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ninja-muse · 4 years

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i’m trying to branch out and read outside my genre (fantasy) do you have any book recs for someone whose heart is in fantasy but needs to see what else is out there?

Hi anon! Thanks for the ask! Fantasy’s such a wide genre, and this is such an open ask, that I’m mostly going to be recommending books with similar feels or themes from other genres, to push you a little outside the fantasy bubble and introducing you to different genres and types of storytelling. If you have a favourite subgenre or trope or author, I can maybe get a little more specific or offer read-alikes.

Also, I don’t know if you knew this before asking, but fantasy is my favourite genre too, so some of these recs are books that pushed me out of the genre as well, or that I found familiar-but-different.

And this is getting long, so I’m going to throw it under a cut to save everyone scrolling.

Science fiction

the Vorkosigan saga by Lois McMaster Bujold - This is space opera, which means it’ll have fairly familiar plots except with science-y things instead of magic. There’s an heir with something to prove, heists, cons, and mysteries, attempted coups and assassinations, long-suffering sidekicks, and a homeworld that’s basically turn-of-the-century Russia but with fewer serfs. It was one of the first adult sci-fi books I read and genuinely liked.

The Book of Koli by M.R. Carey - I finished this recently, and the second book of the trilogy just came out. This is post-apocalyptic sci-fi, but not grim or particularly complex. (Some SF gets really into the nuts and bolts of the science elements; this isn’t that.) Basically, Koli’s a teenager who wants more than his quasi-medieval life’s given him, and finds himself in conflict with his village (and then exile) because of it. I could see where the story was going pretty much from the start, but I loved the journey anyway.

The Martian by Andy Weir - This doesn’t have much in common with fantasy, but it’s my go-to rec for anyone who’s never read science fiction before, because it’s funny, explains the science well, and has a hero and a plot you get behind right away. In case you haven’t heard of it (or the film), it’s about an astronaut stranded on Mars, trying to survive long enough to be rescued.

Foreigner by C.J. Cherryh - This is an alien first contact story, about a colony of humans in permanent quarantine on an alien planet. The MC is the sole social liaison and translator, explaining his culture to the aliens and the aliens to the human, and working to keep the peace—until politics and assassins get involved. It’s been over a decade since I read this, so my memory’s blurred, but I remember the same sort of political intrigue vibes as the Daevabad trilogy, just with fewer POVs.

Who Fears Death by Nnedi Okorafor - One from my TBR. It looks like dark fiction about women, outcasts, and revenge, which sounds very fantastic and the MC can apparently do magic—but it’s post-apocalyptic Africa.

Speaking of political intrigue and sweeping epic plots, the Expanse series by James S.A. Corey has both in spades. Rebellions, alien technology, corrupt businesses, heroes doing good things and getting bad consequences, all that good stuff. It takes the science fairly seriously, without getting very dense with it, and will probably register as “more sci-fi” than my recs in the genre so far.

Oh, and Dune by Frank Herbert is such a classic chosen-one epic that it barely registers as science fiction at all.

Graphic novels

It’s technically fantasy, but assuming you’ve never picked up a graphic novel before, you should read Monstress by Marjorie Liu. Asian-inspired, with steampunk aesthetics, and rebellions and quests and so many female characters. It’s an absolutely fantastic graphic novel, if you want a taste of what those can do.

I’d highly recommend Saga by Brian K. Vaughan. It’s an epic science fiction story about a family caught between sides of a centuries-long war. (Dad’s from one side, Mom’s from the other, everyone wants to capture them, their kid is narrating.) It’s a blast to read, exciting and tense, with hard questions and gorgeous tender moments, and the world-building somehow manages to include weaponized magic, spaceship trees, ghosts, half-spider assassins, and all-important pulp romance novels without anything feeling out of place.

Historical fiction

Hild by Nicola Griffith - Very rich and detailed novel following a girl growing up in an early medieval English court. It’s very fantasy-esque, with battles and politics and changes of religion, and Hild gets positioned early on to be the king’s seer, so there’s “magic” of a sort as well.

The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry - A widow goes to the Victorian seaside to heal and reawaken her interest in biology. Slow, gentle, lovely writing and atmosphere, interesting characters and turns of plot. Doesn’t actually deliver on the sea monster, but still has a lot to recommend it to fantasy readers, I think.

Yiddish for Pirates by Gary Barwin - The late-medieval Jewish pirate adventure you didn’t know you wanted. It’s funny and literary, full of tropes and set pieces like “small-town kid in the big city” and “jail break”, and features the Spanish Inquisition, Columbus, the Fountain of Youth, and talking parrots, among other things.

The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett - A thousand pages about the building of a cathedral in England, mostly focusing on the master builder, the monk who spearheads the project, and a noblewoman who’s been kicked off her family’s land, but has several other plots going on, including a deacon with political ambitions, a war, and a boy who’s trying so hard to fit in and do right.

Sharon Kay Penman - This is an author on my TBR, who comes highly recommended for her novels about the War of the Roses and the Plantagenets. Should appeal to you if you liked Game of Thrones. I’m planning to start with The Sunne in Splendour.

Lady of the Forest by Jennifer Roberson - Either a Robin Hood retelling that’s also a romance, or a romance that’s also a Robin Hood retelling.

Hamnet & Judith by Maggie O’Farrell - A novel of the Shakespeare family, mostly focused on his wife and son. Lovely writing and a very gentle feel though it heads into dark and complex subjects fairly often. A good portrait of Early Modern family life.

Mystery

There’s not a lot of mystery that reads like high, epic, or even contemporary fantasy, but if you’re a fan of urban fantasy, which is basically mystery with magic in, then I’d rec:

Cozy mysteries as a general subgenre, especially if you like the Sookie Stackhouse end of urban fantasy, which has romance and quirky plots; there are plenty of series where the detective’s a witch or the sidekick’s a ghost but they’re solving non-magical mysteries, and the genre in general full of heroines who are good at solving crimes without formal training, and the plots feel very similar but with slightly lower stakes. Cozies have become one of my comfort-reading genres (along with UF) the last few years. My intros were the Royal Spyness novels by Rhys Bowen and the Fairy Tale Fatale books by Maia Chance.

If you like your urban fantasy darker and more serious, and your heroines more complicated, try Kathy Reichs and her Temperance Brennan novels. Brennan’s a forensic anthropologist, strong and complicated in the same ways of my fave UF heroines, and the mysteries are already interesting, with a good dash of thriller and a smidge of romance.

Two other recs:

Haunted Ground by Erin Hart - The first of four books about a forensic anthropologist in Ireland, who’s called in when the Garda find bodies in the peat bogs and need to know how long they’ve been there. They’re very atmospheric—I can almost smell the bog—and give great portraits of rural Ireland and small-town secrets, and since not all the bodies found in each book are recent, they also bring interesting slices of the past to life as well.

A Burnable Book by Bruce Holsinger - This is essentially a medieval thriller about a seditious book that’s turned up in London. I liked the mystery in it and that it’s much more focused on the lives of average people than the rich and famous (for all that recognizable people also show up).

Classics

Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift - I swear this is actually one of the first fantasy novels but few people ever really class it as such. Basically, Gulliver’s a ship’s doctor who keeps getting shipwrecked—in a country of tiny people, a country of giants, a country of mad scientists, a country of talking horses, etc. It’s social satire and a spoof of travelogues from Swift’s time, but it’s easily enough read without that context.

Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll - Another, slightly later, fantasy and satire! Even more amusing situations than in Gulliver’s Travels and, while it’s been a while* since I read it, I think it’ll be a decent read-alike for authors like Jasper Fforde, Genevieve Cogman, and that brand of light British comic fantasy.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare - Also technically a fantasy! I mean, there are fairies and enchantments, for all it’s a romantic comedy written entirely in old-fashioned poetry. It’s a pretty good play to start you off on Shakespeare, if you’re interested in going that direction.

On the subject of Shakespeare, I would also recommend Much Ado About Nothing, Macbeth, and King Lear, the first because it’s my favourite comedy, the others because they’re fantasy read-alikes imo as well (witches! coups! drama!).

the Arthurian mythos. Le Morte D’arthur, Crétien de Troyes, The Once and Future King by T.H. White, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court by Mark Twain, etc. - I’ve read bits and pieces of the first two, am about 80% sure I read the third as a kid (or at least The Sword in the Stone), and have the last on my TBR. Basically, these stories are going to give you an exaggeratedly medieval setting, knights, quests, wizards, fairies, high drama, romantic entanglements, and monsters, and the medieval ones especially have different kinds of plots than you’ll be used to (and maybe open the door to more medieval lit?) **

Beowulf and/or The Odyssey - Two epics that inspired a lot of fiction that came later. (There’s an especial connection between Beowulf and Tolkien.) They’re not the easiest of reads because they’re in poetry and non-linear narratives, but both have a hero facing off against a series of monsters and/or magical creatures as their core story.

Frankenstein by Mary Shelley - The first real science fiction novel. It’s about the ethics of science and the consequences of one’s actions, and I loved seeing the Creature find himself and Frankenstein descend into … that. It’s also full of sweeping, gothic scenes and tension and doom and drama.

* 25 years, give or take

** There are plenty of more recent people using King Arthur and associated characters too, if this "subgenre” interests you.

Other fiction

Vicious by V.E. Schwab - I don’t know if you classify superheroes as science fiction or fantasy or its own genre (for me it depends on the day) but this is an excellent take on the subject, full of moral greyness and revenge.

David Mitchell - A literary fiction writer who has both a sense of humour and an interest in the fantastic and science fictional. He writes ordinary people and average lives marvelously well, keeps me turning pages, plays with form and timelines, and reliably throws in either recurring, possibly-immortal characters, good-vs-evil psychic battles, or other SF/F-y elements. I’d start with either Slade House, a ghost story, or Utopia Avenue, about a ‘60s rock band. Or possible The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, which I fully admit to not having read yet.

Devolution by Max Brooks - A horror movie in book form, full of tension and desperation and jump scares and the problems with relying on modern technology. The monsters are Bigfeet. Reccing this one in the same way I’m reccing The Martian—it’s an accessible intro to its genre.

Son of a Trickster by Eden Robinson - Contemporary fiction with a slight literary bent, that doesn’t pull its punches about Indigenous life but also has a sense of humour about the same. Follows a teen dealing with poverty and a bad home life and drugs and hormones—and the fact that his bio-dad might actually be the trickster Raven. Also features witches, magic, and other spirit-beings, so I generally pitch this as magic realism.

The Only Good Indians by Stephen Graham Jones - Another Indigenous rec, this time a horror novel about ghosts and racism and trying to do the right thing. This’ll give you a taste of the more psychological end of the horror spectrum.

Eliza and Her Monsters by Francesca Zappia - A good example of contemporary YA and how it handles the complexities of life, love, and growing up. Follows the writer of a fantasy webcomic who makes a friend who turns out to write fic of her story and who suddenly has to really balance online and offline life, among other pressures. Realistic portrait of mental health problems.

Non-fiction

The Book of Margery Kempe - The first English-language autobiography. Margery was very devout but also very badass, in a medieval sort of way. She went on pilgrimages to Jerusalem, was possibly epileptic, frequently “saw” Christ and Mary and demons, basically became a nun in middle age while staying married to her husband, and wound up on trial for heresy, before talking a monk into writing down her life story. It’s a fascinating window into the time period.

The Hammer and the Cross by Robert Ferguson - A history of medieval Norse people and how their explorations and trade shaped both their culture and the world.

A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor - Travel writing that was recommended to me by someone who raved about the prose and was totally right. Fermor’s looking back, with the aid of journals, on a walking trip he took across Europe in the 1930s. It’s a fascinating look at the era and an old way of life, and pretty much every “entry” has something of interest in it. He met all sorts of people.

Tim Severin and/or Thor Heyerdahl - More travel writing, this time by people recreating historical voyages (or what they believe to be historical voyages, ymmv) in period ships. Severin focuses on mythology (I’ve read The Ulysses Voyage and The Jason Voyage) and Heyerdahl’s known for Kon-Tiki, which is him “proving” that Polynesians made contact with South America. They both go into the history of the sailing and areas they’re travelling through, while also describing their surroundings and daily life, and, yes, running into storms and things.

Hope this helps you!

#bookblr #booklr #fantasy #read-alikes #answered asks #book recommendations #rec lists

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th3okamid3mon · 5 years

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La Liga de los 5, México has their own heroes [SPOILERS]

Superheroes are very popular now days, kids love them very much, so let Anima Studios jump into the opportunity to tell the story of group of heroes with unique and not orthodox superpowers. Mexicans have a new group of heroes and they are spicy!

Sinopsis:

After their parents passed away, Chema and Dolores have been living together while hiding. After using her powers and getting the attention of the main villain, she gets kidnapped and is held to be used for a ritual that brings back the worst evil the world has seen. Now Chema has to look for his parents´ comrades to save his little sister before it´s too late.

Art design and animation:

Let me get something out of the way: people always talk shit about this studio and about any animated Mexican movie. Mexican movies tend to be either gross humor and obscenities when it comes to animated movies, at least the ones with Huevo Cartoon, even Mexicans talk shit about their own studio! I hate that. Animation here is complicated to take out, people get inspire and do try to give something, to tell a story they believe in and show their creativity. People inside and out of the country have to understand we dont have the same resources but we do try to make something good. Ana y Bruno might not have looked pleasant but what it doesnt have in animation it has in character development and story. La leyenda de la Nahuala might have looked awkward, but the story and the effects (at the time) looked and gave slight horror to the kids who watch it. It´s a try and fail, it´s been a REALLY long time for animation in Mexico and this creators are trying their best, the main things they are using to tell stories might be viewed as over the top but those are practically the main parts of our culture. Of course there´s more, there are legends and places and such but for the love of god give the studio and the creators a break. They are trying to entertain you, they are trying to tell a story of bravery, of family, of accepting one self. STOP SHIT TALKING ABOUT MEXICAN MOVIES AS IF THEY ALL SUCK. THERE ARE PLENTY OF GOOD MEXICAN MOVIES, OLD AND NEW. SAYING MEXICAN MOVIES SUCK IS NOT A PERSONALITY TRAIT, CONSTRUCTIVE CRITICISM EXIST, YOU ARE NOT COOL FOR HATING A MEDIA.

Now where was I? Right.

As always, Anima Studios amazes me with their different animation skills and artwork. Maybe for some people who are used to Pixar or Dreamworks this doesnt look appealing, but hey, it looks way better than I thought, this is actually an improvement from previous works. Their style is recognizable and distinguish. If you dont know which studio is Anima or what they´ve done, maybe you´ve heard of La leyenda de la Nahuala. No? How about Legend Quest? Yep. They made Legend Quest.

The character design is always a treat, everyone look different from each other and always pop in their own ways. Even the background characters look different from each other, this people actually take care to make sure everyone looks unique. For some reason they didn´t use as many models as they used too, it look pretty empty in comparison to their other works but considering this is AN OPERA PRIMA from Maverick Núñez I think they did a really good job.

The main protagonists also come in different shapes:

Just... Look. You can tell everyone apart.

The backgrounds are really eye catching to being waaay too different from the main characters animation, that´s like they common thing now. I dont really mind, they capture what A MEXICAN CITY LOOKS LIKE NOT LIKE OTHER USA OR WHATEVER OTHER COUNTRY PORTRAYS IT. I can´t find many pictures since it has been almost a week after it came out.

The animation looked very fluid, one thing that is really awesome is that they use different types of animation, you have the main 2D and they mix up the 3D animation for villains and other models of backgrounds. Sure it pops up but it doesn´t do it as awkward as before, they made sure to blended a bit better. The effects are fitting and blend WAY better than other movies they´ve done. It looks part of the characters and part of the animation than a separated after effects thing. Anima Studios has improved a lot.

Sound and editing:

I don´t know if you know this, but sometimes some Mexican movies have troubles with sound, general sounds. Sometimes they are way to loud, other times way too low, then it has too much noise or sounds like a sound taken from the internet. This is one of the reasons some people don´t like Mexican movies, though the ones I´ve seen so far have improved more (And let me tell ya, Hollywood movies sometimes have sucky sound too. Really bad sound design sometimes, specially for horror movies and they HAVE A BIGGER BUDGETS! For example: The Conjuring used 20 000 000 dollars, Belzebuth, cost around 191 500 dollars. Like... Bruh).

In this case the sound design was on well done, it wasn´t over the top and the sounds made sense. effects for the cars and the steps do sound like they were done. The designers really tried and accomplish, the dialogues were at the same volume and never were uneven. I liked they didnt use a lot of popular songs, Pachuco was actually a good song for the car chase scene. The music? BOI. I loved it. For some reason they have this whimsical and epic music and I have no idea where they got it. Even in La Leyenda de la Nahuala they always had this type of music: really well made, fitting to the scene, perfect between events and its not over used, letting the silence spaces to be silent and/or letting the background sounds do the job.

The editing had a really fast pace. I´ve notice lately that a lot of animated movies are really fast now or feel really fast, this was way too fast. There´s not exactly enough time to breath, the events pass so quickly you have to pay attention to what´s going on. Even at moments where there has an emotional moment it passes so fast because of a next action. At some point they slow it down but then it makes it fast again. I think the main problem is the time, it is a 1:30 movie like many others but I feel this movie was longer than that so they had to reedit it to make it go faster. Plot is understandable, just fast.

Writing and Characters:

Ah, shit! Here we go again. I like this studio, I like the movies they´ve made (not all of them. Agente -P2? seriously, guys? That was a dark time...), but the writing has always been slightly awkward for me. Sometimes they have too many pauses or what they say doesn´t land correctly. I thought it was the voice actors but no, guys. The voice actors are really good, we have a lot of talent. In general is the writing. They did improve a lot, the pacing and the dialogues were cleaner and sounded natural but for some reason this one has the same problem in certain parts. It´s not like people dont talk like this I think its the pauses that make it weirder. Other than that, the story of the origins of the main 2 is not really original. Then again, as I said before, Originality is a lie. The characters and their powers are the original part. The tale of two siblings that become orphans and have to hide because the main villain is looking for them is old, its what happens around and how the characters act that matters.

It could have used a bit more of a build up, maybe more interactions between the siblings to know them better. The opening scene and introduction was great, it shows you the characters, what happened to the parents and then you flashforward to the main two in their... teenage years? I think they are teens. It´s perfect, but other than that we don´t know Chema or Dolores that well, we know Chema is careful and gets worried a lot while Dolores is a bit more carefree and cheerful, and they interact and you can tell their personalities. i just think it could have used a bit more of their relationship. Dolores powers involve turning into a ghost, flying, going through walls and apparently, being a vessel to bring the evil Dr. Vampire.

The other 4 characters are La Tuna, Catrina, Tetlepanquetzal and Tin Martin.

Tin Martin is kind of annoying to me. He is smart and builds the different gadgets the heroes use, he is really useful and also the comic relief though he actually shows he cares about what I presume are his nephews. Its really competent in his area, all the gadgets he provides work perfectly which is odd to me, its usual for this type of guys to have something that doesnt work. It´s a nice change.

