No Longer Human
last updated: 2024-09-01 02:14:25.561755
Plagued by a maddening anxiety, the terrible disconnect between his own concept of happiness and the joy of the rest of the world, Yozo Oba plays the clown in his dissolute life, holding up a mask for those around him as he spirals ever downward, locked arm-in-arm with death. Osamu Dazai’s immortal—and supposedly autobiographical—work of Japanese literature, is perfectly adapted here into a manga by Junji Ito. The imagery wrenches open the text of the novel one line at a time to sublimate Yozo’s mental landscape into something even more delicate and grotesque. This is the ultimate in art by Ito, proof that nothing can surpass the terror of the human psyche.
Cursed Bunny
last updated: 2024-09-01 02:14:19.256013
Cursed Bunny is unique and imaginative, blending horror, sci-fi, fairy tales, and speculative fiction into stories that defy categorization. By turns thought-provoking and stomach-turning, here monsters take the shapes of furry woodland creatures and danger lurks in unexpected corners of everyday apartment buildings. But in this unforgettable collection, translated by the acclaimed Anton Hur, Chung's absurd, haunting universe could be our own.
The Empathy Exams
last updated: 2024-09-01 02:13:59.380152
A collection of essays explores empathy, using topics ranging from street violence and incarceration to reality television and literary sentimentality to ask questions about people's understanding of and relationships with others. https://search.worldcat.org/en/title/846545823
The Mushroom at the End of the World
last updated: 2024-09-01 02:13:52.750092
Matsutake is the most valuable mushroom in the world-and a weed that grows in human-disturbed forests across the northern hemisphere. Through its ability to nurture trees, matsutake helps forests to grow in daunting places. It is also an edible delicacy in Japan, where it sometimes commands astronomical prices. In all its contradictions, matsutake offers insights into areas far beyond just mushrooms and addresses a crucial question: what manages to live in the ruins we have made? A tale of diversity within our damaged landscapes, The Mushroom at the End of the World follows one of the strangest commodity chains of our times to explore the unexpected corners of capitalism. Here, we witness the varied and peculiar worlds of matsutake commerce: the worlds of Japanese gourmets, capitalist traders, Hmong jungle fighters, industrial forests, Yi Chinese goat herders, Finnish nature guides, and more. These companions also lead us into fungal ecologies and forest histories to better understand the promise of cohabitation in a time of massive human destruction. By investigating one of the world's most sought-after fungi, The Mushroom at the End of the World presents an original examination into the relation between capitalist destruction and collaborative survival within multispecies landscapes, the prerequisite for continuing life on earth. https://search.worldcat.org/en/title/923713782
Against Technoableism
last updated: 2024-09-01 02:13:46.252265
A manifesto exploding what we think we know about disability, and arguing that disabled people are the real experts when it comes to technology and disability. When bioethicist and professor Ashley Shew became a self-described "hard-of-hearing chemo-brained amputee with Crohn's disease and tinnitus," there was no returning to "normal." Suddenly well-meaning people called her an "inspiration" while grocery shopping, or viewed her as a needy recipient of technological wizardry. Most disabled people don't want what the abled assume they want--nor are they generally asked. Why do abled people frame disability as an individual problem that calls for technological solutions, rather than a social one? In a warm, feisty, opinionated voice and vibrant prose, Shew shows how we can create better narratives and more accessible futures by drawing from the insights of the cross-disability community. For the future is surely disabled--whether through changing climate, new diseases, or even through space travel. It's time we looked closely at how we all think about disability technologies and learn to envision disabilities not as liabilities, but as skill sets enabling all of us to navigate a challenging world. A manifesto exploding what we think we know about disability, and arguing that disabled people are the real experts when it comes to technology and disability. When bioethicist and professor Ashley Shew became a self-described "hard-of-hearing chemo-brained amputee with Crohn's disease and tinnitus," there was no returning to "normal." Suddenly well-meaning people called her an "inspiration" while grocery shopping, or viewed her as a needy recipient of technological wizardry. Most disabled people don't want what the abled assume they want--nor are they generally asked. Why do abled people frame disability as an individual problem that calls for technological solutions, rather than a social one? In a warm, feisty, opinionated voice and vibrant prose, Shew shows how we can create better narratives and more accessible futures by drawing from the insights of the cross-disability community. For the future is surely disabled--whether through changing climate, new diseases, or even through space travel. It's time we looked closely at how we all think about disability technologies and learn to envision disabilities not as liabilities, but as skill sets enabling all of us to navigate a challenging world. https://search.worldcat.org/en/title/1401761567
Syllabus
last updated: 2024-09-01 02:13:41.818084
Writing exercises and creativity advice from Lynda Barry's pioneering, life-changing workshop. https://search.worldcat.org/en/title/927138563
bp : beginnings
last updated: 2024-09-01 02:13:35.217085
Lumayo Ka Nga Sa Akin
last updated: 2024-09-01 02:13:27.197608
Mula sa kasumpa-sumpang kahirapan at kalunos-lunos na kaignorantehan sa mundong kanyang kinagisnan, namulat si Marie sa tunay na mukha ng matamis at mapapakasakit na pag-ibig. Ngunit makakayanan niya ba ang mga hamon ng bukas? Ano ang kanyang magiging kapalaran?
