Titling his book Journey to the End of the Century, SACHAL puts us in the macrocosm of the culture of the Soviet Union through the microcosm of his life there. It was a harsh and difficult beginning: homelessness, starvation, loneliness, diseases, and a painful existence. Never complaining, little Sacha learns how to use experience in the most magical ways. He recounts how he bravely endured, how to use the system of control to survive and fully be himself. This severe beginning prepared Sacha for the horrors of war, for the harshness and severity of the German prison camp and the French Resistance. This hero received the Croix de Guerre in France. He learned how to survive homelessness, severe cold, no food, cruelty, and brutality, and all with a smile, ingenuity, a song on his lips, or his gift of art. He was a genius with poetry in his soul that he later put on canvas. This unforgettable history speaks to us about how to use adversity and to triumph in a sometimes cruel, brutal world. It is a powerful story of how one man learned to be himself, gentle, powerful, resilient, uncomplaining of himself or others throughout this saga of his life. While his story is devastating, it is magnificent that a man such as Sacha can endure and learn from every adversity that being true to himself is the greatest response. This book is an unforgettable read and will enrich all those who venture into Journey to the End of the Century. For more information on Sacha, the man and his art, see www.sachal.com.

When it was published in 1932, this revolutionary first fiction redefined the art of the novel with its black humor, its nihilism, and its irreverent, explosive writing style, and made Louis-Ferdinand Celine one of France's--and literature's--most important 20th-century writers. The picaresque adventures of Bardamu, the sarcastic and brilliant antihero of Journey to the End of the Night move from the battlefields of World War I (complete with buffoonish officers and cowardly soldiers), to French West Africa, the United States, and back to France in a style of prose that's lyrical, hallucinatory, and hilariously scathing toward nearly everybody and everything. Yet, beneath it all one can detect a gentle core of idealism.

The bestselling Journey to the West comic book by artist Chang Boon Kiat is now back in a brand new fully coloured edition. Journey to the West is one of the greatest classics in Chinese literature. It tells the epic tale of the monk Xuanzang who journeys to the West in search of the Buddhist sutras with his disciples, Sun Wukong, Sandy and Pigsy. Along the way, Xuanzang's life was threatened by the diabolical White Bone Spirit, the menacing Red Child and his fearsome parents and, a host of evil spirits who sought to devour Xuanzang's flesh to attain immortality. Bear witness to the formidable Sun Wukong's (Monkey God) prowess as he takes them on, using his Fiery Eyes, Golden Cudgel, Somersault Cloud, and quick wits! Be prepared for a galloping read that will leave you breathless!

“A masterpiece” about faith, race, and morality at a medieval turning point, from the National Jewish Book Award winner and “Israeli Faulkner” (The New York Times). It’s edging toward the end of the year 999 when Ben Attar, a Moroccan Jewish merchant from Tangiers, takes two wives—an act of bigamy that results in the moral objections of his nephew and business partner, Raphael Abulafia, and the dissolution of their once profitable enterprise of importing treasures from the Atlas Mountains. Abulafia’s repudiation triggers a potentially perilous move by Attar to set things right—by setting sail for medieval Paris to challenge his nephew, and his nephew’s own pious wife, face to face. Accompanied by a Spanish rabbi, a Muslim trader, a timid young slave, a crew of Arab sailors, and his two veiled wives, Attar will soon find himself in an even more dangerous battle—with the Christian zealots who fear that Jews and others they see as immoral infidels will impede the coming of Jesus at the dawn of a new millennium. From the author of A Woman in Jerusalem, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, this is an insightful portrait of a unique moment in history as well as the timeless issues that still trouble us today. “The end of the first millennium comes to represent only one of many breaches—between north and south, Christians and Jews, Jews and Muslims, Ashkenazic and Sephardic Jews, men and women—across which A. B. Yehoshua's extraordinary novel delivers us.” —The New York Times

Travel along with a group of seasoned adventure motorcyclists as they ride an uncharted route across South America on a journey dubbed Expedition 65. Led by long-time tour guide Jim Hyde, the group assembles an A-team of machines and veteran riders to cross explore South America from top to bottom. The journey was chronicled by long-time professional photographer Alfonse Palaima, who recorded amazing moments from the world's most dangerous road to crossing the legendary Salar de Uyuni, the world's largest salt flat. Join in on the adventure of a lifetime, and learn how the world's best adventure riders prepare to travel across the bottom of the world.

Céline’s masterpiece—colloquial, polemic, hyper-realistic, boiling over with black humor Céline’s masterpiece—colloquial, polemic, hyper realistic—boils over with bitter humor and revulsion at society’s idiocy and hypocrisy: Journey to the End of the Night is a literary symphony of cruelty and violence that hurtles through the improbable travels of the petit bourgeois (and largely autobiographical) antihero, Bardamu: from the trenches of WWI, to the African jungle, to New York, to the Ford Factory in Detroit, and finally to life in Paris as a failed doctor. Ralph Manheim’s pitch-perfect translation captures Céline’s savage energy, and a dynamic afterword by William T. Vollmann presents a fresh, furiously alive take on this astonishing novel.

Overwhelmed by what he felt was the worthlessness of his great success as a writer, Chekhov (1860-1904) decided to leave everything behind him and go to the far reaches of Siberia - to the terrible Russian penal colony on Sakhalin Island. This book mixes his witty, charming letters back to friends on his long journey with his grim account of the reality of life in one of the worst places on earth. Great Journeys allows readers to travel both around the planet and back through the centuries - but also back into ideas and worlds frightening, ruthless and cruel in different ways from our own. Few reading experiences can begin to match that of engaging with writers who saw astounding things- Great civilisations, walls of ice, violent and implacable jungles, deserts and mountains, multitudes of birds and flowers new to science. Reading these books is to see the world afresh, to rediscover a time when many cultures were quite strange to each other, where legends and stories were treated as facts and in which so much was still to be discovered.