La Tuna is a wrestler and has a goofy look, but this guy knows how to fight and really well. He is extremely strong, as strong or more than Tetlepanquetzal, and he actually has a soft side that isn´t shown as a weakness. He gives advice to Chema when he is down and encourages him to be brave and to believe in himself. Chema is really insecure because of his powers that are to make everyone get spiced. I´m not kidding, his power is to make the air spiced, like if you take chilli peppers and throw them in peoples faces, he does that without having any peppers around. Tuna tells him to believe in himself because his powers dont define him, Tuna had issues too because of his short stature and his powers are becoming prickly and secreting slimy substance (you know, like a nopal. Tuna is a prickly pear) but tells him his father told him that non of that matter, what really matter was who they were inside. Its a really nice and touching scene, Chema is a kid who had to grow fast and misses his parents and now he has a couple parental figures to help him with whats troubling him.

Catrina is kind of a fresa? Like a rich queen or something, or its portrayed like that. Stylish and such, but she is loyal and does care about his friends and dont diminish them, she only teases them because they´ve known each other for a while. She is powerful, summoning bones to be use as armor and to kick the bad guys butts. Catrina has a strong personality, not taking shit and trying to focus on every situation, she is practically the glue that keeps the team on track.

Tetlepanquetzal is the most left out character there is. He is silent, his expressions are ok but he doesn´t provide with any remarks. He does his job, his power is really cool too. He transforms into any animal he touches for a certain amount of time. He is the extra muscle, Tetlepanquetzal is smart but really goofy, due to having animals characteristics from the transformations he does lot of goofy stuff but other than that its just like a silent wall. Strong wall that is.

The villains... We have 2 which one of them I have no idea how it´s called. They never called him by his name in the whole movie. One of the henchman calls him boss so I will call him by that. Boss is a pyrotechnic mastermind, he controls the fireworks and uses that to destroy everything. He is the one that wants to use Dolores and open a portal to bring Dr. Vampire (which is the second villain). The reason? He used to have a daughter, and her daughter died in his house because of fireworks going off, she was burned or suffocated. The Dr. Vampire promised him he would bring her back if Boss brought him back.

Turns out the vampire lied and kind of turn his back on Boss, who now felt like an idiot and wanted to save Dolores. (There´s a point where Dolores enters Boss´ mind with the help of an obsidian mirror and sees the flashback of the daughter dying, so both characters do kind of have a mild bond)

Dr. Vampire is the weirdest, dumbest looking villain I have ever seen. He looks like a edgy teenager but looks old as fuck. It´s super weird and is completely evil, bringing certain Mexican monuments to live and bring havoc to Mexico City. like... Holy shit, he has red messy hair, long face, nose and teeth, wears A FREAKING GOTH CLOAK AND BOOTS and has a trident. It´s a weird design for a vampire. We don´t know shit about this character, only that he was supposed to be brought back by Boss and that´s all. BUT HE IS PURE EVIL!

They manage to defeat the villain by fighting each of the monuments and then fighting against the vampire, Chema and Dolores have a special combination that not only provokes an explosion but also gives the other 3 characters a power boost. I dont know why that happens, there´s no explanation. If there´s more of it I WISH AND HOPE THERE´S A SERIES. THIS!!! THIS RIGHT HERE:

THIS CAN BE TURN INTO A SERIES. PLEASE, NETFLIX: YOU ALREADY TOOK LA LEYENDA DE LA NAHUALA, TAKE THIS ONE! PLEASE!!! PLEASE!!!

(If you take a closer look you can see the aura is in a pepper form, its so funny to me. The big pictures at the movie theater glow at a certain angle if they are stroke with a light)

There´s something I like a lot and that´s that there isn´t a separation moment, they never get separated because of ¨I have to prove myself¨ or ¨i need to do this alone¨. They get separated due to circumstances like following a truck while others take care of a fallen comrade, but Chema is never alone. He is with at least one of them, mostly La Tuna (that´s how we get their emotional talk) and IM SO GLAD THEY DIDNT DO THAT KIND OF CLICHE. Chema never fights with them for stupid things or misunderstandings, they all work whatever misunderstanding right then and there and always stick together because THEY KNOW HOW DANGEROUS IT CAN BE. AND THEY LISTEN TO EACH OTHER! ITS GREAT! THEY ARE GREAT!

Also the last scene, which parodies marvel movies:

Tin Martin: OH NO! A giant snake is eating Trompa´s wall

La Tuna: Let the snake eat it.

(People call Trump El Trompas, trompas has several meanings like trumpet but we use it to also refer to the duck face)

Conclusion:

Superheroes are really overdone. Marvel, you are ok I guess but please just let yourself die (At least after you give me Black Widow and the next Guardians of the Galaxy). In México the close to a superheroe we had was Santos and Blue Demon, being really popular wrestlers and movie stars and all in the silver era. Sure, we also have Villainous that explores villains and heroes that TO ME ARE ALL MEXICAN UNTIL PROVEN THE CONTRARY, but this is a movie not a web-series (that has probably being cancelled ´cause Ituriel doesn´t seem to know how to administrate his company and properly treat his workers).

Anima Studios took the chance with Maverick Núñez and they really made a good job. As an Opera Prima it looks and sounds awesomely, the writing could still use some work but other than that it is an entertaining movie. It has a nice message, the characters are really well made from design to voice acting and the story is interesting. From what I read it had a really good opening, but it didn´t quite made it in the box office. Still, I think you should give it a watch, not because it´s a Mexican movie, but because it´s a superhero movie that just takes place in Mexico. It´s different from Marcianos vs Mexicanos because that one was full on ridiculousness and comedy while this one is drama with comedy. If you followed Anima Studios, you will see how much they have improve and advance. This company was and is the start of animation in México and they are becoming better.

Now I´m waiting for their next movie: Las Leyendas: El origen. And you know why I am excited? Because it´s 2 movies from the same Studio in 1 year, they are really becoming bigger.

Animation has never been this amazing, and Mexican Animation is growing faster and better. Please, be objective but supportive. Don´t be destructive for the sake of being destructive. People are trying their best and it is paying off in my opinion.

Sincerely, a Mexican with hopes for more animations in her own country.

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rajrag66 · 4 years

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Indian Expeditions Down Under

There is a certain allure to cricket played in Australia. This could be attributed to the massive iconic venues, sunny weather when it is cold and dreary in most parts of the world, revolutionary television coverage pioneered by channel 9 and sporting wickets.

As the test series gets under way in Sydney with the 1st ever day and night match between the two countries, my mind goes back to the battles waged down under since I started following cricket in the 70s. The Aussies were practically invincible at home for most of that decade as they humiliated their bitter rivals England in 74-75 & the mighty Windies in 76-76. I still recall hearing about the exploits of Lillie, Thompson & the Chappell brothers through the crisp commentary of Alan McGilvray & Jim Maxwell on Radio Australia short wave.

There had been only 2 previous tours by India to Australia in 1947-48 & 1967-68. On both occasions, the hosts had won 4-0. Therefore history was against the tourists, when they visited Australia at the end of 1977 after a gap of 10 years, However India were up against a severely weakened team due to the exodus to Kerry Packer’s world series cricket. Only Thompson resisted the temptation of joining the Packer bandwagon and a 41- year old Simpson was recalled after several years of retirement to captain a young and virtually unknown team. It still turned out to be a close series with Australia winning 3-2. Simpson apart from marshalling his young troops well, also scored an epic 176 in the 2nd test at Perth and 100 in the final test in Adelaide with 539 runs in the series. Australia won the first 2 matches at Brisbane and Perth narrowly by 16 runs & 2 wickets respectively. Tony Mann became only the second batsman in test history to score a century as a night watchman at Perth. India came back strongly with thumping wins at Melbourne & Sydney, as the Indian spin trio of Bedi (captain), Chandra & Prasanna wove their magic for the last time in their illustrious careers. Chandra picked up 12 wickets at Melbourne as he bowled India to victory. The final test at Adelaide went down to the wire with Australia romping home by 47 runs as India almost reached the massive 493 set for victory. India felt the absence of a genuine fast bowler and in hindsight could have included Kapil Dev who was just making his mark in domestic cricket. Gavaskar scored 3 consecutive centuries and was well supported by Vishwanath and Mohinder Amarnath, all three finished with over 400 runs in the series. The Aussies uncovered a number of new talents during that series such as Peter Toohey, Rick Darling, Wayne Clarke, Graham Yallop, Gary Cozier & Craig Sarjeant.

The Packer boys had come back by the time India toured next in 1980-81. Thompson & Ian Chappell were no longer playing, but the home team had Len Pascoe, Alan Border, Kim Hughes, Graeme Wood & Rodney Hogg to support stalwarts such as Greg Chappell, Lillie & Walters. The tourists made a shaky start losing easily in Sydney and scrapping through to a draw in Adelaide. Sandeep Patil was the hero at Adelaide with a blistering 174 after being knocked down by Len Pasco in the previous match. India defied expectations with a thrilling victory in the 3rd test at Melbourne to draw the series. Vishwanath whose place in the team was in doubt, silenced his critics with a brilliant century at the MCG. Gavaskar almost forfeited the match when he forced his partner Chetan Chauhan to walk off the field after an altercation with the opposition following a doubtful LBW decision. Luckily the manager Wing Commander Durrani intervened to cool things down. Chauhan who had a brilliant series was unlucky to miss out yet again on a well-deserved century. India successfully defended a meagre target of 142 thanks to the brilliance of Kapil Dev who braved a knee problem with pain killer injections to finish with figures of 5 for 28 as Australia was skittled out for 83. Kapil was ably supported by Dilip Doshi and Karsan Ghavri who bowled Greg Chappell round his legs in the 2nd innings. In addition to the test series, there was also a tri-series ODI competition featuring New Zealand as well. As was expected, the Indians who were still finding their feet in limited-over cricket did not fare well in this series. It was a treat to see the highlights brought by channel 9 for the first time during the 80-81 series. Even in those early days, their coverage was really innovative and brought out a different dimension to watching the game on TV.

After a gap of 5 years, India toured again in 1985-86. At the beginning of 1985, India stunned the cricketing world again in the ODIs. Following on from their shock win in the 1983 world cup, they won the world championship of cricket which was likely a mini-world cup and held to mark the 150th anniversary of the European settlement in Victoria. The enduring image of the win was the Indian team going around the MCG ground after easily winning the final against Pakistan, in the Audi car won by Ravi Shastri who was declared the champion of champions. We were privileged to watch most of the matches in that tournament live and by then the channel 9 coverage had evolved considerably. Messers Greig, Lawry & Benaud delighted Indian fans with their magnificent commentary and insight into the game.

The 1985-86 tour was a tale of missed opportunities as India could not get over the line in at least 2 matches. They were foiled by some stoic resistance from the Aussies especially the captain Allan Border. Gavaskar scored 2 centuries and others like Amarnath & Srikkanth piled on the runs against a relatively weak attack. Craig McDermott was the only potent bowler on the Aussie side and they were still in a rebuilding phase after Kim Hughes had quit the previous summer. Steve Waugh made his debut in the 2nd test and showed early glimpses of his talent . The other newcomers like David Boon, Geoff Marsh and the beanpole like fast bowler Bruce Reid were to be become mainstays of the team in future years. India did very well in the ODI tri-series which also featured the Kiwis. They however could not beat the Aussies in the finals.

The next series in 1991-92 was quite a let-down for the Indian team which could not quite match a strong home side led by Allan Border with experienced cricketers like Boon, Marsh, McDermott, Merv Highes & Dean Jones. Mark Taylor who was establishing himself in the team had a brilliant series with 422 runs second only to David Boon who finished with 556 runs. Shane Warne had the most inauspicious start to his career at Sydney and his bowling was taken to the cleaners by Ravi Shastri who scored a double century. The saving grace for India was the batting of Tendulkar who displayed his prodigious talent in no small measure with 2 brilliant centuries.The other big gain for India during the tour was the emergence of Srinath as a genuine quick bowler following in the footsteps of Kapil Dev who still a force to reckon with on the tour capturing 25 wickets. Manoj Prabhakar also ended with a creditable haul of 19 wickets. In the tri-series which followed also featured the West Indies, India managed to reach the finals but were no match for the Aussies who won easily. Kris Srikkanth won 2 player of the match awards during this tournament on the last international tour of his career. The world cup which was the climax of a long Australian summer was also a disappointment, with the only bright spark for India being the victory against the eventual winners Pakistan.

India had to wait almost 9 years for their next tour in 1999-2000. This was a very low-key series and the Indian team led by Tendulkar was no match for the Aussies. Bret Lee who was at his peak broke the left thumb of the Indian opener Sadagopan Ramesh and along with McGrath proved lethal for the Indian battsman. India lost all 3 tests by huge margins despite Tendulkar’s determined displays. Ponting, Langer, Waugh & Gilchrist dominated the Indian bowling.The tri-series one-dayers featuring Pakistan were equally disastrous with India notching a solitary win in 8 matches.

The tour in 2003 was a watershed in India’ test history abroad. Well led by Sourav Ganguly, India proved they were no pushovers any more overseas. Ganguly set the tone for the Indian performance by scoring a brilliant 144 in the first test at Brisbane, which was drawn. Rahul Dravid’s brilliant double century to match Ricky Ponting who achieved the same feat and 6 for 41 by Ajith Agarkar helped them register a historic win in Adelaide. Australia came back strongly to win the next test at Melbourne. India almost won the final test at Sydney, which was Steve Waugh’s last match and he signed off with 80 in the 2nd innings. India had earlier posted a mammoth 705 for 7 in the 1st innings thanks to 241 from Tendulkar and 178 from Laxman.

It was mixed bag in 2007-08 and the tour was shrouded in controversy The second test in Sydney marred by poor umpiring decisions against the visitors, also saw the Monkeygate scandal when Harbhajan Singh was charged with racial abuse against Andrew Symonds. Harbhajan was suspended from the next test, which was revoked after a protest by India. Steve Bucknor who made some contentious decisions was stood down by the ICC from the next match at Perth, which also created a controversy. The Sydney test had a dramatic climax, with Michael Clarke getting 3 wickets in the last over of the game. India went into the Perth test down 0-2 after losing the 1st test at Melbourne by a massive 371 runs and the 2nd test at Sydney by 122 runs despite gaining a substantial 1st innings lead. The tourists stayed alive in the series winning the Perth test mainly due to some splendid bowling by the young Ishant Sharma. His spell in Perth against Ponting arguably the best batsman in the world at the time is still a vivid memory. Sehwag made a triumphant comeback with 151 in the last test in Adelaide, which ended in a draw. Laxman who relished batting on the hard wickets continued his dominance over the Australia bowlers. He finished 2nd in the batting averages after Tendulkar who got over 500 runs with 2 centuries. Kumble’s leadership during a difficult series was commendable and he also led the bowling averages with 20 wickets second only to Brett Lee with 24 wickets. India lost the series 1-2, but had the consolation of winning the tri-series that followed, which also featured Sri Lanka.

The tour in 2011-12 was a rather forgettable affair and capped a miserable year following India’s crushing defeat in England that summer. Two legends Dravid & Laxman retired after the Aussie series. They will be remembered as much for exemplary conduct as for their sublime batting skills. Their record match winning 376 run 5th wicket partnership in Eden Gardens against Steve Waugh’s men in 2001 is the best in Indian test history. The 2011-12 series also saw the coming of age of Virat Kohli who resurrected his career with a brilliant 116 in the last test at Adelaide. This could not prevent India reeling to a 4th loss and a series whitewash. They also finished last in the tr-series also featuring Sri Lanka.

The 2014 test series was preceded by the one of the biggest tragedies in cricketing history. The young and promising life of Philip Hughes was cruelly cut short after he died following a head injury during a Sheffield shield match. The series was slightly delayed and itinerary rearranged as this extremely unfortunate event cast a pall of gloom. India almost pulled off a sensational win in the 1st test at Adelaide chasing 364 to win falling short by only 49 runs. Credit for this goes to Virat Kohli who scored a sensational 141 to add to his 115 in the first innings. Kohli also deputised as captain for the injured Dhoni, before taking over on a permanent basis after the 3rd test at Melbourne when Dhoni announced his retirement from test cricket. Murali Vijay was another big success scoring a century in the 2nd test as well as coming close to 3 figures on two other occasions with 99 & 80. India drew the last 2 tests after losses at Adelaide & Brisbane. India had a disappointing tri-series featuring England, losing 3 of the 4 matches. They also failed to defend the world cup held in Australia in 2015, losing convincingly to the hosts in the semis after a promising run including a quarter-final win over Pakistan.

India created history during the 2018-19 tour by finally winning a test series in Australia 2-1. The biggest hero from an Indian point of view was Cheteshwar Pujara who ended with 3 centuries including a brilliant 199 in the last test at Sydney. He was ably supported by Kohli, debutant Mayank Agarwal & the young Rishabh Pant who also got a century in the last test when India scored a mammoth 622 for 7 in the 1st innings. Bumrah was sensational with the ball and was ably supported by Shami & Kuldeep Yadav. India also won the ODI series that followed the tests 2-1 ending possibly one of their best ever overseas tours. The only slight disappointment was the absence of Warner & Smith who were serving their suspension due to the ball tampering incident in South Africa. This should not detract from the merit of India’s performance.

It has been bit of a roller coaster ride for the Indian team down under over the years. In the same vein, they had a fairly rough start in the ODI series this time, salvaging some pride in the last match after losing the series. However they made up with a brilliant 2-1 victory in the T20s, which saw a new star in the horizon in the form of the debutant T.Natarajan. Kohli who was in top form in the T20s, will be missed both as a captain and batsman when he is away on paternity leave after the 2nd test. The experience of Pujara and Rahane will be needed in the absence of Kohli. India will also be hoping that the younger batsmen like Mayank Agarwal and Shubman Gill make a substantial contribution. Ishant Sharma who has been a star against Austraia will also be sadly missed, but hopefully Bumrah and Shami will repeat their performance from last time. Fans on both sides will be hoping that this rivalry which is the next biggest after the Ashes lives up to its billing.

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uomo-accattivante · 6 years

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One of the things you can’t help noticing when you talk to Oscar Isaac is just how incredible he is at playing the part of Oscar Isaac. It’s not that he’s putting on a performance. But when you talk to Oscar Isaac, the public idea of Oscar Isaac begins to make a tremendous amount of sense.

We talk a couple of days before the release of Netflix’s new Triple Frontier, an action-adventure heist/American military allegory flick (it’s a lot) that Isaac stars in, and Isaac manages to, within the span of a few minutes, quote Shakespeare and express guilt about shoplifting in his college days. In other words: He’s sensitive with a risky streak. It’s no wonder the Internet has declared him its boyfriend (and more recently, its husband).

This quality, of course, is part of what makes Isaac so compelling to watch when he’s playing an actual role. He seamlessly shades his characters with duality; by turns he can play dour and charming, cerebral and clueless. Take Triple Frontier. Isaac portrays a character, Santiago ‘Pope’ Garcia, who is essentially a stand-in for Donald Rumsfeld. He’s tasked with rallying an all-star gang of ex-Special Forces agents (played by Ben Affleck, Charlie Hunnam, Pedro Pascal, and Garrett Hedlund) to execute a covert heist of a South American drug lord. It’s an ill-fated, and perhaps misguided, operation, but Isaac makes you believe that nothing can go wrong—and, moreover, that what they’re doing is inherently right, all while emitting a sense of manifest failure.

On the heels of turning 40, Isaac hasn’t given much thought to where he wants to take his talents for portraying complex characters next, only that he wants to scale back. “Doing the circus thing can get tiring after a while,” he says. Though, it won’t be long before he talks about what a thrill it was to train for a daunting high elevation chase scene. The change of tune comes off genuinely; he digs a good adventure, but also wants to settle down. It’s both. And it’s Oscar Isaac, so you believe him.