Noli Me Tángere
last updated: 2024-09-01 02:13:15.715205
Crisostomo Ibarra returns to the Philippines after studying in Europe for seven years. His father has died mysteriously and soon new obstacles appear to his marriage to childhood sweetheart Maria Clara... Noli Me Tangere reflects the society and incidents from the Philippines of Rizal's time, a country ruled by Spanish friars for over 300 years. As a result, many of the characters in the novel have now become woven into the culture. The publication of this book and its sequel El Filibusterismo, led to Asia's first nationalist revolution in 1896. However no writer paid a higher price for self-expression: the Spanish executed Rizal primarily for his writings. But for the same reason, Filipinos embraced him as their national hero.
State and Society in the Philippines
last updated: 2024-09-01 02:13:09.751705
People in the Philippines routinely vote, run for office, organize social movements, and call for good governance by the state. Why, then, is there a recurring state society dilemma in the Philippines? One horn of the dilemma is the persistent inability of the state to provide basic services, guarantee peace and order, and foster economic development. The other is Filipinos' equally enduring suspicion of a strong state. The idea of a strong republic evokes President Marcos's martial law regime of the 1970s and 1980s, which spawned two armed rebellions, cost thousands of lives in repression and billions of dollars in corruption, set the nation back years in economic development, and exacerbated suspicion of the state." "This dilemma stimulates thinking about the puzzle of state resilience. How has a "weak state" maintained the territorial integrity of the Philippines in the postwar period in the face of two major rebellions and an armed separatist movement, corruption, mismanagement, intractable poverty, weak sovereignty, and an often chaotic electoral system? Why does the inability to collect taxes, secure citizens' lives and property, and maintain economic infrastructure not result in state failure?" "State and Society in the Philippines engages the dilemma of state society relations through a historical treatment of state formation and the corresponding conflicts and collaborations between state leaders and social forces. It examines the long history of institutional state weakness in the Philippines and the efforts made to overcome the state's structural fragility and strengthen its bond with society. It answers these difficult questions by focusing on how the state has shaped and been shaped by its interaction with social forces, especially in the rituals of popular mobilization that have produced surprising and diverse results. https://search.worldcat.org/en/title/57452454
Darkness Visible
last updated: 2024-09-01 02:13:01.687076
The author chronicles his personal battles with severe depression, and offers help to others on how to overcome this disorder. https://search.worldcat.org/en/title/78895161
Solanin
last updated: 2024-09-01 02:12:55.712158
Meiko Inoue is a recent college grad working as an office lady in a job she hates. Her boyfriend Shigeo is permanently crashing at her apartment because his job as a freelance illustrator doesn't pay enough for rent. And her parents in the country keep sending her boxes of veggies that just rot in her fridge. Straddling the line between her years as a student and the rest of her life, Meiko struggles with the feeling that she's just not cut out to be a part of the real world. https://search.worldcat.org/en/title/209717008
Dead Dead Demons Dededede Destruction
last updated: 2024-09-01 02:12:50.332045
When you look up at the sky, what do you see? A blue sky? Freedom? A hopeful future? The people of Tokyo see none of these. Instead, an ominous alien mothership looms overhead, engulfing the city skyscape. Three years ago, they came. The arrival of the "Invaders" sparked the greatest war humanity had ever faced—one that threatened to end the world. The Japanese government scrambled to fight the Invaders. Weapons were mass-produced, sparking controversy and pacifist movements. That day, everything changed. And yet, nothing has changed. Kadode Koyama and Ouran Nakagawa live their final days like they always have: going to school, playing with friends, and doing what any carefree high school girl would do. As they grow up, they come to learn what it truly means to be an adult, in a world where adults seem to be demons who only deceive and destroy. They come to learn the real threat to humanity is not the Invaders, but humanity itself.
