tales, and Arnold's dual identity as "poet of water" and prose arbiter of "culture." It also considers Romanticism's classical inheritance, arguing that the Lake Poets dissolved into the idea of culture the Virgilian system of pastoral, georgic, and epic modes of literature and life. This compelling new study will engage any reader interested in the intellectual and literary history of Britain and the lived experience of British Romanticism.

Fishing guide and award-winning author Randy Spencer weaves a spell with quirky, colorful residents, fish-out-of-water tourists, native traditions, and a large helping of absolute wonder. Written On Water is an extraordinary collection of tales about the part of Maine that truly is, as those who reside there call it, the “back of the beyond.” With its assemblage of quirky characters who live far off the beaten path, and consider fishing to be a sacred art, the beautiful, watery, down-east Grand Lake Stream (population 132) has been hallowed ground since the 1800s. Written On Water takes us to a place where very old ways of life have persisted and, against all odds, the velocity of modern life has not yet invaded its shores and lakes, pines and canoes, and most importantly, its citizens. The unlikely survival of such a place in the twenty-first century is remarkable, as is the oral history that has survived with it. Award-winning author and master Maine guide, Randy Spencer, shares this insightful collection of colorful oral histories, teeming with drama, mysteries, and laugh-out-loud moments about eccentric and lovable individuals. In poignant and frequently hilarious prose, Spencer brings us “fish stories”—tales of the author’s experience guiding “sports” on fishing excursions—as well as stories about the quirky local residents, passed downs through generations.

YOUR NAME WRITTEN ON WATER, winner of an international contest for erotic literature in Spanish and a bestseller in Spain, is a startling and charged exploration of desire and narcissism that reads like Carole Maso's AUREOLE with a twist of THE STORY OF O. Sofía works in a gallery in Madrid, the young wife of an architect whose love for her has hardened into a passionate and destructive resentment. Her life is transformed when one afternoon, by chance, she spends her lunch hour at a public pool outside the city. There she meets Marina, a woman who is her doppelgänger. They are immediately drawn together - so powerfully that Sofía feels it all may be a trick of her fevered mind - and together they forge a love that is tender as well as passionate, with an intimacy that is almost eerie. When Sofía learns that Marina is leaving for a job in Rome, she sees the perfect exit from a marriage that has become tyranny. And so they go, twin fugitives after desire - but pursued as well by the spectre of danger. YOUR NAME WRITTEN ON WATER is a stunningly accomplished and deeply psychological novel with the charge of an erotic thriller.

The story of a determined Ojibwe Grandmother (Nokomis) Josephine-ba Mandamin and her great love for Nibi (water). Nokomis walks to raise awareness of our need to protect Nibi for future generations, and for all life on the planet. She, along with other women, men, and youth, have walked around all the Great Lakes from the four salt waters, or oceans, to Lake Superior. The walks are full of challenges, and by her example Josephine-ba invites us all to take up our responsibility to protect our water, the giver of life, and to protect our planet for all generations.

A “miraculous” (Newsweek) human drama, based on a true story, from the renowned author of The Prince of Tides and The Great Santini The island is nearly deserted, haunting, beautiful. Across a slip of ocean lies South Carolina. But for the handful of families on Yamacraw Island, America is a world away. For years the people here lived proudly from the sea, but now its waters are not safe. Waste from industry threatens their very existence unless, somehow, they can learn a new way. But they will learn nothing without someone to teach them, and their school has no teacher—until one man gives a year of his life to the island and its people. Praise for The Water Is Wide “Miraculous . . . an experience of joy.”—Newsweek “A powerfully moving book . . . You will laugh, you will weep, you will be proud and you will rail . . . and you will learn to love the man.”—Charleston News and Courier “A hell of a good story.”—The New York Times “Few novelists write as well, and none as beautifully.”—Lexington Herald-Leader “[Pat] Conroy cuts through his experiences with a sharp edge of irony. . . . He brings emotion, writing talent and anger to his story.”—Baltimore Sun

When the Sudanese civil war reaches his village in 1985, 11-year-old Salva becomes separated from his family and must walk with other Dinka tribe members through southern Sudan, Ethiopia and Kenya in search of safe haven. Based on the life of Salva Dut, who, after emigrating to America in 1996, began a project to dig water wells in Sudan. By a Newbery Medal-winning author.