Happy birthday!

Thank you.

Did you do anything exciting?

We had a little bit of a house party. We just moved to a new place. So we thought, “Why not trash it? Have a party.”

It was a pretty big birthday [40]. As you move into middle age, are there new kinds of roles you're interested in playing?

No, not necessarily. But it's just kind of fun to start a new decade.

Do you have a philosophy in terms of how you choose roles generally?

Oh no, if only. Things would be so much easier. Choosing roles is really more like falling in love. I don't have a specific type that I'm looking for. It's just kind of if I read the thing or speak to the director or see some art that's connected with it and it incites something where I can't stop thinking about it, then I keep moving towards it.

Tell me about how you fell in love, then, with the character of Pope in Triple Frontier.

I worked with J.C. [Chandor] on A Most Violent Year. That had gone well. And I knew he was somebody I could trust in the editing room. You could try lots of different things and he won't make you look like an idiot. And then he talked to me about the kind of guy this is, the parables behind the whole movie, it being an allegory to the way the United States has operated throughout the world, and how in some ways my character is the Donald Rumsfeld of the story. [Pope] says, “Look, we can do this. We can take out a really bad guy. We'll be rich. We'll be in and out. No problem.” And so there's a bit of hubris there about their skills—even though these characters are incredibly skilled. But he underestimates the team's greed.

Once I became involved, we started having conversations. We thought an interesting complication—and one thing that would make it not feel so cliché—would be making the character of Pope actually from the area that he's been working in. There's a familial connection to it, so there's something more at stake. He wants to take out this guy not just as a trophy but because he actually thinks it'll make a difference.

In Annihilation you also played someone in the military. And I read that you at one point had considered joining the Marines. Is there something about diving into that military world that attracted you?

Yeah. That's definitely something I had been into when I was younger, and I had imagined that that was an avenue I could've gone down for my life. And I was very near going to boot camp and starting that whole process, and then other things happened that took me away from that. So I think there's always something inside of me that wonders about the What if? of it.

I can be quite a good student when it comes to certain things. So learning the mechanics of working with the weapons, learning about situational awareness and clearing the room, the team-building exercises—all those things, I got very excited by. And also, there was a lot of high altitude training.

What was that like?

What was cool was that all of us had a different physical task. Garrett [Hedlund] was the MMA fighter and there was a whole MMA fight that ended up getting cut down quite a bit. So he ended up spending a lot of time training that way, training with jiu-jitsu. Pedro [Pascal] spent a lot of time with the cockpit and flying. And then Charlie [Hunnam] and Ben [Affleck] both found things that were specific to their characters. And for me, I knew that I was having to do this extended chase sequence in Colombia, which was between 10,000 and 13,000 feet, depending on exactly where we were shooting. So I knew that was something I needed to train for just so I'd be able to do more than one take without throwing up. And I found a place here in New York that's a hyperbaric chamber that's able to replicate what it's like to run in different altitudes. They have a treadmill in there. And an oxygen mask, and even a tent you could sleep in at night to get your blood saturated with oxygen.

When you were preparing, what kinds of things did you learn about the military that surprised you, or that you didn't know when you were considering joining the Marines way back when?

I was a kid back then, so I didn't know much. I was like, “I'll get fit. I'll get money for college. I'll go in there because some of my friends are planning on going in there as well.” There were some people I admired who had been. This was like 1998. But the reality of it is the amount of sacrifice—not just physically, but emotionally. Being separated from your family for long, long periods of time. And especially special forces guys, who are just the elite, top of the top. There's this sense of [it being] these tough guys, these killers, chest-pounding guys. The truth is the people we spoke with [have] humility and soft-spokenness and ethical codes they go by, [there’s] lack of rejoicing in violence, the desire for connection, and the way deadly force is viewed—all those things I found to not be clichéd adolescent ideas of what being a military guy is.

The movie is very much an allegory about the American military and the country's greed. But how did you internalize the individual sense of greed that you're portraying in the film?

There's something that's epic about it. It's a very primal tale. Macbeth is the same thing. Macbeth is a heroic soldier. The entire first part of Macbeth is everyone saying what an incredible soldier Macbeth was, what he did, how he was fearless, courageous, how he saved his men. He is the hero. And then that little thing gets in there like an infection, this thought, What more could I have? "What do I deserve for everything that I've done?" And that’s mixed with the violence the person is seeing. So that for me was very interesting. Noble people who have a tragic flaw that brings them down. For my character, it was less the money. It was more revenge, taking out this one guy he's been hunting since he's been down there. He actually believes that if he cuts down this head, the rest of the thing will fall.

Did you return to moments in your life or career where you caught yourself letting greed get the best of you?

I think when I was in college I definitely did some damage at the Tower Records across the street. And the Barnes & Noble... And a couple liquor stores. There was a sense of, “I am a college student. I can barely make ends meet over here. This is a big company; they're not going to mind if I take this book of poetry.” So I could justify snagging a few items here and there. But of course Tower Records closes down, and I can't help but feel at fault.

It’s not your fault.

It was a flawed system. They had the bargain DVDs right next to the place where you walk out. So you could just put [your bag] right there next to it, go through the metal detectors, and then reach back and grab your bag.

Do you think you could graduate from Barnes & Noble theft and pull off an actual heist?

No. I wouldn't know where to begin or what to do. Anything I know about it is from movies.

Are you a fan of the heist genre?

I like the heist genre thrown on its head. My favorite movie is Dog Day Afternoon. And that is another thing where it's like, Let's do this thing. We're going to rob a bank. In and out of there. And everything that happens after that is, to me, the most exciting part. It's people in extreme situations. I worked in a hospital when I was younger, and that's something I learned a lot from, seeing people in extreme situations. You see the entire spectrum of humanity in those moments.

As a musician and a big music fan, how do you use music to get yourself in the mindset of a role?

I've done that for ages. Often for me, it's less specific about, This makes me think about this thing. It's more about what gets me to a place of readiness, openness. What makes me feel connected to the earth a bit more. Sometimes I'll put together music that I find inspiring thematically, or tonally. But I think if it's something that needs any real depth of emotion, there's this one guy named Ernst Reijseger, an incredible cellist who did the soundtrack to Werner Herzog's Cave of Forgotten Dreams. I listen to that and it puts me in a primal state. It opens me up so I'm able to receive anything that's floating around inside without judging it too much.

Were you listening to that for this role?

For this one, there were a couple moments when I did. But I think I listened to a lot of Sepultura, a Brazilian hardcore metal band. It gave a sense of the chaos and the violence, and it has some Brazilian kind of tribal elements to it. So it felt like a bit of a mix of everything they're getting involved in down there.

What's the best piece of direction you've gotten in your career?

The first one that comes to my mind was just like the sweetest way of saying "Tone it down." A great writer, Hossein Amini, he came over and in the sweetest way said, "The camera is just not able to capture what you're doing right now. We don't have the technology yet to get what you're doing. So you just have to bring it down a bit so we can capture it on the camera."

My editor insisted I find out about the footage you filmed for the Disney Parks upcoming Star Wars-themed lands. Is there anything you can tell me?

I'm afraid I can't, because actually I don't really remember [laughs]. I think some of it happened in the middle of filming the actual movie. So they were like, "Hey, today you're coming in and you'll be in the cockpit." So it's those kinds of situations. I'm sure I'm in the cockpit and I'm screaming about something important.

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#oscar isaac #triple frontier #pope #santiago garcia #poe dameron #star wars #episode ix #ben affleck #charlie hunnam #garrett hedlund #pedro pascal #interview #gq magazine

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palehorsepalerider · 6 years

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World War II

The Pacific - Hugh Ambrose

Between America’s retreat from China in late November 1941 and the moment General MacArthur’s airplane touched down on the Japanese mainland in August of 1945, five men connected by happenstance fought the key battles of the war against Japan. From the debacle in Bataan, to the miracle at Midway and the relentless vortex of Guadalcanal, their solemn oaths to their country later led one to the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot and the others to the coral strongholds of Peleliu, the black terraces of Iwo Jima and the killing fields of Okinawa, until at last the survivors enjoyed a triumphant, yet uneasy, return home.

In The Pacific, Hugh Ambrose focuses on the real-life stories of the five men who put their lives on the line for our country. To deepen the story revelaed in the miniseriesand go beyond it, the book dares to chart a great ocean of enmity known as The Pacific and the brave men who fought. Some considered war a profession, others enlisted as citizen soldiers. Each man served in a different part of the war, but their respective duties required every ounce of their courage and their strength to defeat an enemy who preferred suicide to surrender. The medals for valor which were pinned on three of them came at a shocking price - a price paid in full by all.

Band of Brothers: E Company, 506th Regiment, 101st Airborne from Normandy to Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest- Stephen E. Ambrose

“As good a rifle company as any in the world, Easy Company, 101st Airborne Division, U. S. Army, kept getting the tough assigments–responsible for everything from parachuting into France early D-Day morning to the capture of Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest at Berchtesgaden. In Band of Brothers, Ambrose tells of the men in this brave unit who fought, went hungry, froze, and died, a company that took 150 percent casualties and considered the Purple Heart a badge of office. Drawing on hours of interviews with survivors as well as the soldiers’ journals and letters, Stephen Ambrose recounts the stories, often in the men’s own words, of these American heroes.

Citizen Soldiers: The US Army from the Normandy Beaches to the Bulge to the Surrender of Germany - Stephen E. Ambrose

From Stephen E. Ambrose, bestselling author of Band of Brothers and D-Day, the inspiring story of the ordinary men of the U.S. army in northwest Europe from the day after D-Day until the end of the bitterest days of World War II. In this riveting account, historian Stephen E. Ambrose continues where he left off in his #1 bestseller D-Day. Citizen Soldiers opens at 0001 hours, June 7, 1944, on the Normandy beaches, and ends at 0245 hours, May 7, 1945, with the allied victory. It is biography of the US Army in the European Theater of Operations, and Ambrose again follows the individual characters of this noble, brutal, and tragic war. From the high command down to the ordinary soldier, Ambrose draws on hundreds of interviews to re-create the war experience with startling clarity and immediacy. From the hedgerows of Normandy to the overrunning of Germany, Ambrose tells the real story of World War II from the perspective of the men and women who fought it.

D-Day, June 6, 1944: The Battle for the Normandy Beaches - Stephen E. Ambrose

It is the young men born into the false prosperity of the 1920s and brought up in the bitter realities of the Depression of the 1930s that this book is about. The literature they read as youngsters was anti-war and cynical, portraying patriots as suckers, slackers and heroes. None of them wanted to be part of another war. They wanted to be throwing baseballs, not handgrenades; shooting .22s at rabbits, not M-1s at other young men. But when the test came, when freedom had to be fought for or abandoned, they fought (from the Prologue).

The Other Nuremberg: The Untold Story of the Tokyo War Crimes Trial - Arnold Brackman

Dotted with stunning disclosures of crimes and cover-ups, this is a startling narrative of the way Japan conducted World War II: from Nanking to Pearl Harbor to the attempted assassination of Stalin to their final surrender. 16 pages of photographs.

Flags of Our Fathers - James D. Bradley

In this unforgettable chronicle of perhaps the most famous moment in American military history, James Bradley has captured the glory, the triumph, the heartbreak, and the legacy of the six men who raised the flag at Iwo Jima. Here is the true story behind the immortal photograph that has come to symbolize the courage and indomitable will of America. In February 1945, American Marines plunged into the surf at Iwo Jima—and into history. Through a hail of machine-gun and mortar fire that left the beaches strewn with comrades, they battled to the island's highest peak. And after climbing through a landscape of hell itself, they raised a flag. Now the son of one of the flagraisers has written a powerful account of six very different young men who came together in a moment that will live forever. To his family, John Bradley never spoke of the photograph or the war. But after his death at age seventy, his family discovered closed boxes of letters and photos. In Flags of Our Fathers, James Bradley draws on those documents to retrace the lives of his father and the men of Easy Company. Following these men's paths to Iwo Jima, James Bradley has written a classic story of the heroic battle for the Pacific's most crucial island—an island riddled with Japanese tunnels and 22,000 fanatic defenders who would fight to the last man. But perhaps the most interesting part of the story is what happened after the victory. The men in the photo—three were killed during the battle—were proclaimed heroes and flown home, to become reluctant symbols. For two of them, the adulation was shattering. Only James Bradley's father truly survived, displaying no copy of the famous photograph in his home, telling his son only: "The real heroes of Iwo Jima were the guys who didn't come back." Few books ever have captured the complexity and furor of war and its aftermath as well as Flags of Our Fathers. A penetrating, epic look at a generation at war, this is history told with keen insight, enormous honesty, and the passion of a son paying homage to his father. It is the story of the difference between truth and myth, the meaning of being a hero, and the essence of the human experience of war.

Shifty’s War: The Authorized Biography of Sargeant Darrell “Shifty” Powers, the Legendary Sharpshooter from the Band of Brothers - Marcus Brotherton

When he was a boy gorwing up in the remote mining town of Clinchco, Virginia, Shifty Powers’ goal was to become the best rifle shot he could be. His father trained him to listen to the woods, to “see” without his eyes. Little did Shifty know his finely-tuned skills would one day save his life-and the lives of many of his friends.

Shifty’s War is a tale of a soldier’s blood-filled days fighting his way from the shores of France to the heartland of Germany, and the epic story of how one man’s abilities as a sharpshooter, along with an engaging unassuming personality, propelled him to a life greater than he could have ever imagined.

We Who Are Alive and Remain: Untold Stories from the Band of Brothers - Marcus Brotherton

They were the men of the now-legendary Easy Company. After almost two years of hard training, they parachuted into Normandy on D-Day and, later, Operation MARKET-GARDEN. They fought their way through Belgium, France, and Germany, survived overwhelming odds, liberated concentration camps, and drank a victory toast in April 1945 at Hitler’s hideout in the Alps. Here, revealed for the first time, are stories of war, sacrifice, and courage as experienced by one of the most revered combat units in military history. In We Who Are Alive and Remain, twenty men who were there and are alive today-and the families of three deceased others-recount the horrors and the victories, the bonds they made, the tears and blood they shed…and the brothers they lost.

Islands of the Damned: A Marine at War in the Pacific - R.V. Burgin

This is an eyewitness-and eye opening-account of the most savage and brutal fghting in the war against Japan, told from the perspective of a young Texan who volunteered for the Marine Corps to escape a life as a traveling salesman. R.V. Burgin enlisted at the age of twenty, and with his sharp intelligence and earnest work ethic, climbed the ranks from a green private to a seasoned sergeant. Along the war, he shouldered a rifle as a member of a mortar squad. He saw friends die - and enemies killed. He saw scenes he wanted to forget but never did - from enemy snipers who tied themselves to branches in the highest trees, to ambushes along narrow jungle trails, to the abandoned corpses of hara kiri victims, to the final howling banzai attacks as the Japanese embraced their inevitable defeat.

An unforgettable narrative of a young Marine in combat, Islands of the Damned brings to life the hell that was the Pacific War.

Call of Duty: My Life Before, During and After the Band of Brothers - Lt. Lynn Compton

As part of the elite 101st Airborne paratroopers, Lt. Lynn “Buck” Compton fought in critical battles of World War II as a member of Easy Company, immortalized as the Band of Brothers.

This is the true story of a real-life hero. From his years as a two-sport UCLA star who played baseball with Jackie Robinson and football in the 1943 Rose Bowl, through his legendary post-World War II legal career as a prosecutor, in which he helped convict Sirhan Sirhan for the murder of Robert F. Kennedy, Buck Compton’s story truly embodies the American Dream: college sports star, esteemed combat veteran, detective, attorney, judge.

Brothers in Battle, Best of Friends: Two WWII Paratroopers from the Original Band of Brothers Tell Their Story - Bill Guarnere and Edward “Babe” Heffron

William “Wild Bill” Guarnere and Edward “Babe” Heffron were among the first paratroopers of the U.S. Army members of an elite unit of the 101st Airborne Division called Easy Company. The crack unit was called upon for every high-risk operation of the war, including D-Day, Operation MARKEY-GARDEN in Holland, the Battle of the Bulge, and the capture of Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest in Berchtesgaden. Both men fought side by side until Guarnere lost his leg in the Battle of the Bulge and was sent home. Heffron went on to liberate concentration camps and take Hitler’s Eagle’s Nest hideout. United by their experience, they reconnected at the war’s end and have been best friends ever since. Their story is a tribute to the lasting bond forged between comrades in armsand to all those who fought for freedom.

The Longest Winter: The Battle of the Bulge and the Epic Story of World War II’s Most Decorated Platoon - Alex Kershaw

On a cold morning in December, 1944, deep in the Ardennes forest, a platoon of eighteen men under the command of twenty-year-old lieutenant Lyle Bouck were huddled in their foxholes trying desperately to keep warm. Suddenly, the early morning silence was broken by the roar of a huge artillery bombardment and the dreadful sound of approaching tanks. Hitler had launched his bold and risky offensive against the Allies-his "last gamble"-and the small American platoon was facing the main thrust of the entire German assault. Vastly outnumbered, they repulsed three German assaults in a fierce day-long battle, killing over five hundred German soldiers and defending a strategically vital hill. Only when Bouck's men had run out of ammunition did they surrender to the enemy.

As POWs, Bouck's platoon began an ordeal far worse than combat-survive in captivity under trigger-happy German guards, Allied bombing raids, and a daily ration of only thin soup. In German POW camps, hundreds of captured Americans were either killed or died of disease, and most lost all hope. But the men of Bouck's platoon survived-miraculously, all of them.

Once again in vivid, dramatic prose, Alex Kershaw brings to life the story of some of America's little-known heroes-the story of America's most decorated small unit, an epic story of courage and survival in World War II, and one of the most inspiring stories in American history.

The Girls of Atomic City: The Untold Story of the Women Who Helped Win World War II - Denise Kiernan

The Tennessee town of Oak Ridge was created from scratch in 1942. One of the Manhattan Project’s secret cities, it didn’t appear on any maps until 1949, and yet at the height of World War II it was using more electricity than New York City and was home to more than 75,000 people, many of them young women recruited from small towns across the South. Their jobs were shrouded in mystery, but they were buoyed by a sense of shared purpose, close friendships—and a surplus of handsome scientists and Army men!

But against this vibrant wartime backdrop, a darker story was unfolding. The penalty for talking about their work—even the most innocuous details—was job loss and eviction. One woman was recruited to spy on her coworkers. They all knew something big was happening at Oak Ridge, but few could piece together the true nature of their work until the bomb "Little Boy" was dropped over Hiroshima, Japan, and the secret was out. The shocking revelation: the residents of Oak Ridge were enriching uranium for the atomic bomb.

Though the young women originally believed they would leave Oak Ridge after the war, many met husbands there, made lifelong friends, and still call the seventy-year-old town home. The reverberations from their work there—work they didn’t fully understand at the time—are still being felt today. In The Girls of Atomic City, Denise Kiernan traces the astonishing story of these unsung WWII workers through interviews with dozens of surviving women and other Oak Ridge residents. Like The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, this is history and science made fresh and vibrant—a beautifully told, deeply researched story that unfolds in a suspenseful and exciting way.

Conversations with Major Dick Winters: Life Lessons from the Commander of the Band of Brothers - Cole C. Kingseed

He was a quiet, reluctant hero whose modesty and strength drew the admiration of not only his men, but millions worldwide. Now comes the story of Dick Winters in his last years as witnessed and experienced by his good friend, Cole C. Kingseed.

