Mary Astell's 'A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, for the Advancement of their True and Greatest Interest' is a groundbreaking work that addresses the lack of educational opportunities for women in the 17th century. Astell argues that women should have access to the same intellectual pursuits as men, advocating for the establishment of institutions to provide women with a solid education. Written in a persuasive and engaging style, the book is a call to action for women to assert their intellectual capabilities and demand equality in education. Astell's work is considered a seminal text in feminist literature, challenging traditional views on women's education and their role in society. The book is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of women's rights and the development of feminist thought.

In this major collection of his essays, Alberto Manguel, whom George Steiner has called “the Casanova of reading,” argues that the activity of reading, in its broadest sense, defines our species. “We come into the world intent on finding narrative in everything,” writes Manguel, “landscape, the skies, the faces of others, the images and words that our species create.” Reading our own lives and those of others, reading the societies we live in and those that lie beyond our borders, reading the worlds that lie between the covers of a book are the essence of A Reader on Reading. The thirty-nine essays in this volume explore the crafts of reading and writing, the identity granted to us by literature, the far-reaching shadow of Jorge Luis Borges, to whom Manguel read as a young man, and the links between politics and books and between books and our bodies. The powers of censorship and intellectual curiosity, the art of translation, and those “numinous memory palaces we call libraries” also figure in this remarkable collection. For Manguel and his readers, words, in spite of everything, lend coherence to the world and offer us “a few safe places, as real as paper and as bracing as ink,” to grant us room and board in our passage.

This polyphonic collection of twenty-five stories presents a multitude of Malaysian perspectives spanning age, gender, and class. Yow char kwai hawkers compete for customers on a busy city street. Marital dynamics unfurl at an abortion clinic. On an island, a man's infatuation with a veiled woman takes a supernatural turn. A woman writes to her brother about their dead cat. Characters in these stories connect through chance encounters and fateful events. Their narratives are inevitably coloured by the social tension and occasional absurdities of a multicultural society. Shortlisted for the 2009 Frank O'Connor International Short Story Prize.