Aquiles is an upper-middle-class man in his mid-40s. He shares his days with Marina, his wife, who is deeply in love and enjoys full sexuality devoid of prejudices. He has a very active routine between the gym, work, and sports, sharing his leisure time with his three childhood friends and families. His life goes on pleasantly and away from any conflict that may disturb him. An unexpected situation will provoke a shockwave in his structure and aroused his curiosity, which will lead him to travel unknown walking trails and discover that there are relationships that go beyond those established by social doctrines and by the cultural mandates within which he moves. From that moment on, Aquiles will begin to sharpen his attention to situations that had gone unnoticed until then. Even with the qualms imposed by his heterosexual male structure, he will try to open his head to understand that nothing is what it seems and that maybe there is another type of pleasure that, until now, he has never experienced or imagined.

There was no turning back... What has been done was done, and although Aquiles did not know how far he would go or what would happen, his world had undeniably changed. His curiosity, the double intentions, the hints, and the phrases with double meaning, had been left behind. Instead, that kiss had turned his straight man structure upside down. The armor Aquiles had put on to preserve himself and protect himself from something that even he knew, finally rusty and battered, had fallen. It was time to face the situation and accommodate his ideas to continue living a life that would surely not be the same. In this third book of the Aquiles’ saga, Gonzalo Narvreón continues to make us travel through captivating landscapes and situations, making us spectators of the internal conflicts that Achilles faces and the desire that grows in him. That feeling will tempt him to experiment and let himself be carried away into a new world, which until now was alien and unknown to him and in which he will probably discover sensations and pleasures that he never imagined being able to feel.

That much feared and eluded journey had finally come true. Beyond what was agreed before boarding the plane, what had ultimately happened was what Aquiles and Alejandro knew would inevitably end up happening. Almost cornered by the impulse, by the impetus, and by the impudence of Alejandro, Aquiles had lived a new experience that pushed him to cross a new limit. Strangely enough, and despite how mobilizing this journey had been for him, Aquiles did not fall prey to the disturbing internal conflicts that had come to haunt him. Indeed, what had happened had freed him from a heavy backpack; only Aquiles had not yet been able to think about it too much. Nor did he know that this journey would trigger an abrupt and definitive turn in his professional life, which would affect the entire armed structure. Already with the lighter burden, waiting for the birth of his first child, and feeling more open to letting things simply flow, Aquiles would continue to develop and strengthen his emotional bonds without having the slightest suspicion about what was about to happen to him.

An original and groundbreaking examination of the psychological devastation of war through the lens of Homer’s Iliad in this “compassionate book [that] deserves a place in the lasting literature of the Vietnam War” (The New York Times). In this moving and dazzlingly creative book, Dr. Jonathan Shay examines the psychological devastation of war by comparing the soldiers of Homer’s Iliad with Vietnam veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. A classic of war literature that has as much relevance as ever in the wake of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, Achilles in Vietnam is a “transcendent literary adventure” (The New York Times) and “clearly one of the most original and most important scholarly works to have emerged from the Vietnam War” (Tim O’Brien, author of The Things They Carried). As a Veterans Affairs psychiatrist, Shay encountered devastating stories of unhealed PTSD and uncovered the painful paradox—that fighting for one’s country can render one unfit to be a citizen. With a sensitive and compassionate examination of the battles many Vietnam veterans continue to fight, Shay offers readers a greater understanding of PTSD and how to alleviate the potential suffering of soldiers. Although the Iliad was written twenty-seven centuries ago, Shay shows how it has much to teach about combat trauma, as do the more recent, compelling voices and experiences of Vietnam vets. A groundbreaking and provocative monograph, Achilles in Vietnam takes readers on a literary journey that demonstrates how we can learn how war damages the mind and spirit, and work to change those things in our culture that so that we don’t continue repeating the same mistakes.

Back in print for the first time in decades, Auden’s National Book Award–winning poetry collection, in a critical edition that introduces it to a new generation of readers The Shield of Achilles, which won the National Book Award in 1956, may well be W. H. Auden’s most important, intricately designed, and unified book of poetry. In addition to its famous title poem, which reimagines Achilles’s shield for the modern age, when war and heroism have changed beyond recognition, the book also includes two sequences—“Bucolics” and “Horae Canonicae”—that Auden believed to be among his most significant work. Featuring an authoritative text and an introduction and notes by Alan Jacobs, this volume brings Auden’s collection back into print for the first time in decades and offers the only critical edition of the work. As Jacobs writes in the introduction, Auden’s collection “is the boldest and most intellectually assured work of his career, an achievement that has not been sufficiently acknowledged.” Describing the book’s formal qualities and careful structure, Jacobs shows why The Shield of Achilles should be seen as one of Auden’s most central poetic statements—a richly imaginative, beautifully envisioned account of what it means to live, as human beings do, simultaneously in nature and in history.

Two modern cases of genocide and extermination began in Southeast Asia in the same year. Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge regime ruled Cambodia from 1975 to 1979, and Indonesian forces occupied East Timor from 1975 to 1999. This book examines the horrific consequences of Cambodian communist revolution and Indonesian anti-communist counterinsurgency. It also chronicles the two cases of indigenous resistance to genocide and extermination, the international cover-ups that obstructed documentation of these crimes, and efforts to hold the perpetrators legally accountable.The perpetrator regimes inflicted casualties in similar proportions. Each caused the deaths of about one-fifth of the population of the nation. Cambodia's mortality was approximately 1.7 million, and approximately 170,000 perished in East Timor. In both cases, most of the deaths occurred in the five-year period from 1975 to1980. In addition, Cambodia and East Timor not only shared the experience of genocide but also of civil war, international intervention, and UN conflict resolution. U.S. policymakers supported the invading Indonesians in Timor, as well as the indigenous Khmer Rouge in Cambodia. Both regimes exterminated ethnic minorities, including local Chinese, as well as political dissidents. Yet the ideological fuel that ignited each conflagration was quite different. Jakarta pursued anti-communism; the Khmer Rouge were communists. In East Timor the major Indonesian goal was conquest. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge's goal was revolution. Maoist ideology influenced Pol Pot's regime, but it also influenced the East Timorese resistance to the Indonesia's occupiers.Genocide and Resistance in Southeast Asia is significant both for its historical documentation and for its contribution to the study of the politics and mechanisms of genocide. It is a fundamental contribution that will be read by historians, human rights activists, and genocide studies specialists.