Kingseed shares the formative experience that made Winters such an effective leader. He addresses Winter’s experiences and leadership during the war, his intense, unbreakable devotion to his men, his search for peace both without and within after the war, and how fame forced him to make adjustments to an international audience of well-wishers and admirers, even as he attempted to leave a lasting legacybefore joining his fallen comrades. Following Winters’s death on January 2, 2011, the outpouring of grief and adulation for one of this nation’s preeminent leaders of character, courage, and competence shows just how much of an impact Dick Winters left on the world.

This is a story of leadership, fame, and friendship, and the journey of one man’s struggle to find the peace that he promised himself if he survived World War II.

Battle for Iwo Jima - Robert Leckie

Iwo Jima is one of the most famous battles in World War II, and the greatest battle fought by the U.S. Marine Corps in World War II. From that battle came the most famous image of the war, the raising of the flag on Mount Suribachi. Robert Leckie, the bestselling author of Helmet for My Pillow has written an extraordinary story of one of the bloodiest battles in Marine Corps history.

Challenge for the Pacific: Guadalcanal: The Turning Point of the War - Robert Leckie

From Robert Leckie, the World War II veteran and New York Times bestselling author of Helmet for My Pillow, whose experiences were featured in the HBO miniseries The Pacific , comes this vivid narrative of the astonishing six-month campaign for Guadalcanal. From the Japanese soldiers’ carefully calculated—and ultimately foiled—attempt to build a series of impregnable island forts on the ground to the tireless efforts of the Americans who struggled against a tenacious adversary and the temperature and terrain of the island itself, Robert Leckie captures the loneliness, the agony, and the heat of twenty-four-hour-a-day fighting on Guadalcanal. Combatants from both sides are brought to life: General Archer Vandegrift, who first assembled an amphibious strike force; Isoroku Yamamoto, the naval general whose innovative strategy was tested; the island-born Allied scout Jacob Vouza, who survived hideous torture to uncover the enemy’s plans; and Saburo Sakai, the ace flier who shot down American planes with astonishing ease. Propelling the Allies to eventual victory, Guadalcanal was truly the turning point of the war. Challenge for the Pacific is an unparalleled, authoritative account of this great fight that forever changed our world.

Helmet for My Pillow: From Parris Island to the Pacific - Robert Leckie

Here is one of the most riveting first-person accounts to ever come out of the Second World War. Robert Leckie was 21 when he enlisted in the US Marine Corps in January 1942. In Helmet for My Pillowwe followhis journey, from boot camp on Parris Island, South Carolina, all the way to the raging battles in the Pacific, where some of the war’s fiercest fighting took place. Recounting his service with the 1st Marine Division and the brutal action on Guadalcanal, New Britain and Peleliu, Leckie spares no detail of the horrors and sacrifice of war, painting an unsentimental portrait of how real warriors are made, fight, and all too often die in the defence of their country.

From the live-for-today rowdiness of Marines on leave to the terrors of jungle warfare against an enemy determined to fight to the last man, Leckie describes what it’s really like when victory can only be measured inch by bloody inch. Unparalleled in its immediacy and accuracy, Helmet for My Pillow is a gripping account from an ordinary soldier fighting in extraordinary conditions. This is a book that brings you as close to the mud, the blood, and the experience of war as it is safe to come.

Okinawa: The Last Battle of World War II - Robert Leckie

Former Marine and Pacific War veteran Robert Leckie tells the story of the invasion of Okinawa, the closing battle of World War II. Leckie is a skilled military historian, mixing battle strategy and analysis with portraits of the men who fought on both sides to give the reader a complete account of the invasion. Lasting 83 days and surpassing D-Day in both troops and material used, the Battle of Okinawa was a decisive victory for the Allies, and a huge blow to Japan. In this stirring and readable account, Leckie provides a complete picture of the battle and its context in the larger war.

Strong Men Armed: The United States Marines Against Japan - Robert Leckie

Strong Men Armed relates the U.S. Marines' unprecedented, relentless drive across the Pacific during World War II, from Guadalcanal to Okinawa, detailing their struggle to dislodge from heavily fortified islands an entrenched enemy who had vowed to fight to extinction—and did. (All but three of the Marines' victories required the complete annihilation of the Japanese defending force.) As scout and machine-gunner for the First Marine Division, the author fought in all its engagements till his wounding at Peleliu. Here he uses firsthand experience and impeccable research to re-create the nightmarish battles. The result is both an exciting chronicle and a moving tribute to the thousands of men who died in reeking jungles and on palm-studded beaches, thousands of miles from home and fifty years before their time, of whom Admiral Chester W. Nimitz once said, "Uncommon valor was a common virtue."Strong Men Armed includes over a dozen maps, a chronology of the war in the Pacific, the Marine Medal of Honor Winners in World War II, and Marine Corps aces in World War II.

Battleground Pacific: A Marine Rifleman’s Combat Odyssey in K/3/5 - Sterling Mace

Sterling Mace’s unit was the legendary “K-3-5” (for Company K, 3rd Batallion, 5th Regiment of the 1st Marine Division) and his story takes readers through some of the most intense action of the Pacific War, from the seldom-seen perspective of a rifleman at the point of attack.

Battleground Pacific is filled with inedible moments that begin with his childhood growing up in Queens, New York, and his run-in with the law that eventually led to his enlistment. But this is ultimately a combat tale - as violent and harrowing as any that has come before. From fighting through the fiery hell that was Peleliu to the deadly battleground of Okinawa, Mace traces his path from the fear of combat to understanding that killing another human comes just as easily as staying alive. He learns that bravery often equates to stupidity, leading to the death of close friends, but also that life goes on, with death on its heels.

Battleground Pacific is one of the most important and entertaining memoirs about the Pacific theater in WWII.

Easy Company Soldier: The Legendery Battles of a Sargeant from World War II’s “Band of Brothers” - Don Malarkey

Drafted in 1942, Malarkey arrived at Camp Toccoa in Georgia and was one of the one in six soldiers who earned their Eagle wings. He went to England in 1943 to provide cover on the ground for the largest amphibious military attack in history: Operation Overlord.

In the darkness of D-day morning, Malarkey parachuted into France and within days was awarded a Bronze Star for his heorism in battle. He fought for twenty-three days in Normandy, nearly eighty in Holland, thirty-nine in Bastogne, and nearly thirty more in and near Hauhenau, France and the Ruhr pocket in Germany.

This is his dramatic tale of those bloody days fighting his way from the shores of France to the heartland of Germany, and the epic story of how an adventurous kid from Oregon became a leader of men.

Hell in the Pacific: A Marine Rifleman’s Journey From Guadalcanal to Peleliu - Jim McEnery

In what may be the last memoir to be published by a living veteran of the pivotal invasion of Guadalcanal, which ocurred almost seventy years ago, Marine Jim McEnery has teamed up with author Bill Sloan to create an unforgettable chronicle of heroism and horror.

McENERY’S RIFLE COMPANY - the legendary K/3/5 of the First Marine Division, made famous by the HBO miniseries The Pacific - fought in some of the most ferocious battles of the war. In searing detail, the author takes us back to Guadalcanal, where American forces first turned the tide against the Japanese; Cape Gloucester, where 1,300 Marines were killed or wounded; and bloody Peleliu, where McEnery assumed command of the company and helped hasten the final defeat of the Japanese garrison after weeks of torturous cave-to-cave fighting.

McEnery’s story is a no-holds-barred, grunt’s-eye view of the sacrifices, suffering, and raw courage of the men in the foxholes, locked in mortal combat with an implacable enemy sworn to fight to the death. From bayonet charges and hand-to-hand combat to midnight banzai attacks and the loss of close buddies, the rifle squad leader spares no details, chronicling his odyssey from boot camp through twenty-eight months of hellish combat until his eventual return home. He has given us an unforgettable portrait of men at war.

You’ll Be Sor-ree: A Guadalcanal Marine Remembers the Pacific War - Sidney Phillips

Sid Phillips knew he was a long way from his home in Mobile, AL, when he plunged into the jungles of Guadalcanal in August 1942. A mortarman with H-Company (the same company as Helmet for My Pillow author Robert Leckie), 2nd Battalion, 1st Marine Regiment of the 1st Marine Division, Sid was only a 17-year old kid when he entered combat. Some two years later, when he returned home, the island fighting on Guadalcanal and Cape Gloucester had turned Sid into an “Old Timer” by Marine standards, and more; he came home a man. These are his memoirs, the humble and candid tales that Sid collected during a Pacific odyssey spanning half the globe, from the grueling boot camp at Parris Island to the coconut groves of Guadalcanal to the romantic respite of Australia. In this true story, Sid recalls his encounters with icons like Chesty Puller, Gen Vandergrift, Eleanor Roosevelt, and his boyhood friend, Eugene Sledge. He remembers a sense of helplessness as Japanese bombers and battleships rained expendable. This is the story of how Sid stood shoulder to shoulder with his Marine brothers to discover the inner strength and deep faith necessary to survive the dark, early days of World War II in the Pacific.

At Dawn We Slept: The Untold Story of Pearl Harbor - Gordon Prange

Decades after the attack that plunged America into WWII, At Dawn We Slept remains the greatest account of Pearl Harbor ever written. This gripping study scrupulously reconstructs the Japanese attack, from its conception (less than a year before the actual raid) to its lightning execution; & it reveals the true reason for the American debacle: the insurmountable disbelief in the Japanese threat that kept America from heeding advance warnings & caused leaders to ignore evidence submitted by our own intelligence sources. Based on 37 years of intense research & countless interviews, & incorporating previously untranslated documents, At Dawn We Slept is history with the dramatic sweep of a martial epic.

I’m Staying with My Boys: The Heroic Life of Sgt John Basilone, USMC - Jim Proser

“I’M STAYING WITH MY BOYS…” is a first-hand look inside the life of one of the greatest heroes of the Greatest Generation.

Sgt. John Basilone was lauded by General Douglas MacArthut as “…one man Army”, awarded the Medal of Honor for his heroic actions on Guadalcanal and celebrated by the nation.

It was the turning point of the war and Basilone’s foxhole was the site of the turning point in the battle. That was just the beginning of his legend.

Distinctive among military biographies, the story is narrated by Sgt. Basilone himself allowing readers to experience the development of Johnny Basilone, the aimless youth, into Gunnery Sergeant “Manila John” Basilone, the clear-eyed warrior, undefeated light-heavyweight boxer and nationally revered war hero.

This publication is the only family-authorized biography and features many never before published family photographs. Basilone, along with his first commanding officer in sctual combat, Chesty Puller, are arguably the two greatest icons in Marine Corps history. The story of “Manila John” is part of every Marine’s boot camp education.

The story is woven with surprising personal details. He clearly foresaw his future three separate times. Each time his visions came to pass - including the last - foretelling his death. But his place was with “…my boys”, so he ignored the vision and returned to battle at Iwo Jima. Manila John was killed on the beach defending his boys and earned the Navy Cross for his bravery - an emotional true story.

With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa - E.B. Sledge

In his own book, Wartime, Paul Fussell called With the Old Breed “one of the finest memoirs to emerge from any war.” John Keegan referred to it in The Second World War as “one of the most arresting documents in war literature.” And Studs Terkel was so fascinated with the story he interviewed its author for his book, “The Good War.” What has made E.B. Sledge’s memoir of his experience fighting in the South Pacific during World War II so devastatingly powerful is its sheer honest simplicity and compassion.

Nowincluding a new introduction by Paul Fussell, With the Old Breed presents a stirring, personal account of the vitality and bravery of the Marines in the battles at Peleliu and Okinawa. Born in Mobile, Alabama in 1923 and raised on riding, hunting, fishing, and a respect for history and legendary heroes such as George Washington and Daniel Boone, Eugene Bondurant Sledge (later called “Sledgehammer” by his Marine Corps buddies) joined the Marines the year after the bombing of Pearl Harbor and from 1943 to 1946 endured the events recorded in this book. In those years, he passed, often painfully, from innocence to experience.

Sledge enlisted out of patriotism, idealism, and youthful courage, but once he landed on the beach at Peleliu, it was purely a struggle for survival. Based on the notes he kept on slips of paper tucked secretly away in his New Testament, he simply and directly recalls those long months, mincing no words and sparing no pain. The reality of battle meant unbearable heat, deafening gunfire, unimaginable brutality and cruelty, the stench of death, and, above all, constant fear. Sledge still has nightmares about “the bloody, muddy month of May on Okinawa.” But, as he also tellingly reveals, the bonds of friendship formed then will never be severed.

Sledge’s honesty and compassion for the other marines, even complete strangers, sets him apart as a memoirist of war. Read as sobering history or as high adventure, With the Old Breed is a moving chronicle of action and courage.

China Marine: An Infantryman’s Life After World War II - E.B. Sledge

China Marine is the extraordinary sequel to E.B. Sledge’s memoir, With the Old Breed, which remains the most powerful and moving account of the U.S. Marines in World War II. Sledge continues his story where With the Old Breed left off and recounts the compelling conclusion of his Marine career.

After Japan’s surrender in 1945, Sledge and his company were sent to China to maintain order and to calm the seething cauldron of the political and ideological unrest created by opposing factions. His regiment was the first Marine unit to return to the ancient city of Peiping (no Beijing) where they witnessed the last of old China and the rise of the Communist state. Sledge also recounts the difficulty of returning to his hometown of Mobile, Alabama, and resuming civilian life while haunted by shadows of close combat. Through the discipline of writing and the study of biology, he shows how he came to terms with the terrifying memories that had plagued him for years.

Poignant and compelling, China Marine provides a frank depiction of the real costs of war, emotional and psychological as well as physical, and reveals the enduring bond that develops between men who face the horrors of war.

Brotherhood of Heroes: The Marines at Peleliu, 1944- The Bloodiest Battle of the Pacific War - Bill Sloan

This Band of Brothers for the Pacific is the gut-wrenching and ultimately triumphant story of the Marines’ most ferocious - yet largely forgotten - battle of World War II.

Between September 15 and October 15, 1944, the First Marine Division suffered more than 6,500 casualties fighting on a hellish little coral island in the Pacific. Peleliu was the setting for one of the most savage struggles of modern times, a true killing ground that has been all but forgotten - until now. Drawing on interviews with Peleliu veterans, Bill Sloan’s gripping narrative seamlessly weaves together the experiences of the men who were there, producing a vivid and unflinching tableau of the twenty-four-hour-a-day nightmare of Peleliu.

Emotionally moving and gripping in its depictions of combat, Brotherhood of Heroes rescues the Corps’s bloodiest battle from obscurity and does honor to the Marines who fought it.

Red Blood, Black Sand: Fighting Alongside John Basilone from Boot Camp to Iwo Jima - Chuck Tatum

Originally penned for his Marine buddies, now, WWII veteran Chuck Tatum’s coveted book, “Red Blood, Black Sand,” is available to audiences worldwide. “Red Blood, Black Sand,” is Chuck’s true story, his first-hand account of Iwo Jima, the Marine Corps’ most savage battle. Best selling author/historian Stephen E. Ambrose praised “Red Blood, Black Sand,” saying, “In my judgement no combat veterans’ memoir is better…and only a handful are equal.” Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg agreed, and bought the rights to use “Red Blood, Black Sand” as a credited source for their new, $200-million-dollar HBO mini-series, “The Pacific.” In addition, they made Chuck Tatum a central character of the series, portrayed by actor Ben Esler. “Red Blood, Black Sand,” transports the reader back to 1944, when the Marine Corps built a fresh division, the 5th, for an apocalyptic battle: Iwo Jima. This gripping narrative follows Chuck’s life-or-death training at Camp Pendleton where Chuck learned machine guns, the tools of his trade, from his new mentor: Medal of Honor recipient John Basilone. Chuck’s colorful storytelling takes the reader on his voyage overseas, from the raucous port of Pearl Harbor with its gambling, gals, and tattoos, to the island of death itself, where Chuck hit the black sand beach of Iwo Jima, an 18-year-old Marine machine gunner in the climactic battle of the war. This is the story of Chuck’s two weeks in hell, where he fought alongside Basilone and watched his hero fall, where enemy infiltratiors stalked the night and snipers haunted the day, and where Chuck would see his friends whittled away in an ear-shattering, earth-shaking, meat grinder of a battle. Before the end, Chuck would find himself, like his hero Basilone, standing alone, blind with rage, firing a machine gun from the hip, while in a personal battle to keep his sanity. This is the island, the heroes, and the tragedy of Iwo Jima, through the eyes of the battle’s greatest storyteller, Chuck Tatum. Includes new bonus chapters: “Chuck’s thoughts on The Pacific series” and actor Ben Esler’s “On Set Memories of Portraying Chuck Tatum.“

Myth and Maneater: The Story of the Shark - David Kenyon Webster

Parachute Infantry: An American Paratrooper’s Memoir of D-Day and the Fall of the Third Reich - David Kenyon Webster

David Kenyon Webster’s memoir is a clear-eyed, emotionally charged chronicle of youth, camaraderie, and the chaos of war. Relying on his own letters home and recollections he penned just after his discharge, Webster gives a first hand account of life in E Company, 101st Airborne Division, crafting a memoir that resonates with the immediacy of a gripping novel. From the beaches of Normandy to the blood-dimmed battlefields of Holland, here are acts of courage and cowardice, moments of irritating boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror, and pitched urban warfare. Offering a remarkable snapshot of what it was like to enter Germany in the last days of World War II, Webster presents a vivid, varied cast of young paratroopers from all walks of life, and unforgettable glimpses of enemy soldiers and hapless civilians caught up in the melee. Parachute Infantry is at once harsh and moving, boisterous and tragic, and stands today as an unsurpassed chronicle of war - how men fight it, survive it, and remember it.

Beyond Band of Brothers: The War Memoirs of Major Dick Winters - Major Dick Winters

Immortalized as the Band of Brothers, they suffered 150% casualties while liberating Europe—an unparallelled record of bravery under fire. Dick Winters was their commander—“the best combat leader in World War II” to his men. This is his story—told in his own words for the first time.

On D-Day, Dick Winters parachuted into France and assumed leadership of the Band of Brothers when their commander was killed. He led them through the Battle of the Bulge and into Germany, by which time each member had been wounded. They liberated an S.S. death camp from the horrors of the Holocaust and captured Berchtesgaden, Hitler’s alpine retreat. After briefly serving during the Korean War, Winters was a highly successful businessman. Made famous by Stephen Ambrose’s book Band of Brothers - and the subsequent award-winning HBO miniseries - he is the object of worldwide adulation, Beyond Band of Brothers is Winters’s memoir - based on his wartime diary - but it also includes his comrades’ untold stories. Virtually all this material is being released for the first time. Only Winters was present for the activation of Easy Company until the war’s end. Winner of the Distinguished Service Cross, only he could pen this moving tribute to human spirit.

