The Decline of the Ottoman World: The Middle East in History, takes you inside the long, uneasy journey from imperial glory to crisis. I start with Suleiman the Magnificent — the sultan under whom Ottoman power felt unshakable — and trace what comes after: the slow, grinding process by which swagger gave way to unease and confidence slowly eroded into anxiety. This is not a tale of sudden collapse. It is a story of rulers trying, again and again, to hold an unruly empire t...

Atlantis is perfect. That is what makes it dangerous.Before dawn, a supply vessel races toward the Harbor District beneath the white beam of the Star Tower. For Lacian Viseran, a structural calibration apprentice born among harbor workers, the city has always been a machine of sacred precision: towers, bridges, rituals, records, and laws bound into one flawless order.Then a cold white light rises from beneath the sea.The ship drops. Steel fails. People are injured. And...

Ancient Greece: Europe in History, PART ONE, is the book I wrote to chase one question that kept bothering me: where did Europe really start to take shape? Not Europe as a modern idea, but Europe as a lived experience — a mosaic of places, practices, and habits people actually inhabited and remembered.The story opens before written records, threads through prehistory, and finally steps into documented history with Minoan Crete and the Mycenaeans of the Bronze Age. ...

A note from the depths of Atlantis carries two impossible lines: the right of witness may be suspended, and the Original Text lies in the Lowest Vault.For Lacian Viseran, structural calibration apprentice and unwilling keeper of forbidden evidence, the message turns investigation into trespass. Beneath the Royal Vault, beyond sealed records and erased laws, he finds proof that the city's most sacred institutions were never built to bless return from death. They were built to refuse ...

"Apocalypse Awakening" takes you on a heart-pounding journey into a post-apocalyptic world filled with mystery and terror. Sean, our protagonist, suffers from sudden hallucinations that warp his perception of reality. After a four-year self-imposed exile from the world, an invitation to a high school reunion prompts him to venture out of his safe haven.Upon arrival, Sean is horrified to find his classmates transformed into monstrous beings, with only Layla appearing untouched by th...

Atlantis has begun to count its own people as fuel.When Lacian Viseran follows a hidden coordinate into the city's sealed understructure, he finds the scar left by the first opening of the Second Gate: a wound beneath the memorials, beneath the Temple seals, beneath every official history Atlantis still dares to recite. The city's miracles are not failing by accident. They are waking.Lacian is a structural calibrator, trained to read stress, load, fracture, and collapse. But ...

In 2009 Slavoj Zizek brought together an acclaimed group of intellectuals to discuss the continued relevance of communism. Unexpectedly the conference attracted an audience of over 1,000 people.The discussion has continued across the world and this book gathers responses from the conference in Seoul. It includes the interventions of regular contributors Alain Badiou and Slavoj Zizek, as well as work from across Asia, notably from Chinese scholar Wang Hui, offering regional perspect...

What must China do to become truly democratic and equitable? This question animates most progressive debates about this potential superpower, and inChina's Twentieth Century the country's leading critic, Wang Hui, turns to the past for an answer. Beginning with the birth of modern politics in the 1911 revolution, Wang tracks the initial flourishing of political life, its blossoming in the radical sixties, and its decline in China's more recent liberalization, to arrive at the cros...

Challenging both the bureaucratic one-party regime and the Western neoliberal paradigm, China's leading critic shatters the myth of progress and reflects upon the inheritance of a revolutionary past. In this original and wide-ranging study, Wang Hui examines the roots of China's social and political problems, and traces the reforms and struggles that have led to the current state of mass depoliticization.Arguing that China's revolutionary history and its current liberalization are p...

The story of Cinderella is possibly the world's most popular folk tale. The earliest known version is from Greece around two thousand years ago, and over the next thousand years, it traveled to France, Italy and Germany, and eventually to the Walt Disney studio in America.But as the Cinderella story traveled from Greece to Western Europe, it was also carried eastward to Asia along the Silk Road and other ancient trade routes. The story of Ye Xian in this book is the oldest known As...

Folk tales are immensely popular in China. Passed down orally over the centuries from grandparents and parents to children, they serve as an unwritten handbook for living. Nearly all Chinese folk tales are about simple people who find themselves in difficult situations. These people are often helped (and occasionally hindered) by talking animals, as well as by powerful gods, wizards and other supernatural beings who actively interfere in events here on earth. And within every Chinese folk ...

Things begin to unravel for Sun Wukong as he sees the consequences of his outrageous actions. While trying to defend his troop of monkeys, he manages to offend the underwater Dragon King, the Dragon Kong's mother, all ten Kings of the Underworld, and the great Jade Emperor himself. Finally, goaded by a couple of troublemaking demons, he goes too far, calling himself the Great Sage Equal to Heaven and setting events in motion that cause him some serious trouble.This is the ...