Goodbye, Things
last updated: 2024-09-01 02:12:34.612133
Fumio Sasaki is not an enlightened minimalism expert or organizing guru like Marie Kondo--he's just a regular guy who was stressed out and constantly comparing himself to others, until one day he decided to change his life by saying goodbye to everything he didn't absolutely need. The effects were remarkable: Sasaki gained true freedom, new focus, and a real sense of gratitude for everything around him. In Goodbye, Things Sasaki modestly shares his personal minimalist experience, offering specific tips on the minimizing process and revealing how the new minimalist movement can not only transform your space but truly enrich your life. The benefits of a minimalist life can be realized by anyone, and Sasaki's humble vision of true happiness will open your eyes to minimalism's potential. https://search.worldcat.org/en/title/951070792
Hiraeth: The End of the Journey
last updated: 2024-09-01 02:12:27.651050
Mika, a junior high student, is grieving the loss of her best friend and determined to reunite with her in death. However, her path collides with an unnamed god journeying to Yomi (the land of the dead) and their companion Hibino, an immortal man who is following the god in hopes of learning how to finally end his own life. Together, the three travel by motorbike to Shimane Prefecture, where the entrance to Yomi is said to be located.
The Columbia Anthology of Japanese Essays : Zuihitsu from the Tenth to the Twenty-First Century
last updated: 2024-09-01 02:12:11.790506
A court lady of the Heian era, an early modern philologist, a Meiji-period novelist, and a physicist at Tokyo University. What do they have in common, besides being Japanese? They all wrote zuihitsu, a uniquely Japanese literary genre encompassing features of the nonfiction or personal essay and miscellaneous musings. https://search.worldcat.org/en/title/891445967
Akira
last updated: 2024-08-18 04:25:31.261356
Welcome to Neo-Tokyo, built on the ashes of a Tokyo annihilated by a blast of unknown origin that triggered World War III. The lives of two streetwise teenage friends, Tetsuo and Kaneda, change forever when paranormal abilities begin to waken in Tetsuo, making him a target for a shadowy agency that will stop at nothing to prevent another catastrophe like the one that leveled Tokyo. At the core of the agency's motivation is a raw, all-consuming fear of an unthinkable, monstrous power known only as Akira. https://search.worldcat.org/en/title/459789310
Silk, Silver, Spices, Slaves
last updated: 2024-08-08 15:18:59.180247
A country’s history is like a jigsaw puzzle. The bigger picture of how a country and its people came to be can be pieced together through multiple narratives, perspectives, and stories. In Silk, Silver, Spices, Slaves, Lio Mangubat reaches back into the depths of colonial archives and brings to life long-lost stories that would otherwise have been footnotes in Philippine history. https://www.faction.press/product-page/silk-silver-spices-slaves-philippines-history
Why Are We ‘Artists'? 100 World Art Manifestos
last updated: 2024-07-04 19:20:14.465639
Art is not a luxury. Art is a basic social need to which everyone has a right'. This extraordinary collection of 100 artists' manifestos from across the globe over the last 100 years brings together activists, post-colonialists, surrealists, socialists, nihilists and a host of other voices. From the Negritude movement in Africa and Martinique to Brazil's Mud/Meat Sewer Manifesto, from Iraqi modernism to Australia's Cyberfeminist Manifesto, they are by turns personal, political, utopian, angry, sublime and revolutionary. Some have not been published in English before; some were written in climates of censorship and brutality; some contain visions of a future still on the horizon. What unites them is the belief that art can change the world. https://search.worldcat.org/en/title/999525134
Waking the Dead and Other Stories
last updated: 2024-06-29 19:54:16.597363
A shadow falls. A shape in the window. A sound at the door. The dead have risen. This book collects ten short stories of horror, tragedy and the things in between from the terrifying imagination of award-winning fictionist Yvette Tan. Are you ready to wake the dead?
Revolutionary Girl Utena
last updated: 2024-06-25 17:29:15.059417
Pretty Guardian Sailor Moon
last updated: 2024-06-25 17:27:51.272210
A Poetry Handbook
last updated: 2024-06-21 15:30:11.368900
It Chooses You
last updated: 2024-06-21 15:28:13.018455
Chainsaw Man
last updated: 2024-06-21 15:24:56.405475
Las Aventuras de Tintín
last updated: 2024-06-21 15:23:15.179004
Yotsuba &!