The Abandonment of the Jews: America and the Holocaust 1941-1945 - David Wyman

Wyman's account is devastating, not least because it documents the precise degree to which all segments of the American population--including the churches and the Jewish community themselves--failed to accomplish the very least that could have been expected. It exposes the failure of the State Department to fill the existing quotas (left 90 percent unfilled) and the continuous pattern of lies and deceptions by means of which the government turned back any proposals that were made, such as transporting European Jews to Turkey or North Africa, to say nothing of the "controversial" question of allowing more immigrants into the United States. The narrative moves through three stages: It opens with the developments that led to the realization by the Allies that a systematic annihilation of the Jews was under way. Foreshadowed by rumors through most of 1942, this news was publicly established in November of that year. The second stage deals with the ensuing struggle by Jews and non-Jews against myriad odds, including an obstructive State Department, an indifferent president and public, and inadequate press coverage, that culminated in January 1944 with President Roosevelt's creation of the War Refugee Board. The final stage examines the WRB's actions through the end of the war, actions tat were substantial but severely handicapped by their tardiness and by lack of commitment from administration officials. It is difficult for a generation that has seen hundreds of thousands--indeed, millions--of Vietnamese, Hispanic, and other refugees absorbed into our society with relative ease to understand the full extent of the anti-Semitism that kept the government from trying to help, and kept the Jews themselves from acting effectively. Wyman's analysis , careful and utterly convincing, is a thorough account, as well as a searing indictment, of that tragic state of affairs.

#you guys can ignore this im just making lists #world war II #WWII #book list #long post

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Saturday, February 05, 2022 Canadian TV Listings (Times Eastern)

WHAT IS NOT PREMIERING IN CANADA TONIGHT? SINGLE BLACK FEMALE (TBD - Lifetime Canada) SHENMUE (TBD - Adult Swim)

NEW TO AMAZON PRIME CANADA/CBC GEM/CRAVE TV/DISNEY + STAR/NETFLIX CANADA:

CBC GEM BEING BLACK IN CANADA AT THE OLYMPIC GAMES

CRAVE TV ABBY HATCHER (Season 2) ARPO KID E-CAT (Season 1, Episodes 1-20) PERCY TIGER TALES (Season 1, Episodes 1-20) RAINBOW RUBY (Season 1, Episodes 1-13) TEAM HOT WHEELS: BUILD THE EPIC RACE TEAM HOT WHEELS: SEARCH FOR THE 5TH DRIVER TEAM HOT WHEELS: THE SKILLS TO THRILL THAT’S JOEY (Episodes 1-20) XAVIER RIDDLE AND THE SECRET MUSEUM

WINTER OLYMPICS (CBC) 3:00am: Women's Cross Country Skiing, Women's Speed Skating, Freestyle Skiing - Men's Moguls, Women's Hockey (SN/SN1/TSN2/TSN4) 5:30am: Women’s Ski Jumping, Men’s Luge. Women’s Hockey, Speed Skating (SN1/SN/CBC) 6:00am: Women's Ski Jumping; Men's Luge; and Women's Hockey, United States vs. Russian Olympic Committee. (CBC) 8:00am: Mixed Doubles Curling: U.S. vs. Canada (CBC/SN/TSN3/TSN4) 12:00pm: The Hockey Show (CBC/SN) 7:00pm: Primetime Coverage (SN/SN1/TSN2/TSN4) 8:00pm: Mixed Doubles Curling, Alpine Skiing: Men’s Downhill (TSN2/TSN4/CBC) 8:25pm: Figure skating, Snowboarding, Men's Slopestyle, Mixed Doubles Curling: Canada vs. Czech Republic. (CBC) 10:00pm: Alpine Skiing (CBC) 11:00pm: Women’s Short and Men’s Free Figure Skating (CBC) 1:00am: Mixed Doubles Curling: Canada vs. Czech Republic

CURLING (TSN//TSN5) 2:00pm: Scottie’s Tournament of Hearts: Page Playoff (TSN/TSN3) 7:00pm: Scottie’s Tournament of Hearts: Page Playoff

G LEAGUE BASKETBALL (SN Now) 2:00pm: Delaware Blue Coats vs. Raptors 905

NHL HOCKEY (SN/SN1) 3:00pm: All-Star Game

NBA BASKETBALL (SN1) 7:00pm: Heat vs. Hornets (SN1) 10:00pm: Bucks vs. Trailblazers

W5 (CTV) 7:00pm: Dogs In Distress/Left Behind: Asking whether dogs are suffering and dying in what critics call an outdated tourist pursuit; whether Ian White was abandoned by the NHL and the NHLPA.

AURORA TEAGARDEN MYSTERIES: TIL DEATH DO US PART (CTV) 8:00pm: Just days before Aurora's wedding, a body is discovered, and she fears her father may be a suspect. Aurora and Nick race to solve the cold case before they walk down the aisle.

LOVE IN ACTION (W Network) 8:00pm: An outdoorsy fitness expert at a luxury wellness retreat must whip a bad-boy movie star into shape before shooting begins on his next action film.

CARNIVAL EATS (Food Network Canada) 8:00pm/8:30pm: Tearing into the Conevore, filled to the brim with smoked brisket, pork and chicken; eating the Ragin' Cajun hoagie before sampling a fried fruit tart and Big Banana Pop; the World Series Burger; chile relleno burrito; birthday cake popcorn balls. In Episode Two, taking a stroll with the Walking BBQ; bacon PB&J quesadilla; deep fried salad; an all-American ice cream sundae called the Burst of Freedom; the Lane County Fair in Eugene, Ore.

EXPEDITION X (Science) 8:00pm/9:00pm (SERIES PREMIERE): Jessica Chobot and Phil Torres dive into the legend of Mothman by searching for clues in a long-sealed bunker and at a top-secret Air Force base. In Episode Two, the surge of human activity surrounding the discovery of an ancient city sends Phil Torres and Jessica Chobot deep in the Cambodian jungle to search for a monster that has been terrifying locals for centuries.

A WEDDING TO REMEMBER (Super Channel Heart & Home) 8:00pm: Sparks fly between a best man and a maid of honor as they put their differences aside to save their best friends' wedding.

BUILDING OFF THE GRID: HIGH ALTITUDE HIDEOUT (HGTV Canada) 9:00pm: Joey Caiafa sets out to build a mountaintop hideout outside of Leadville, Colo.; he enlists the help of his friends and an architectural designer to trick out the solar powered space, but unforeseen issues could bring the build to a halt.

FREE GUY (Crave) 9:00pm: When a bank teller discovers he's a background player in a video game, he decides to become the hero of his own story -- one that he can rewrite himself. In a world with no limits, he's determined to save the day his way before it's too late.

WITCH HUNT (Super Channel Fuse) 9:00pm: A teen and her family help modern-day witches escape across the border to seek asylum in Mexico. However, when their mode of transport gets disrupted by federal witch hunters, they must hide two of them within the walls of their own home.

NLL LACROSSE (TSN/TSN3) 10:00pm: Panther City LC vs. Vancouver Warriors

THE HOUSE NEXT DOOR: MEET THE BLACKS 2 (Crave) 11:00pm: Author Carl Black's life takes an unexpected turn when he meets the eccentric new homeowner next door. Convinced that the man is a vampire, Carl and his oddball neighbors join forces to save themselves from the bloodsucking undead.

HOT ONES (Global) 1:00am: Ed Helms

#cdntv #cancon #canadian tv #canadian tv listings #W5 #carnival eats #hot ones #winter olympics #curling #g league basketball #nhl hockey #nba basketball #nll lacrosse

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richincolor · 7 years

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There are quite a few new releases this week and I’m excited for several of them.

Wild Beauty by Anna-Marie McLemore

Feiwel & Friends

Love grows such strange things.

For nearly a century, the Nomeolvides women have tended the grounds of La Pradera, the lush estate gardens that enchant guests from around the world. They’ve also hidden a tragic legacy: if they fall in love too deeply, their lovers vanish. But then, after generations of vanishings, a strange boy appears in the gardens.

The boy is a mystery to Estrella, the Nomeolvides girl who finds him, and to her family, but he’s even more a mystery to himself; he knows nothing more about who he is or where he came from than his first name. As Estrella tries to help Fel piece together his unknown past, La Pradera leads them to secrets as dangerous as they are magical in this stunning exploration of love, loss, and family.

Akata Warrior (Akata Witch #2) by Nnedi Okorafor Viking Books for Young Readers

A year ago, Sunny Nwazue, an American-born girl Nigerian girl, was inducted into the secret Leopard Society. As she began to develop her magical powers, Sunny learned that she had been chosen to lead a dangerous mission to avert an apocalypse, brought about by the terrifying masquerade, Ekwensu. Now, stronger, feistier, and a bit older, Sunny is studying with her mentor Sugar Cream and struggling to unlock the secrets in her strange Nsibidi book.

Eventually, Sunny knows she must confront her destiny. With the support of her Leopard Society friends, Orlu, Chichi, and Sasha, and of her spirit face, Anyanwu, she will travel through worlds both visible and invisible to the mysteries town of Osisi, where she will fight a climactic battle to save humanity.

Much-honored Nnedi Okorafor, winner of the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards, merges today’s Nigeria with a unique world she creates. Akata Warrior blends mythology, fantasy, history and magic into a compelling tale that will keep readers spellbound.

Broken Circle by J.L. and M.A. Powers Black Sheep

Adam wants nothing more than to be a “normal” teen, but his reality is quickly leaking normal. Afraid to sleep because of the monster that stalks him in his dreams, Adam’s breakdown at school in front of his crush Sarah lands him in the hospital.

Now Adam can only vaguely comprehend some sort of future. His mother died when he was only four and his eccentric father—who might be an assassin, a voodoo god, the reincarnation of the Buddha, or something even stranger—is never available when Adam really needs him.

Adam’s life takes an even stranger turn when a fat man with a gold tooth and a medallion confronts his father regarding Adam’s supposed “true destiny.” Adam is soon headed toward a collision with life, death, and the entities charged with shepherding souls of the newly dead, all competing to control lucrative territories where some nightmares are real and psychopomps of ancient legends walk the streets of North America.

Seize Today (Forget Tomorrow #3) by Pintip Dunn Entangled: Teen

The third book in the New York Times bestselling and RITA award winning Forget Tomorrow series is a thrilling conclusion to an epic trilogy.

Seventeen-year-old precognitive Olivia Dresden is an optimist. Since different versions of people’s futures flicker before her eyes, she doesn’t have to believe in human decency. She can literally see the path to goodness in each person—if only he or she would make the right decision. No one is more conflicted than her mother, Chairwoman Dresden, and Olivia is fiercely loyal to the woman her mother could be.

But when the Chairwoman captures Ryder Russell, a boy from the rebel Underground, Olivia is forced to reevaluate her notions of love and faith. With Ryder’s help, Olivia must come to terms with who her mother is in the present—and stop her before she destroys the world.

Not Your Villain (Sidekick Squad #2) by C.B. Lee

Bells Broussard thought he had it made when his superpowers manifested early. Being a shapeshifter is awesome. He can change his hair whenever he wants, and if putting on a binder for the day is too much, he’s got it covered. But that was before he became the country’s most-wanted villain.

After discovering a massive cover-up by the Heroes’ League of Heroes, Bells and his friends Jess, Emma, and Abby set off on a secret mission to find the Resistance. Meanwhile, power-hungry former hero Captain Orion is on the loose with a dangerous serum that renders meta-humans powerless, and a new militarized robotic threat emerges. Everyone is in danger. Between college applications and crushing on his best friend, will Bells have time to take down a corrupt government?

Sometimes, to do a hero’s job, you need to be a villain.

Pashmina by Nidhi Chanani First Second

Pashmina tells the story of an Indian-American girl who struggles to fit in at high school, then discovers more about her family’s history with the help of her mother’s magical pashmina.

— Cover images and summaries via Goodreads

#new releases

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miragerules · 7 years

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Here is a really well written article about both Daenerys good and bad qualities. The authors of the article make a lot of great points about Daenerys as well as Jon.

Warning: Spoilers ahead for "Game of Thrones."

Daenerys Targaryen is, in many ways, one of the most appealing characters in HBO's "Game of Thrones." She's powerful and determined, and she inspires people to follow her again and again.

Now she's close to forming an alliance with Jon Snow, the other main hero of our tale. Together, they'll be a dragon-riding, direwolf-wielding duo who will slaughter the White Walkers and save Westeros. They could both perhaps be "The Prince That Was Promised," Azor Ahai reborn.

But would a writer like George R.R. Martin really let his series end so simply?

Some fans don't think so and point to a few troubling characteristics of Daenerys both on the show and in the books that could lead to her eventual turn toward a darker path.

Let's explore just why some people think Daenerys could become a villain.

Daenerys is a vengeance-seeker.

Throughout the series, Daenerys is convinced of her own moral compass. If she ever witnesses something she views as wrong — such as rape or slavery — she immediately attempts to put a stop to it and punish the wrongdoer.

This a noble trait, but seeing the world in black and white and believing she is the sole bringer of justice is one of Daenerys' downfalls.

We saw this early in the series when she saved a healer and maegi named Mirri Maz Duur, one of the Lhazareen women raped by the Dothraki, who had conquered their village. To Daenerys, saving Duur was an honorable thing to do, and she enlisted Duur to help heal Khal Drogo after he was injured.

Instead, Duur made Drogo's condition worse and killed Daenerys' son, Rhaego, when he was still in the womb using blood magic.

Daenerys doesn't understand why the woman turned on her when Daenerys had saved her. But Duur viewed it quite differently:

"Saved me? Three of those riders had already raped me before you saved me, girl. I saw my god's house burn, there where I had healed men and women beyond counting. In the streets I saw piles of heads: the head of the baker who makes my bread, the head a young boy that I had cured of fever just three moons past. So tell me again: Exactly what it was that you saved?"

Duur herself was seeking vengeance for the death of her people. In retaliation, Daenerys murdered Duur in Khal Drogo's funeral pyre and emerged with her three dragons.

Was the scene epic? Of course. But this wouldn't be the last time Daenerys murdered or harmed people who disagreed with her perception of what is right and wrong.

Another moment of Daenerys' vengeance gone awry is when the Great Masters crucify 163 slave children as mile markers on her way to Meereen as a way to intimidate her. When she sacks the city, Daenerys crucifies 163 Great Masters as a punishment.

In "A Storm of Swords," however, Daenerys begins to regret her actions, despite her initial sense of righteousness:

"She had them nailed to wooden posts around the plaza, each man pointing at the next. The anger was fierce and hot inside her when she gave the command; it made her feel like an avenging dragon. But later, when she passed the men dying on the posts, when she heard their moans and smelled their bowels and blood …

"It was just. It was. I did it for the children."

Daenerys, though she suppresses the thought, realizes some of the masters may not have been guilty of the death of these children. She tries to convince herself that she was right to take their lives.

And in season six, episode five, show watchers saw Daenerys murder the powerful khals in their straw hut. These weren't nice men — they spent a significant chunk of time insulting Daenerys and talking about how they intended to rape and kill her — but watching her burn them alive was still an unnerving moment for some viewers, especially because it looked like she took pleasure in watching them die.

Daenerys' rationalizations for all these events should give her fans pause. Murdering evil people may seem like the right thing to do, but what would happen if Daenerys' moral compass were ever skewed?

It wouldn't be the first time she burned people who disagreed with her, after all.

Dragons as nuclear weapons.

In "A Dance With Dragons," Daenerys compares her dragons to monsters:

"Mother of dragons, Daenerys thought. Mother of monsters. What have I unleashed upon the world? A queen I am, but my throne is made of burned bones, and it rests on quicksand. Without dragons, how could she hope to hold Meereen, much less win back Westeros? I am the blood of the dragon, she thought. If they are monsters, so am I."

This wild and changeable nature of dragons is directly tied to Daenerys. When she equates herself to a dragon, she means it: She can be just as destructive and changeable as her dragon children.

What's more, Martin has talked about ties between the dragons and nuclear weapons. Both are powerful to have but can easily lead to utter destruction.

"Dragons are the nuclear deterrent, and only Dany has them, which in some ways makes her the most powerful person in the world," Martin told Vulture in a 2014 interview. "But is that sufficient? These are the kind of issues I'm trying to explore. The United States right now has the ability to destroy the world with our nuclear arsenal, but that doesn't mean we can achieve specific geopolitical goals. Power is more subtle than that. You can have the power to destroy, but it doesn't give you the power to reform, or improve, or build."

We saw the full force of this when Daenerys attacked the Lannister army with Drogon. Director Matt Shakman chose to show the battle from Jaime and Bronn's perspective to bring the horrors of dragonfire into sharp relief.

"I wanted to tell the story of what it was like ... when war changes forever and a truly horrific weapon like napalm or an atom bomb is suddenly unleashed and what that does to the men on the ground," Shakman told Insider.

Daenerys is sitting with her finger on a red button that could take out all of Westeros. She may not want to destroy the kingdom, especially before she ever has the chance to rule there. But by virtue of wanting to conquer Westeros, she could be bringing more death and destruction into a country still ravaged by war.

There's a chance Daenerys could be viewed as a villain instead of the returning hero of House Targaryen.

Daenerys and the Mad King.

While Daenerys has remained fairly sane so far, the Targaryen dynasty has a history of mental illness, mainly because of intermarriage. Daenerys' father, King Aerys II, was called the Mad King because he became paranoid and started killing people and hiding wildfire around King's Landing.

Daenerys starts to worry about this possible "taint" in her blood, as do many other characters throughout the series. But it's not so much that Daenerys could go crazy — though that's certainly a possibility — as that she could follow in her father's footsteps by punishing those who disagree with her or whom she views as her enemies.

Tyrion warned her against this tactic at the end of season six, and the two reached a compromise where Daenerys instead burned just one of the slaver's ships and had Grey Worm execute two of the three slave masters.

Once she arrived in Westeros, Tyrion once again counseled Daenerys against immediately using the dragons to burn King's Landing or other cities, telling her she didn't want to be the "queen of the ashes."

But their alternate plans failed because of Tyrion's miscalculations of what Jaime and Cersei would do, and Daenerys got tired of sitting around and doing nothing. She rode Drogon into battle against the Lannister army and laid waste to their soldiers and loot. She didn't choose a select few leaders to punish — she went for everything in sight.

Granted, it was better than her flying to the Red Keep and attacking civilians, but it was still hard to 100% root for her in this moment.

Daenerys also had a tense conversation with Varys earlier in the seventh season. She made him promise to be straightforward with her about her potential failings as a leader, but she then vowed to burn him alive if he ever betrayed her.

If Daenerys goes too far in the "fire and blood" direction, she could end up repeating her father's mistakes — something that would end up costing her the throne, just like it ended up costing King Aerys both his kingdom and his life.

Jon Snow is the true hero.

A penchant for vengeance, a crazy father, and dragons do not together make Daenerys a villain. But let's compare Daenerys with another heroic character in the "Song of Ice and Fire" series: Jon Snow.

In the books and show, Jon is similar to Ned Stark. He's honorable, justice-minded, and takes no pleasure in killing. When he's forced to take a life, Jon makes sure he's the one to swing the sword, and he views it as a burden, not a pleasure.

For example, when he punished the brothers of the Night's Watch who stabbed him in season six, Jon took no joy in it. He listened to every man's last words before cutting the rope and watching them die. He did not look pleased by their deaths — unlike Daenerys, who smiled right before she watched the khals burn.

Jon also never asks for the responsibility heaped on his shoulders time and time again. Jon is forced to become the lord commander after Samwell Tarly submitted his name. He doesn't want to be the one to take care of the Wildlings, but he feels morally obligated to help them and therefore becomes their savior. He doesn't want to be the one to punish his brothers, even though they betrayed and murdered him, and yet he knows the responsibility falls to him.

And now, he's king in the north after rallying the Northern houses around him. But he didn't even want to do that — not until Sansa Stark convinced him it was the right thing to do.

Jon follows the traditional "reluctant hero" journey in many ways. He questions himself, he sometimes falls, and he picks himself back up.

It's not unlike what Dumbledore tells Harry in the "Harry Potter" film series: "It is a curious thing, Harry, but perhaps those who are best suited to power are those who have never sought it. Those who, like you, have leadership thrust upon them, and take up the mantle because they must, and find to their own surprise that they wear it well."

Jon never asks to be a leader; he's just the best man for the job. It's something Daenerys — with her Targaryen dynasty and ambitions — would never understand. When Jon and Daenerys meet for the first time, Daenerys tells him that all people enjoy what they're good at.

"I don't," Jon said.

He was likely referring to leading and killing, the two things he's been forced into since leaving Winterfell as a young man. Jon never sought out a royal title, but he's good at owning it. That factor might make him the one person best suited for the job.

What does this mean for the series?

There's also substantial evidence throughout the series that Daenerys will be a good ruler. She's intelligent, she tries to listen to her advisers, and she genuinely wants the people she rules to be happy. People like Missandei and Grey Worm follow Daenerys because they believe in her ability to change lives for the better.

And even with her possible flaws, Daenerys would ultimately be a much better ruler than Cersei or Joffrey Lannister, or even King Robert.

Still, there could be a complicated friction as Daenerys tries to claim the Iron Throne. Instead of being the hero she assumes she will be, Daenerys is likely to face opposition and bring destruction and death to the kingdom.

On the other hand, she possesses weapons that, while volatile, could be the key to defeating the White Walkers (at least on the show). We know that Valyrian steel and dragonglass — two things believed to be made with dragon fire — can kill the White Walkers, so it stands to reason that actua fire from actual dragons would do the trick, too.

So while she may not be greeted in Westeros as a hero, she and her dragons could fast become their only hope. Plus, a Jon and Daenerys romance might be brewing — even though their shared bloodline grosses some fans out. Perhaps his "ice" will temper her "fire," if you catch our drift.

In the end, only Martin knows what will happen, but Daenerys fans should buckle up. It could be a bumpy ride on her way to the Iron Throne.

#Game of Thrones #Game of Thrones Season 7 #Game of Thrones Spoilers #Game of Thrones Season 7 Spoilers #Daenerys #Daenarys Targaryen #Jon Snow #Jon X Daenerys #Jonerys #Jon x Dany #Anti Daenerys #Anti-Daenerys

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recentanimenews · 7 years

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Crunchyroll's 2017 Co-Productions

At Crunchyroll, we’re dedicated to sharing anime with the world and are always looking for ways to further contribute to the industry at its home in Japan. While most series on Crunchyroll are licensed through a revenue-sharing model, for the second year in a row, a significant number of anime simulcast on Crunchyroll are the result of co-productions, where we invest in the project at its conception alongside our partners in Japan. These are exciting opportunities to help get series off the ground and represents how much creators in Japan value the participation of fans overseas in the creation of anime! With the year coming to a close, we want to highlight a few of the 2017 titles we’ve played a part of directly financing and co-producing!

Chain Chronicle - The Light of Haecceitas -

Based on the hit mobile game, Chain Chronicle brought some serious production to match the scope of their setting. The last stand by the forces of good against a darkness that can decay the land and corrupt allies. Along with some amazing visuals and combat, Chain Chronicle’s tale isn’t just about fighting evil, but defying hopelessness.

NANBAKA

The goofiest anime about a supermax prison ever made. NANBAKA’s irreverent comedy set in a strangely glamorous (and sparkly) penitentiary staffed by more guards in military dress made for maybe one of the most unique anime this year. Who would have thought escape attempts, death traps, and fighting tournament arcs could be so funny?

Masamune Kun's Revenge

A romantic comedy built on bad intentions. Instead of getting the girl, Masamune-kun wants to earn Aki’s love just to leave her in the dust as revenge for a childhood slight. This anime has all the hallmarks of a wacky high school romance balanced with some surprisingly sincere moments, as Masamune begins to overcome his childhood angst and cope with his destructive insecurities.

Kemono Friends

The charming anime about animal girls that became a cult sensation. Kemono Friends’ endearing characters and goofy style hid a surprisingly sophisticated slowburn story surrounding its seemingly simple setting. Their exploration of Japari Park and conflict with the blue gel-like Ceruleans eventually reveal a hidden history at odds with the anime’s sunny disposition.

Minami Kamakura High School Girls Cycling Club

A wonderful slice of life following the members of a high school cycling club set in the Kamakura city in the Kanagawa Prefecture. In addition to providing its own wonderful story, this anime highlights Kamakura’s charm with gorgeous backgrounds of its cozy town and beautiful coastal roads. Each episode is followed up by an educational segment about bicycles to help you start on your own road.

Piacevole

The anime about Italian cooking you didn’t know you needed. Piacevole follows Morina’s first job as a waitress at a tiny Italian trattoria. We learn about Italian cuisine along with Morina as she waits tables while learning how to cook on her own. A cozy anime for foodies or anyone looking for a quick, 4-minute vacation in their rustic restaurant.

Idol Incidents

An unusual collision of idol anime with politics, Idol Incidents is half concerts and half candidacy, as Natsuki runs to represent her prefecture in a world where idols also act as politicians. Japan needs more than good fiscal policy to solve its issues -- it needs the inspiration only idols can provide. Natsuki’s group is looking to join the Diet and save their country!

Love Tyrant

An irreverent comedy poking fun at storytelling tropes from its fellow romantic comedies and beyond. Seiji is visited by an unstable angel named Guri who has a magical notebook called the Kiss Note, which forces people who kiss to become a couple. What follows is an increasingly complex shipping war complete with all the expected archetypes from imoutos to yanderes.

Shonen Ashibe - GO! GO! Goma-chan 2

Everyone’s favorite spotted baby seal is back in Shonen Ashibe! Goma-chan and his best friend Ashibe are inseparable, even going to school together! The two get into all kinds of hijinks with an expanding cast of wacky neighbors in this hilarious adaptation of the classic manga that made Goma-chan a cultural icon in Japan.

The Reflection

Stan Lee and Hiroshi Nagahama team up to create one of the most visually arresting and unique anime of the year. A story of Western-style masked heroes and villains in a battle to decide the fate of humanity. It’s a mystery turned roadtrip with a ton of twists that leave just as many questions as it provides answers for.

Restaurant to Another World

This relaxed series has all the pros of a slice of life and cooking anime set against a world of fantastic environments and creatures. A strangely laid-back episodic story that takes you on small vignettes where the pressure never gets too high, since you can rest assured it will end in a warm meal.

A Centaur's Life

Just another high school anime, except in an alternate world where evolution took a different course, leading to people with wings, tails, cat ears, and fins. Himeno is a centaur girl navigating the uncertainty of her high school years along with her friends Nozomi and Kyouko. Through their humorous misunderstandings the anime reveals a surprisingly deep setting that asks what the world would look like if humans had an extra set of limbs or a horse body for a behind.

Classroom of the Elite

The Tokyo Koudo Ikusei Senior High School has a reputation for instructing the next generation of Japanese leadership. It’s students must survive a cutthroat system of accruing class points to reach the top of their school. Ayanokoji and Horikita are placed in the problem class 1-D and must scheme and politic against the other classes and their own classmates to the top of the school.

Recovery of an MMO Junkie

One of the most heartwarming romance anime in recent memory, MMO Junkie is equal parts funny and relatable. It explores the appeal of MMOs and how meaningful relationships can form and blossom into true love online. The lead Moriko has left her job and devoted herself to playing her hot guy character online, where she meets a colorful cast of new friends and a surprising romantic partner.

URAHARA

The owners of PARK, a clothing store in the fashion mecca of Harajuku, must defend their city against an alien invasion. Unable to create on their own, Scoopers arrive on Earth to siphon up its culture for their own. The PARK girls quest to stop the Scoopers explores the nature of creativity and friendship of its three leads with a visual style that's unforgettable.

Dies irae

Produced with the help of crowdfunding from fans, this famous visual novel turned anime follows an apocalyptic conflict taking place in the heart of Japan. Ren Fuji has to defend his city from a threat that has been gathering strength since WWII, a cult with mystical abilities sufficient to destroy the world. Dies irae is a grand conflict with an epic soundtrack.

Kino’s Journey -the Beautiful World- the Animated Series

A reboot of the classic anime following the journeys of Kino, a mysterious traveler who never stays in one place for more than three days. Their journey leads them to a variety of countries with unusual laws and cultures often anachronistic or outright dangerous. Expanding on its predecessor, the Beautiful World explores additional stories penned by the acclaimed author Keiichi Sigsawa.

We’re proud of the anime we’ve played a part in, and we hope that you’ve enjoyed watching them! Next year, our team in Tokyo will be even busier, so keep an eye out for more great series’ in 2018! Speaking of which, here’s a sneak peek at two co-productions we have slated for the January season!

Junji Ito Collection

From one of the biggest names in horror, now celebrating his 30th year in the manga business. Junji Ito Collection brings together the living legends most terrifying tales in a series of shorts that are sure to make you miss some sleep! We’re excited to finally see some of Ito’s most iconic characters finally make their way from manga page to animation!

citrus

The smash hit yuri manga citrus is also making its way to your monitors this winter! When the trendy Yuzu Aihara ends up in a conservative all girls school, she immediately starts making trouble for the student council president and her new step-sister Mei. This series follows the winding romance between two nearly opposite girls forced to live in the same room and come together through adversity.

Were any of these anime among your favorites for 2017? Do you want to see more? Let us know in the comments!

---

Peter Fobian is an Associate Features Editor for Crunchyroll, author of Monthly Mangaka Spotlight, writer for Anime Academy, and contributor at Anime Feminist. You can follow him on Twitter @PeterFobian.

By: [email protected]

#Anime #News #Latest in Anime News by Crunchyroll!

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kakarikoherald · 5 years

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Nintendo Download (UK) - June 27th, 2019

UK, here’s your download!

Super Mario Maker 2 (Nintendo, €59.99 / £49.99) - Break the rules and make the Super Mario courses you’ve always dreamed of in Super Mario Maker 2! With lots of new tools, course parts and features at your disposal, let your imagination run wild as you craft unique levels to share with friends and players all over the world

Super Mario Maker 2 + Nintendo Switch Online (Nintendo, €69.99 / £59.99) - Bonus: Download code for Nintendo Switch Online Individual Membership 12-month subscription.

Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night (505 Games, €39.99 / £34.99) - Bloodstained: Ritual of the Night is a gothic horror, side-scrolling, action RPG set in 18th century England. A paranormal force has summoned a demon-infested castle, revealing crystal shards infused with tremendous magical power. Play as Miriam, an orphan scarred by an alchemist's curse which slowly crystallizes her body. To save humanity, and herself in the process, Miriam must fight through the castle and defeat the summoner, Gebel.

Fort Boyard (Microids, €29.99 / £26.99) - Cross the threshold of Fort Boyard and complete the challenges! Enter Fort Boyard and take up the challenge with more than 10 activities that combine Action and Party Games! Endurance, dexterity, and perseverance will be your best assets for collecting boyard coins.

MotoGP19 (Milestone, €59.99 / £49.99) - MotoGP19 celebrates passion for motorsports with many new features! With the Historical Challenges mode, you can relive the most exciting rivalries that made the history of the MotoGP! Compete with a faster, smarter and more accurate AI based on machine learning! Play with your favourite 2019 Championship rider and race on 19 different tracks! Discover all the classes: MotoGP, Moto2, Moto3, Red Bull MotoGP Rookies Cup and the new MotoE.

Psyvariar Delta (Dispatch Games, €26.44 / £23.50) - First released in arcades in 2000, this enhanced version retains the classic BUZZ system that lets players enjoy the thrill of levelling up by avoiding direct hits and evading enemy attacks just enough to graze their planes.

Soldam: Drop, Connect, Erase (Dispatch Games, €7.00 / £6.27) - Dispatch Games brings back the Jaleco arcade classic with, Soldam: Drop, Connect, Erase. The game has been refreshed with updated graphics and gameplay, but retains its arcade charm with its catchy music and unique style that have been fan favourites for many years.

Super Neptunia RPG (Reef Entertainment, €49.99 / £44.99) - Super Neptunia RPG lets players explore side-scrolling dungeons and fight in turn-based battles with all-new art and animations! Settle the debate once and for all – which games are better: 2D or 3D!

Devil May Cry (CAPCOM, €19.99 / £15.99) - The first appearance of Dante, the ultimate devil hunter! With the blood of a legendary demon warrior flowing through his veins, Dante takes on a mission from the mysterious Trish to travel to Mallet Island and defeat Mundus, the king of the underworld. But this is no ordinary job for Dante, who is also motivated by revenge... Use your sword and dual guns to pull off flashy combos in this classic title which introduced the "stylish action" genre to the world.

Terraria (505 Games, €29.99 / £24.99) - The very world is at your fingertips as you fight for survival, fortune, and glory. Delve deep into cavernous expanses, seek out ever-greater foes to test your mettle in combat, or construct your own city - In the World of Terraria, the choice is yours!

We. The Revolution (Klabater, €19.99 / £17.99) - We. The Revolution is a unique game with a singular art style set in the blood-soaked and paranoid world of the French Revolution, where often you could not tell a friend from an enemy. As a judge of the Revolutionary Tribunal, you will pass sentences and play a dangerous political game. At the end of a day you will also confront your decisions with your family.

SEGA AGES Virtua Racing (SEGA, €6.99 / £5.99) - Experience the herald of modern racing games, Virtua Racing! It's a race against time, but be careful, running into opponents and obstacles will slow you down. Can you beat the clock? Now featuring rankings and replays, online 2-player races, offline multiplayer races (up to 8-players at once on a single Nintendo Switch), the crash-disabling helper mode, and motion controls.

Azuran Tales: TRIALS (Tiny Trinket Games, €12.99 / £11.69) - Armies of undead, flying sharks and the price of immortality. Azuran Tales: Trials is a brutal platformer with RPG elements, challenging combat and merciless enemies. Journey across the World of Azuran as you discover its beautiful levels, expansive lore and unravel the mystery of Magrath. But don't expect an easy journey as you explore this world full of lore, monsters, traps, and unique bosses. This game is straightforward and hard to beat so you will be forced to learn and adapt or fail and die each and every time!

Baobabs Mausoleum Ep.2: 1313 Barnabas Dead End Drive (Zerouno Games, €5.99 / £5.39) - Welcome to Flamingos Creek, the ghostly town which only appears every 25 years in Albatros Road. A town that only appears in nightmares! Now arrives the second Baobabs Mausoleum chapter with “Baobabs Mausoleum Ep.2: 1313 Barnabas Dead End Drive” which follows the adventure of our FBI Agent Watracio Walpurgis in his quest: Escape from Flamingos Creek. Now you can explore Flamingos Creek wilfully! You will find the logic evolution of an “open town”, where you will have a profound experience with the town, its inhabitants, main story and secondary missions.

Bitlogic - A Cyberpunk Arcade Adventure (OXiAB Game Studio, €5.95 / £4.99) - Bitlogic is an action and adventure game elegantly classic but enhanced with new adapted graphics. In the game you take control of Bit, your personal avatar in a virtual cyberpunk world full of dangerous enemies, hidden paths and digital mysteries. Immerse yourself in Bit's universe and dare to uncover the secrets behind the source code. Explore, defend yourself and find the correct way to the heart and soul of Bitlogic. This Bitlogic version is an enhanced adaptation of our Bitlogic MSX game.

Chiki-Chiki Boxy Pro Wrestling (The Pocket Company, €13.49 / £12.14) - The battle gong sounds! Make your way through the tournament, aiming for the top! The controls are easy! You can bust out flashy moves with just a single button. Unleash jump attacks, drops, holds, and specials, carrying them out just how you think of them! Up to 6 players can play. Compete in intense battles with players from all around the world! Combine your favourite parts and moves to create your very own custom wrestler!

Dandy Dungeon - Legend of Brave Yamada - (Onion Games, €15.39 / £13.85) - Yamada-kun (age 36) is a programmer at a major game publisher. He hates his job. Deep into every night, alone in his apartment, he works on his own game: it's an RPG, and he is the hero, Brave Yamada! One day, he falls in love at first sight with his new neighbour Maria-chan and in an effort to nurture these feelings, adds Princess Maria into his game! Will Yamada-kun and Maria-chan find love? Find out in this unique RPG from Onion Games!

DOBUTSU SHOGI WORLD (SILVERSTAR, €34.99 / £31.49) - Master Shogi easily with this game! Let’s play and learn Shogi on three levels! A game played on a 3×4 square board with eight animal pieces. Cute animal pieces have marks to show the direction of movement. Easy rules. Have fun learning basic Shogi!

Epic Astro Story (Kairosoft, €10.00 / £8.99) - Ready to test your mettle against the final frontier? Pioneer an untamed planet, building roads and houses for your fellow denizens of the future. Cultivate your quaint colony into a stellar space citadel, and you'll pull alien tourists from everywhere this side of Alpha Centauri!

Furwind (JanduSoft, €8.99 / £8.09) - Furwind is a colourful, pixel art style, action-platformer game that evokes the challenging classics of the old days. Embark on this epic adventure in which a little fox will fight the ominous darkness that is invading its world.

Goonya Fighter (MUTAN, €4.27 / £3.85) - A different kind of fighting game! Even with just one Nintendo Switch device, up to 4 people can fight it out. Are you ready to become a Goonya Fighter? Walk too far and you flop over; punch the wrong way and be sent flying! And get back up again just as easily! For beginners and pros alike, welcome to a different kind of fighting game.

Graveyard Keeper (tinyBuild Games, €19.99 / £17.99) - Graveyard Keeper is the most inaccurate medieval cemetery management sim of the year. Build & manage your own graveyard while finding shortcuts to cut costs, expand into entertainment with witch-burning festivals, and scare nearby villagers into attending church. This is a game of capitalism and doing whatever it takes to build a thriving business.

Human Rocket Person (2nd Studio, €4.49 / £4.04) - Join Human Rocket Person on the adventure of a lifetime as he tries to save the universe. Jump your way through different levels on your incredible pogo stick. Fly with special abilities and master the awkward controls.

Irony Curtain: From Matryoshka with Love (Artifex Mundi, €19.99 / £17.99) - Experience the totalitarian Matryoshka through the eyes of Evan – a low-ranking, goofy journalist involuntarily pulled right into the middle of an espionage stand-off between two powers. Jump into the wacky spy adventure, uncover secrets of the bizarre communist country (and the powerful capitalist empire!), witness a story full of unpredictable twists and turns, and discover the true agenda of the mysterious Supreme Leader!

Lines X (Nestor Yavorskyy, €0.74 / £0.66) - Lines X is a Numberlink-based puzzle game involving finding paths to connect coloured tiles in a grid: 100 brain-teasing Numberlink puzzles, beautiful abstract design, more than 10 colour themes, 8 ambient relaxing soundtracks.

NEKOPARA Vol.3 (CFK, €10.99 / £9.89) - "NEKOPARA Vol.3", the third instalment of the world-famous NEKOPARA adventure game series, has arrived on Nintendo Switch! Prepare for a brand-new story in which Maple and Cinnamon take centre stage! The game has been updated for its console release, which includes a completely new opening movie and song as well as full-HD graphics. NEKOPARA is once again ready to serve its loyal customers all around the world!

Penguin Wars (Dispatch Games, €13.22 / £11.89) - Join Riley and his friends on their journey to Gira Gira land. Collect items and earn candy to evolve your favourite character. You can also buy "Gira Skills" that let you learn special moves for each character. You can play one on one, two on two, or even play with different rules such as using bombs and other items against your opponents. Each character has a different skill set so make sure to use and master appropriate characters to help you on your journey.

Q-YO Blaster (Forever Entertainment, €8.99 / £8.09) - Q-YO Blaster is a horizontal Shoot 'Em Up , with peculiar characters, strange enemies, bullets, many bullets and many explosions. Enter the miniature world and stop the threat. Enjoy the rudeness with weapons, special powers and help from mystical beings. Q-YO Blaster has a nice 2d environment with detailed pixel art scenarios, varied enemies section, stages, powers, improvements and many more!

Rain City (ORENDA, €6.72 / £5.96) - The game begins with the main character, a cat, who embarks to Rain City to find his sister. The story is both bizarre and exciting making players get lost in a mushroom field, search for a secret passage, and run experiments in a laboratory. The reason rain continues in Rain City is uncovered when players find his missing sister...

SEGA AGES Wonder Boy: Monster Land (SEGA, €6.99 / £5.99) - Sequel to the original Wonder Boy, Wonder Boy: Monster Land returns in SEGA AGES for Nintendo Switch! The arcade platform action RPG stars a now-teenage Tom-Tom, also known as Wonder Boy. Having previously saved Wonder Land from clutches of the evil king, the hero is called upon again when the evil MEKA dragon invades. It's up to Wonder Boy to defeat all the monsters in the now-called "Monster Land." Fight monsters, purchase magical weapons, and traverse the realm today!

War Tech Fighters (Blowfish Studios, €17.99 / £15.99) - Travelling across the galaxy, the rebel colonies of Hebos and Ares join forces to battle against the Zatros empire with the deadliest weapons ever built – War Techs. Taking space combat to a whole new level, War Techs are giant mechs that combine cold precision and state of the art technology in the battlefields of space.

Attack of the Toy Tanks (Ratalaika Games, €3.99 / £3.99) - War is coming whether you’re ready for it or not soldier! In Attack of the Toy Tanks, across the game’s 60 levels in the main campaign, players must take control of the provided vehicle of war and battle it out across different arenas and be the last tank standing.

Headball Soccer Deluxe (Cool Small Games, €4.99 / £4.49) - Smash the football and score goals in this addicting football game! Aim your big head headers and perfect your kick skills to destroy your opponent's team defence. Use the slime, ice, and gum to your max advantage in offence skills! Decorate your characters with a variety of costumes. Create the best athletes by developing characters in your own way! Game on!

Maddening Euphoria (Chequered Ink, €0.99 / £0.99) - Maddening Euphoria is a unique, challenging arcade game with randomly generated level design, in which you control brother and sister duet Mason and Millicent Zane as they flee from their own imagined realisation of their troubles in life - an inescapable wall of death - while avoiding bottomless pits, deadly spikes and speed-reducing pools of thick goo. Keep within spitting distance of the wall to receive a short, colourful Second Wind speed boost and gain the opportunity to be one-eighth euphoric.

Rally Rock 'N Racing (EnjoyUp Games, €7.99 / £7.19) - In Rally Rock 'N Racing, you’ll enjoy a wide variety of natural environments, such as deserts, snow-covered mountains, forests... where you can show your skill at the wheel, competing against everyone to become the fastest. The game has several modes, such as Championship, Time Trial, Arcade, and 4-player multiplayer.

Arcade Archives CLU CLU LAND (HAMSTER, €6.99 / £6.29) - "CLU CLU LAND" is an action game released by Nintendo in 1984. In "CLU CLU LAND", you control of the main character, GLOOPY, to find hidden gold ingots hidden around the stage. GLOOPY automatically moves forward, but by holding and releasing the turn posts at the right time, you can send GLOOPY off in different directions. You are also able to enjoy playing together in coop mode.

Real Drift Racing (Cool Small Games, €3.74 / £3.36) - Time to unleash the demon of speed! Drifting, speed and competition - all in one game! Get ready to drive on high-performance cars and make them drift at lightning speed on realistic tracks. Improve your racing and drifting skills as you earn cash to buy new cars! Tune and customize your cars and become the best driver in the world!

Spell Casting: Purrfectly Portable Edition (Hidden Trap, €9.99 / £8.99) - Spell Casting is a line drawing puzzle game in which you are a young wizard learning spells in the comfort of your home thanks to Wizardly Distance Education offered by the prestigious Magical Education Of Wizards School!

Switch eShop - Demos Dragon Quest Builders 2 Demo(Nintendo, Free) - Dragon Quest Builders 2 is headed to Nintendo Switch. Combining both RPG and crafting gameplay together, this game is all about gathering materials to create things like weapons, buildings, and even entire towns! With the help of the mysterious Malroth and other villagers, you’ll be exploring large islands, finding quests, and battling monsters and bosses scattered around the world. Are you prepared to take on the Children of Hargon?

Grass Cutter - Mutated Lawns (Sometimes You, Free) - The goal is to cut the grass. Very simple, but only at first glance… Grass Cutter calls for focus and commitment. Just one blink of an eye – and you lost. It is very challenging! The game is made in a cubic retro-style, has high complexity at advanced levels and is ready to truly test your reaction!

GOD EATER 3 Demo (BANDAI NAMCO Entertainment, Free) - The latest numbered entry in the popular God Eater franchise has finally come to the Nintendo Switch! Now you can experience the game's intriguing story, distinct characters, and stylish, high-speed combat whenever you're on the go, both alone and with friends!

Desktop BaseBall Trial Edition (SAT-BOX, Free) - Watch as your desk transforms into a baseball stadium! Come for the simple controls, stay for the deep strategy. Customize your team down to the uniforms, bats, and pitches and then aim for the big leagues!

Strikey Sisters Demo (DYA GAMES, Free) - Say hello to a fantasy-themed arcade action brick breaker! Featuring cute characters, silly humour, powerful magic, crazy boss battles, and even a local 2 player co-op mode!

For the US Download, click right here!

#nintendo #nintendo download #nintendo switch #nintendo eshop

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ganzeer · 6 years

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NEW MYTHOLOGIES FOR MODERN HUMANS

Generally speaking, I hate flags. National flags in particular, because anything that serves to bring together a very particular group of people only serves to separate them from other peoples. Rifts become bigger and borders become stronger, and I really don't believe in borders.

One flag I have a bit of a soft spot for though is the flag of Lebanon. Where most flags attempt to represent notions that are all too abstract, and quite frankly fabricated, the flag of Lebanon depicts a very real facet of the country's geography. Colors aside, the central feature of the Lebanese flag is the Cedar Tree, an undisputed feature of this part of the world since time immemorial. Of course there are those who only see in the Lebanese flag the circumstances surrounding its creation, and times when it might have been raised by one particular sector of society and not the other, thus only seeing in it its relevance to some Lebanese and not others. Those people are clearly missing the bigger picture. The oldest surviving mention of Lebanese Cedar that we know of is in the Epic of Gilgamesh which dates back to roughly the 18th century B.C, which makes it the oldest surviving work of literature in human history. One of the central parts in the epic involves Gilgamesh's journey to the Cedar forest (which most historians agree must've been in Lebanon). This journey is undertaken with Gilgamesh's friend (or lover, depending on your reading of the tale) Enkidu for the sole purpose of glorifying their names. This glorification is to be achieved by doing two things: 1) Slaying Humbaba; protector of the forest and devote servant of Enlil, god of Earth, Wind, and Air. 2) Cutting down the tallest tree in the forest and using it to build a new gate for the Kingdom of Uruk.

More trees are chopped to build a colossal ship by which to carry the gate and Humbaba's head back to Uruk.

There are a couple things we learn from this story; that if you want to build something sturdy that will stand the test of time, and glorify your name long after you're dead, well then wood from the tallest tree in Lebanon's Cedar forest will likely do the trick. We also learn that Lebanese Cedar can be used to build really great boats. A testament to this is Khufu's "Solar Ark", buried at the foot of the Great Pyramid of Giza in around 2500 BC. The wood of this boat, which survived for over 4000 years under the Earth is comprised almost entirely of Lebanese Cedar.

Another thing the Epic of Gilgamesh tells us is to beware of destroying the environment in the name of "progress". As the king of Uruk, arguably the largest and most advanced city in existence circa 2900 BC, Gilgamesh represents not only progress but human civilization itself. Humbaba, as the guardian of the Cedar forest is a shorthand for nature itself. Before Humbaba is slain by Gilgamesh, he warns him that his murder will only bring a curse upon Gilgamesh. In other words, environmental destruction will only bring ruin upon civilization. And indeed that is sort of how the Epic goes: Gilgamesh's friend falls ill and eventually dies. Overtaken by grief, Gilgamesh tears off his royal garb, rips his own eyes out, and wanders the Earth aimlessly void of glory or vision.

The more I think of it, the more it becomes evident to me that the first work of Science Fiction is in fact not Mary Shelley's FRANKENSTEIN, but rather THE EPIC OF GILGAMESH. When it comes down to it, there are really two things that make a work of fiction Science Fiction: 1) Extrapolation of a future technology from a contemporary technology. 2) Its commentary on the human condition, in particular human progress, ideally serving (as Warren Ellis once put it) as a kind of early-warning station for the Future.

Both these points fit the EPIC OF GILGAMESH like a T. We forget that boat-building was a formidable scientific feat of the civilizations of old. And the boat described in the Epic of Gilgamesh is exceptionally large. We don't think much of it now, not in the age of battleships, aircraft carriers, and cruise-ships capable of accommodating 5000 passengers, but at the time of its writing, such a boat would not be feasible to build, and the act of imagining it couldn't be described as anything other than a Sci-Fi practice.

Think about it; if you live in an age where city-obliterating warheads are commonplace, and you want to deliver some kind of commentary on it in the form of Science Fiction, well then you come up with something capable of obliterating entire planets: a Death Star (that's right folks, STAR WARS has always been a critique of U.S. imperialism). Passenger planes are commonplace? Well then how about space vessels the size of entire cities (BATTLESTAR GALACTICA). Fishing boats are what's common? Then imagine a big enough boat to carry a gateway for the largest city on Earth. Oh, and also, to transport the decapitated head of a giant as well.

Of course, the fact that the epic warns us of our demise as a civilization in the event of our encroachment upon nature in the name of civilization is still a warning we can all very much relate to today, and something only the very best works of science fiction ever manage to tackle.

The EPIC OF GILGAMESH is a phenomenal accomplishment, and within it is not only the DNA for Science Fiction, but all fiction. And as humanity's oldest surviving work of literature, it is kind of astounding that it is not deemed essential reading to everyone capable of reading (if you're reading it in English, I recommend the 2003 translation by Andrew George).

The same Lebanese Cedar which made up Gilgamesh's boat of the future, the same which made up Khufu's Solar Ark in Egypt, may have also been used to construct the boat embarked by King Psamtik during his quest for the owner of a single slipper sometime between 664-610 BC. Fragments of this story first appeared in Herodotus' THE HISTORIES around 440 BC, and then later in the writing of Greek historian Strabo when he journeyed up the Nile in 25 BC, and then even later in Aelian's VARIOUS HISTORIES between 175-235 AD. Increasingly mythologized with each retelling, the story goes that the slipper fit no foot in the entire kingdom other than that of Rhodopis, a Greek slave girl in the Egyptian city of Naucratis, upon which the great Pharoah decided to take her as a wife.

Aside from being an incredibly early version of what has been popularized as the CINDERELLA story, the importance of this tale lies in that it may very well be one of the earliest anti-xenophobic stories in history. Incestuous practices were all too common in Ancient Egypt, especially among royalty, the reasons of which were not just practicality but also a severe sense of disdain held against other "races". What Psamtik's story served to do was to redefine Ancient Egyptian identity to encompass other "ethnicities", and indeed we find actual historical indications of such a shift taking place. During Psamtik's reign, Greek immigrants were in fact encouraged to live and work in Egypt, as well as serve in the Egyptian military, 300 years prior to the arrival of Alexander the Great.

Of course it is well known that Alexander’s “campaign” in Egypt was only really successful because he was welcomed in Egypt. One can't help but wonder if Alexander's arrival would've been welcomed by Egyptians at all had it not been for Psamtik's efforts 300 years prior, and if those efforts would've been successful had it not been for the story of the slipper.

And if Alexander were not welcomed in Egypt, would he have gone on to conquer Babylon, Persia, and make it all the way to the Indus River? Playing the "what if" game is futile, but it isn't inconceivable that history as we know it could've turned out very differently had a certain story involving the slipper of a Greek slave girl never been told.

Stories matter, not because they entertain us, but because they shape us. And in shaping us, they go on to shape the world we live in.

So, if you've ever wondered why I've been making the transition from "fine art" (whatever the hell that is) to fiction, there's you're answer right there.

If you've ever wondered why I’ve been making the shift to Science Fiction in particular, well, Science Fiction as a genre for the mythology of the present and the future makes perfect sense in the age of technological lust we live in. Another reason, of course, is that a great deal of Sci-Fi output seems to be largely dominated by the propaganda of White America. It's kind of hard to disassociate science fiction from the image of the white male protagonist who speaks American English and goes off to save the rest of the planet from an Alien invasion or Robotic dominance. How is it possible for any non-American, completely dis-included from these stories that involve the fate of the entire human race to not feel (at least subconsciously) somewhat inferior?

We are in desperate need of new mythologies. Mythologies that dismantle the idea of any one person’s superiority over any other. Mythologies that cross cultures and celebrate human diversity. Mythologies that re-calibrate our relationship with the environment, that do not promote notions of genocide (even if it’s the genocide of “aliens”), that explore modes of existence beyond abusive capitalism, that do not equate human happiness with fame and fortune, where the point of the story isn’t for the hero to get with the princess (or hottest girl in school). And above all, we need mythologies that aren’t a mere perpetuation of a greedy corporation’s “intellectual property”, existent for the sole purpose of generating income while offering “consumers” little more than a handful of laughs.

Storytellers are generators of culture. Let’s never forget that.

This is just one reason I decided to go off and do THE SOLAR GRID. But then again, I am in no way delusional enough to think that a single comicbook by me (no matter how fat) will have any cultural impact to speak of, but a small part of me would like to think that if within the fictional world of THE SOLAR GRID I manage to figure out how to get two miserable orphans on Earth to destroy a massively oppressive structure in outer space, a structure that is the result of generations upon generations of greed and imperialism, then maybe... just maybe... it might be possible to accomplish something similar right here in the real world.

Ganzeer Beirut, Lebanon December 2017

#text #ganzeer #work #talk #essay

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swipestream · 6 years

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New Release Roundup, 29 September 2018: Fantasy and Adventure

Steampunk airships, buried Egyptian ruins, fallen angels, and the Titanic feature in this week’s roundup of the newest releases in fantasy and adventure.

Assault Against the Heavens – Robert Wagner

Daon is a Bronze Man, a member of an elite force of lawkeepers who protect and carry out the will of The Celestial Lord. Even though he was sold into this life as a child, just like his fellow soldiers, his beliefs are much different than theirs. Daon hates The Celestial Lord and would like nothing more than to be free.

His hope is a small thing, since The Celestial Lord is a God, who came down from his throne in the heavens to rule the people of Eur directly.

When a stranger to the capital city arrives, Daon finds himself swept up into a conspiracy, along with his friends Naya and Gal, to depose The Celestial Lord.

Caught between the duty ingrained in him and his desire for freedom, his loyalty to his friends or the loyalty to his God, one thought dominates all the others.

Can Daon even fight against a God?

Avenging Ava (The Heroes of Razak #1) – C. J. Evans

“The bear stood on it’s hind legs, and it appeared to stand twelve feet tall. It’s roar paralyzed the forrest in terror and dread. Even the birds stopped singing out of fear.“

Nate and his family live just outside of the village on their farm. One day Nate’s younger sister, Ava, is gruesomely killed by a bear. Nate goes out and seeks to avenge the death of his sister, so he joins a hunting party to go out and kill the beast! Yet there is something about this bear that doesn’t sit right… there’s something different about it… almost some sort of dark magic… Nate is in for more than he bargained for…

This novelette was partially inspired by the same story that inspired J.R.R. Tolkein, Beowulf. This is the first story in a fantasy anthology, and it’s a fun introduction to the world of Razak!

The Eternal Chamber (Relics of Deathless Souls #1) – Tom Hunter

Archaeologist Samuel McCarthy is on the verge of a groundbreaking discovery. The treasure map had led him this far, but the ancient Egyptian defenses and advanced cloaking technology guarding the cave prove impossible for one man to penetrate. Unfortunately, the men who answer his call for help may be more dangerous than the powerful artifacts buried deep underground…

Antiquities Ministry staffer Shafira Khouri longs to trade her desk job for the dig site. But when an office overhaul turns deadly, she knows she’s her colleagues’ only hope of survival. After the ministry falls into enemy hands, she fears her first field assignment could be her last…

If Samuel and Shafira can’t stop a shadowy organization from grabbing hold of a terrifying relic, the entire world could become ancient history.

The Fight for Rislandia (The Adventures of Baron von Monocle #3) – Jon del Arroz

The Wyranth Empire is marching on Rislandia City. Zaira Von Monocle and her airship crew are all that stands between the invading army and the total destruction of her country.

After her expedition to the Zenwey continent, Zaira discovers the Wyranth have a new source of their giant’s blood soldier serum. The enemy has pressed the advantage and used the lack of an airship threat to gain ground. Meanwhile, the Rislandian Grand Army is running low on supplies and food. They can’t hold out forever.

Join Zaira and her crew as they try to take on the full might of the Wyranth Empire and deal with a deadly surprise the Iron Emperor has waiting for them in the conclusion to this epic steampunk trilogy!

First Level (Replay #1) – John Gunningham

Waking up in a strange place with no memory of who you are or how you got there is bad enough but when Lana finds out she’s stuck with Peter, who seems overly excited by the prospect of an adventure, she starts to get a bad feeling. To make matters worse, Lana finds out she’s dead, has no memory of the past, and all the talk of skills, leveling up and questing make her want to scream.

All Lana wants to do is find a way to get home, wherever that is, but Peter is more than content to stay and see what this strange world filled with merchant gnomes, minotaur bartenders and angry house toughs have to offer.

Could Peter have something to do with Lana’s current, infuriating state or is he just as lost as she is as they fight towards answers and their FIRST LEVEL!

It Ain’t Easy (The Valens Legacy #10) – Jan Stryvant

With his home now secure, Sean can take the time to start catching up on the million and one things he’s been meaning to do, but never quite seemed to have the time. However, life is really never that simple. Sean’s two armies, run by his friend Chad and his great uncle Maitland are coming across a few things hinting that the Vestibulum aren’t ready to give up the fight quite yet.

The government and its minions are still not quite sure what to make of Sean or the lions he claims to represent. Divisions exist at the highest levels, and when the president decides to open a line of communications, those who are opposed to the idea are quick to act. The problem however is that while politics may make for strange bedfellows, when dealing with forces that aren’t quite human, discretion is highly advised before jumping into bed.

Masters of Deception – J. C. Kang

Hunting a traitor to the clan that raised her, half-elf spy Jie just wants to complete her mission and return home. Instead, she finds herself trapped in a foreign port, where warring crime factions vie for control of the city’s pyramid.

Cassius Larusso, a local diviner and conman, knows why: atop the pyramid sparkles a Dragonstone, preventing the Orc Gods from returning to the world. His family’s thousand-year mandate to protect the ancient artifact is almost as important to him as filling his coffers with gold, his stomach with delicious food, and his bed with a different type of delicacy.

Joined by Sameer, a paladin pursuing his forbidden love, and Brehane, a sorceress seeking her lost teacher, Jie must choose the right side in a game of shifting alliances and deception. Cassius will lie, cheat, and steal to get her to pick his.

A wrong choice doesn’t just mean that Jie can’t go home; it could lead to the downfall of humanity.

The Night Crossing – Robert Masello

Bram Stoker kept secret a tale even more terrifying than Dracula.

It begins among the Carpathian peaks, when an intrepid explorer discovers a mysterious golden box. She brings it back with her to the foggy streets of Victorian London, unaware of its dangerous power…or that an evil beyond imagining has already taken root in the city.

Stoker, a successful theater manager but frustrated writer, is drawn into a deadly web spun by the wealthy founders of a mission house for the poor. Far from a safe haven, the mission harbors a dark and terrifying secret.

To save the souls of thousands, Stoker—aided by the explorer and a match girl grieving the loss of her child—must pursue an enemy as ancient as the Saharan sands where it originated. Their journey will take them through the city’s overgrown graveyards and rat-infested tunnels and even onto the maiden voyage of the world’s first “unsinkable” ship…

Nostrum (The Scourge #2) – Roberto Calas

Sir Edward Dallingridge survived his journey through the anarchy that is now England, leaving in his wake the bodies of mad lords, foul invaders, friends, and the risen dead. There was nothing on earth that could keep him from the woman he loves.

Nothing but the horror that has already consumed her.

His journey is over, but his mission is far from complete. As a knight of the realm, he has defended England from every enemy it has. But how does one drive away a plague sent from hell? His only hope lies in the rumors of a cure–a treatment concocted by a strange man on an island fortress. Edward will do everything in his power to find this alchemist and to bring Elizabeth back from the walking terror she has become.

The Solitude of Sin (The Exinar #2) – Mikkell Khan

Twenty years have passed since the annihilation of the god ruler, Gudrunn. Yet, fractures and remnants of his domination still remain.

Princess Athena, the royal couple’s daughter, is a shining example of the benevolent rule that is loved by both the countryfolk and the rebels and is seen as one to bring peace to the Kingdom. One night in desperation, she is kidnapped by a power-hungry tyrant and discovers the universe is far stranger than she ever thought. One day she is living a fairytale life, the next she becomes a gateway between her kingdom and Alpha Sinteres – a metaphysical plane of existence and a source of unlimited magic.

Ruil, a young man with wizardly healing abilities, could not imagine he would transition from lowly stable-boy to member of the princess’ rescue mission in a single night. He had no idea that this coming of age quest would bring him to the likes of, witches, shapeshifters, telepathy, and machines with the power of gods. Nor was he prepared for the level to which human betrayal, pain, love, and survival would take a person.

This experience would change them both, this unbinding from the comfort which they both knew, this Solitude of Sin, to which they would never be the same again…

The Warrior’s Path (Tales of Gorania #1) – Karim Soliman

Discover the world of Gorania with Masolon, the warrior from the mysterious lands beyond the Great Desert, the outcast who refuses to be the warring monster his clan needs and instead he becomes a kinslayer, the sinner who forges his path of salvation in the broken empire of Gorania with the help of his most—and probably his only—trustworthy friends: his sword and his horse.

As he wanders the kingdoms sprawling over the sun-blazed south and the snow-frosted north, Masolon builds his army to enforce his own notion of justice. His war provokes the ruthless lords of the warring realms, and the merciless outlaws who infest every corner in Gorania—a war he might survive with his body, but not with his mind.

Now enemies and false friends close in from all sides. And Masolon, shrouded in his own cocoon of guilt, meets one fiery girl who could help him find peace for his restless heart. Or maybe peace is just a delusion, and his path to redemption is nothing but a lie.

Vessel of Venus (The Diary of an Ex-Angel #2) – Richard Cain

Mark is a down-and-out IT professional with a secret. When he discovers a sorcery app that gives him incredible powers, he sets out to win his ex-girlfriend’s love and start a new life – until Venusians show up, sharing the story of how their civilization was destroyed by global warming and giving Mark the chance to fight climate change. All he has to do is offers them a sacrifice once in a while.

Will he get the girl? Will everyone finally realize that he’s the most amazing person ever? And will that damn talking locust ever shut up and leave him alone?

You’ll find out in the dementedly hilarious Vessel of Venus.

“Read this to find out the real story behind: The clean up after the the deluge to eliminate evidence of the prior civilization, such as air conditioning and the Nephilim. Pixies. Haunted houses. Crop circles. Aliens.” – Reader Review

.44 Caliber Preacher (Ben Baxter’s Western Adventures #1) – Troy C. Wagstaff

Ben is honor bound and obligated to get revenge when everything turns against him, including getting charged for murder and other crimes he didn’t commit. A sheriff and posse go after him as well as every other lawman and bounty hunter in the west desert.

In spite of the numerous challenges and obstacles Ben presses on. His integrity is challenged when one of the lawmen after him is wounded and falls under Ben’s care. The sheriff wants to see Ben hang. Will Ben get the wounded sheriff the help he needs or let him die?

In spite of the hair raising adventure Ben is on, he comes across evil men determined to destroy a town. The town offers him the job of being their sheriff. What does Bens honor dictate? Will he take the job or keep looking for his pard’s killer?

Preacher Zachary Monroe, a preacher from San Francisco is running from his painful, haunted past. Suddenly the preacher and Ben cross paths. Do they join forces to help each other in their quest or do they go their separate ways?

New Release Roundup, 29 September 2018: Fantasy and Adventure published first on https://medium.com/@ReloadedPCGames

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how2to18 · 6 years

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EARLY IN Half Gods, the debut story collection by Sri Lankan-American author Akil Kumarasamy, Muthu, a Sri Lankan refugee-patriarch, narrates the melancholic reality of surviving the Sri Lankan Civil War. As an exile, he engages in games of “word memory,” compulsively absorbing text as a coping mechanism, but he complains that his grandchildren have no interest in “safekeeping words.” The children have a quick reply: “Sometimes we need to forget something to make room for new memories.” Half Gods asks its readers to do much the same with history, memory, and mythology. As the title suggests, the collection conjures various forms of incompleteness, whether in a search for identity, for a place that could be called home, or for bonds that endure as family. In each of the 10 stories, half of which have been published in venues like Harper’s Magazine, American Short Fiction, and Boston Review, home emerges as a distant and unwieldy concept that threatens to strand its characters in what Georg Lukács has dubbed the fundamental predicament of the novel form, that of “transcendental homelessness.”

The collection’s title also refers to the status of the Pandavas, who are the sons of Pandu, the king of Hastinapur in the Hindu epic Mahabharata — one of the most influential wellsprings of South Asian literary and popular narratives over the last four decades. From B. R. Chopra’s Indian television adaptation (1988) to Shashi Tharoor’s retelling of postcolonial Indian history in The Great Indian Novel (1989) to Ashok Banker’s ongoing Mahabharata book series (2011–present), a veritable cultural industry has found that the longest epic poem in the world makes for strong intellectual and cultural capital. Throughout these disparate projects, the Mahabharata has served as a crucial allegory of post-Independence as well as a spectacular event for the Indian popular imagination. Tharoor, in particular, doubled down on the epic’s allegorical resonance by mapping its narrative structure onto the founding of the nation in a tragicomic register that nonetheless gestures toward its monumental scale.

Kumarasamy takes a different approach to the epic tradition, embarking on a much quieter allusion to the Mahabharata to reflect on the magnitude of the Sri Lankan Civil War, which began in 1983 and lasted for 26 years. It was a conflict between the Sinhalese-controlled national army, the political party Eelam People’s Revolutionary Liberation Front (EPRLF), and the globally vilified separatist insurgent group Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE), ultimately ending with the Sri Lankan army declaring victory in 2009. While Sri Lankan authors have often invoked the other great Indian epic, the Ramayana, by restaging its Indian antagonist Ravana as a tragic hero, Kumarasamy’s turn to the Mahabharata gestures toward the unhomed, divided condition of diaspora. The collection’s imperative epigraph — “Man or god or demon, let him in!” — appears early in the Mahabharata, when Drona — a mentor to one of the most accomplished Pandavas, Arjuna — allows the enigmatic tragic hero Karna to enter a warrior demonstration. Karna, who happens to be Arjuna’s secret half-brother, surpasses Arjuna easily but will go on to join their losing cousins, the Kauravas, in the succession war for the Kuru dynasty. The Pandavas are exiled from Hastinapur after losing to their cousins in a game of dice, spending 12 years disguised as Brahmins in a forest and preparing for the eventual Kurukshetra War. The epigraphic utterance, a relatively minor moment of uncertainty, takes on a surprising resonance with the vulnerability of the refugee seeking sanctuary, thus suggesting a structural resonance between the Pandavas’ exile and that of Sri Lankan diaspora more broadly.

Half Gods unfolds in the form of a punctuated story cycle, wherein the narratives offer brief, nonlinear portraits of a Sri Lankan immigrant family in the United States and the other immigrant lives they encounter. Kumarasamy’s refugee tales bring into focus atrocities in South Asia that remain relatively underrepresented in literary fiction. Diasporic narratives of refugees and stateless persons have become a prominent feature of contemporary American and global fiction, and Kumarasamy joins established Sri Lankan authors like Shyam Selvadurai, Michael Ondaatje, Romesh Gunesekera, and Shehan Karunatilaka in her return to the Sri Lankan Civil War. Half Gods straddles postcolonial pasts and American futures, asking whether it is indeed possible for its melancholy subjects of diaspora to remake their homes in a new land. Kumarasamy unsettles the Sri Lankan-American concept of home, not by gesturing explicitly to the conceptual similarity between the Pandavas’ exile and the Sri Lankan refugees but by meditating on the impossibility of making the allegory stick.

Instead, Kumarasamy casts Arjun and Karna, respectively, as the dutiful, good son and the unconventional, errant brother. Meanwhile, their mother, Nalini, finds herself in an affair with her husband’s brother and thinks of “ancient stories where men were married to many wives, and sisters agreed to wed the same man. She could not imagine Draupadi without the five Pandava brothers, all her beloved husbands.” Her father, Muthu, who is also the boys’ school janitor, smokes himself down to a single functional lung while secretly memorizing any book he can lay his hands on, perhaps an allusive reference to Vyasa, the purported author of the Mahabharata. While the focus holds on the experience of diaspora, Kumarasamy renders slow-moving pictures of both Sri Lankan-American and Sri Lankan grief that unspool over the course of the collection, weaving between nonlinear timelines that continuously revise the family narrative.

Signaling the resonances between family, community, and nation, Kumarasamy experiments with the use of the first-person plural “we” in her story “New World,” which narrates the bewilderment and confusion of Ceylon’s independence from Britain. Narrated by a chorus of women working on a tea estate, the story captures both the political eagerness of new freedom and the stark realities of infrastructural lack:

Our children clung to us tighter, fearful in their smallness, and we told them not to be afraid, because we had nothing to lose in the first place. We own none of this, we reminded them patiently, and their wide eyes looked over the imploded houses, the silver glint of metal, and they pointed at their buried things, waiting to retrieve what was lost.

The strength of “New World” is that its lyrical realism, though overwrought, conveys the fragility of South Asian post-Independence. At key moments, Kumarasamy references India to distinguish the uncertain position that Ceylon (renamed Sri Lanka) occupies in the geopolitics of decolonization.

Another story, “The Birthplace of Sound,” uses the second-person perspective of “you” to place the reader inside the consciousness of an established character, Karna. Writers like Mohsin Hamid have used this technique to renovate the bildungsroman or redeploy the self-help genre as fiction. Kumarasamy contextualizes Karna’s marginality within the family by aligning his growth with that of other marginalized diasporic figures. The story begins with an interpellation that arrests the reader with an expansive immigrant cast:

You are a convenience store owner, a taxi driver, a doctor, a terrorist, an IT worker, an exchange student. An Egyptian, a Pakistani, a Trinidadian, an Indian. You wear your skin like it’s something borrowed, not owned. Like all those hand-me-downs that belonged to your brother your mother saved, so you were always five years behind the latest trends. Who you are right now is temporary, you tell yourself when you break out with acne and miss an audition.

The multitudes of Karna, a struggling actor, also imply the polarities of immigrant work within an American narrative of race, such as the upwardly mobile lawyer Arjun or his working-class refugee grandfather. Half Gods is interested in the latter: there are times when the author seems to be trying to create images reminiscent of the stark refugee fictions of Viet Thanh Nguyen — broken communities that gather in decrepit housing complexes or failing restaurants. However, the sheer number of perspectival shifts — first-person plural, direct address, second-person address, and more — prevents a proper sense of character development. Surprisingly, for example, the collection gives relatively little space to Nalini, whose untroubled infidelity makes her one of the more intriguing family members.

The collection also portrays the difficulty of Sri Lankans, who do not manage to make their way to the United States, Britain, or another reluctant sanctuary. One story, “The Office of Missing Persons,” stands out as a grim representation of the Sri Lanka’s government’s genocidal practices toward the Tamil people and the LTTE. It presents a Kafkaesque tale of a university professor, an entomologist, who mounts a nonviolent demonstration to protest the disappearance of Tamil people after his son vanishes without a trace. Deviating from the lyricism of the rest of the collection, Kumarasamy prefers an approach that walks the thin line between reportage and satire. The story also seems to pause its allusive structure to speak directly about state-sponsored violence:

War had seeped into the meaning of everything. Forty-seven students and one insect ex-professor sitting cross-legged and calling for the return of the disappeared were terrorists in training according to the reports from the central government. That week the United Nations Working Group on Enforced or Involuntary Disappearances also released a report ranking Sri Lanka as the country with the second highest number of disappearances.

In later stories like “Lifetimes in Flight,” the portraits differ in their exploration of both Sri Lankan-American family values and the experiences of other global South immigrants. While Kumarasamy gestures toward a resonance between the Sri Lankan diaspora and other immigrants (like Marlon, the eponymous character from Angola in “The Butcher”), the collection loses its conceptual clarity by deliberately blending the Sri Lankan family into the generalized frame of global immigration. After inhabiting the inner workings of all four family members, “The Butcher” is too self-consciously staged from the perspective of an outsider and ends up rehearsing familiar conventions of immigrant displacement. “Lifetimes in Flight” reveals the crisscrossing immigrant history of Selvakumar from the second story “New World,” but its transatlantic shift to Essex seems too removed from the story cycle to have a significant payoff. In this sense, the collection does not add anything especially new or startling about the particularity of Sri Lankan refugees.

The collection remains in the shadow of established protocols of postcolonial and diasporic representations. The opening story “Last Prayer” pauses briefly with the charged symbolism of the National Geographic to reverse the magazine’s carefully Orientalized images of the East to its Western audience. Instead of deliberating on its images, Arjun dreams of natural disasters stripping various parts of the United States. The fascination with the magazine appears in small but crucial ways, recalling a similar conceit in Kiran Desai’s 2006 Booker Prize–winning novel, The Inheritance of Loss. In “New World,” possibly the collection’s most well-wrought story, Kumarasamy reaches for an overused conceit that recalls another Booker Prize–winning novel, Arundhati Roy’s 1997 The God of Small Things. “Whatever was left of our girlhood survived in small things,” writes Kumarasamy:

[T]he stones our daughters carried in their pockets, and the shriek of a koel bird we had dreamed of eating for its voice. For the new world, we must all transform, shed our skin and rename everything. The flowers were stripped, the trees slanted with torn limbs, and we needed to make sense of it while the water shriveled us into old women and plowed through the land to bring new life.

Much like the perspectival shifts, its lyrical realism retreads a predictable style of narration that privileges preciousness in its presentation of melancholic truth, a style that certainly worked for Roy but one that she has abandoned with alacrity in her more recent novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (2017). Neither does the prose have the same restraint or aesthetic conviction that Michael Ondaatje conjures in Anil’s Ghost (2000), perhaps one of the most prominent novels about the Sri Lankan Civil War.

In Half Gods, the Mahabharata’s allegorical distance from Kumarasamy’s realism, though intriguing at first, falls short of providing a clear generic or scalar purpose; it is never quite clear why Kumarasamy chooses to treat the epic obliquely through realism. How might the Mahabharata provide an ironic sense of scale of the civil war for Sri Lankan diasporic communities, for example? The family’s story cycle is frustratingly cryptic on the precise mechanics of the epic throughout the collection, pointing to a larger problem with the use of mythology in contemporary Anglophone literature. If, indeed, the Mahabharata is being invoked as an abstract, affective mythology, one that relies on a constitutive forgetting, then it seems that Kumarasamy relies on a conceptual slipperiness to invoke the family as a fluid rendition of the epic. In other words, the family members move through a variety of mythic roles — scribes, warriors, gods, men — in what often reads as an arbitrary assignment. It is certainly compelling to reimagine the Kurukshetra War as the battle between the Tamil and Sinhalese ethnic populations, but this too provides an unsatisfactory mapping: how might we account for Tamil lives — civilian, activist, or rebel — who have either perished or endured the war within the island nation in such an allegory?

Indeed, a return to magical realism as allegory, like Salman Rushdie’s much-debated reinterpretation of Islam’s origins in The Satanic Verses (1988) or Vikram Chandra’s satirical use of the Mahabharata in Red Earth and Pouring Rain (1995), will hardly sidestep the problem of inventiveness. But the collection highlights a tendency with contemporary Global South/diasporic writing to reach for epic traditions rooted in vernacular languages to renovate the diasporic as well as Anglophone realist narrative. What transpires in this instance is that the world is both saturated with mythic potential and curiously evacuated from its central conceit. In fact, what is most surprising is that Kumarasamy keeps her readers at a remove from the civil war, which features as a persistent but peripheral location, despite the war having ended as recently as 2009. While three stories, “Last Prayer,” “A Story of Happiness,” and “The Office of Missing Persons,” certainly describe the civilian population caught between the government and the LTTE, the author’s emphasis on Sri Lankan-American lives privileges the haunting of diaspora over contested realities on the island nation, which is perhaps only reasonable given the writer’s American nationality. This tactic also calls to mind Zadie Smith’s complaint about the cost of lyrical realism, that of an “authenticity fetish” that comes “embroidered in the fancy of times past.” The fault is not so much that of Kumarasamy’s as that of a global writing and publishing industry that orients itself toward an inevitable Westward horizon, even when it attempts to account for difference, in the process relegating the non-bourgeois non-Western subject as mere background for its target audience.

Notwithstanding its allusive opacity and predictable prose, Kumarasamy’s debut moves in the right direction, provoking serious questions about the writing of human rights and the ways in which literature bears the burden of representing unsolvable political problems. Writing about the innately interpretative nature of mythology, Indian poet A. K. Ramanujan defiantly opined that “no text is original, yet no telling is a mere retelling — and the story has no closure, although it may be enclosed in a text. In India and in Southeast Asia, no one ever reads the Ramayana or the Mahabharata for the first time.” Kumarasamy adds Sri Lanka to this literary map by rescaling the grand narrative of the Mahabharata into a captivating story cycle.

Kalyan Nadiminti writes about 20th- and 21st-century Asian-American and global Anglophone literatures, law and immigration studies, and affect theory.

The post Melancholic Mythologies: “Half Gods” and the “Mahabharata” appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

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