last updated: 2024-06-21 15:21:13.965871
Neon Genesis Evangelion: The Shinji Ikari Raising Project
last updated: 2024-06-21 15:18:21.791170
Neon Genesis Evangelion: Academic Record of Heaven's Descent
last updated: 2024-06-21 15:17:23.839537
Networks Without A Cause
last updated: 2024-06-21 15:14:01.423669
Women in Clothes
last updated: 2024-06-21 15:12:48.979874
Radical Technologies
last updated: 2024-06-21 15:11:44.499297
Meander, Spiral, Explode
last updated: 2024-06-21 15:10:58.251742
Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto
last updated: 2024-06-21 15:10:16.678875
Defending a Place in the City: Localities and the Struggle for Urban Land in Metro Manila
last updated: 2024-06-21 15:09:20.033631
The Quartet of the Tiger Moon
last updated: 2024-06-21 15:07:24.643332
The Philippines Is Not A Small Country
last updated: 2024-06-21 15:04:36.898380
Non-Places
last updated: 2024-06-21 15:02:33.663808
The Right To Maim
last updated: 2024-06-21 14:59:51.103976
Brown Skin, White Minds
last updated: 2024-06-18 09:46:25.604105
The Patchwork City
last updated: 2024-06-18 09:45:23.572318
The Conjugal Dictatorship of Ferdinand and Imelda Marcos
last updated: 2024-06-18 09:44:22.707635
Under Bright Lights: Gay Manila and the Global Scene
last updated: 2024-06-18 09:43:22.328417
Beauty Regimes
last updated: 2024-06-18 09:26:02.561372
The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories
last updated: 2024-06-14 16:38:03.912507
This mesmerizing collection features all of Ken’s award-winning and award-finalist stories, including: “The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary” (Finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and Theodore Sturgeon Awards), “Mono No Aware” (Hugo Award winner), “The Waves” (Nebula Award finalist), “The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species” (Nebula and Sturgeon award finalists), “All the Flavors” (Nebula award finalist), “The Litigation Master and the Monkey King” (Nebula Award finalist), and the most awarded story in the genre’s history, “The Paper Menagerie” (The only story to win the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards).
Aliasing
last updated: 2024-06-14 16:35:41.962005
An alias is an assumed identity. In Aliasing the narration of fiction shifts like the weave of a binakul blanket, and the reader is confronted by a procession of simulacra that might be misunderstood as an alternative history of the Philippines. There are no falsehoods here since representation precedes and determines the real. The northern whirlpool weave that provides the novel with its title has been used to confuse evil spirits and protect its wearer while asleep. Almost traditional stories are woven into a post-history covering everyone from Macabebe Marie (the Mata Hari of Manila) to the Catholic mystic Emma de Guzman (known to followers as the Mother of Love, Peace and Joy). Reflecting the hybrid nature of our contemporary world, Aliasing reconfigures our understanding of who we are as a twice-told tall tale from the South… https://search.worldcat.org/en/title/1028606046
Touching from a Distance: Ian Curtis and Joy Division
last updated: 2024-06-14 16:34:58.582125
Revered by his peers and idolised by his fans, Ian Curtis left behind a legacy rich in artistic genius. But although mesmerising on stage, in his private life he was introverted and had desperate mood swings. Here, his widow pieces together why — despite his impending international fame and young family— Curtis took his own life on 18 May 1980. https://search.worldcat.org/en/title/732332048
Hit Parade of Tears
last updated: 2024-06-14 16:34:00.209643
Izumi Suzuki had ideas about doing things differently, ideas that paid little attention to the laws of physics, or the laws of the land. In this new collection, her skewed imagination distorts and enhances some of the classic concepts of science fiction and fantasy. https://search.worldcat.org/en/title/1355838108
You Are Not A Rock
last updated: 2024-06-14 16:33:32.311045
A prescriptive and positive guide, illustrated with line drawings, making the case that mental well-being, like physical health, can be strengthened over time and with specific techniques. We all want to feel less anxiety, guilt, anger and sadness. We want to obsess less and be less lonely, free ourselves from our demons, compulsive habits, and stress. But as humans (unlike rocks) we experience all of these. And paradoxically, trying to avoid and control them only makes things worse. Having struggled with serious mental illness for many years himself, Mark Freeman has become a dedicated mental-health advocate and coach. He makes the case that instead of trying to feel less and avoid pain and stress, we need to build emotional fitness, especially our capacity for strength, balance and focus. With wit, compassion and depth of experience and anecdotes, he shows that we can recover from many mental disorders, from mild to very serious, at all ages and stages of life, and even if other methods have failed. Freeman's innovative approach makes use of a range of therapeutic techniques, mindfulness training, peer support, humor and common sense. https://search.worldcat.org/en/title/1022211501
How Do You Live?
last updated: 2024-06-14 11:43:35.939802
The streets of Tokyo swarm below fifteen-year-old Copper as he gazes out into the city of his childhood. Struck by the thought of the infinite people whose lives play out alongside his own, he begins to wonder, how do you live? Considering life's biggest questions for the first time after the death of his father, Copper turns to his dear uncle for heart-warming wisdom. As the old man guides the boy on a journey of philosophical discovery, a timeless tale unfolds, offering a poignant reflection on what it means to be human. But when Copper betrays one of his new friends, how will he ask for forgiveness — and how can he forgive himself? How Do You Live? is the inspiring, transformative story of a young man who, like his namesake Copernicus, looks to the stars and uses his discoveries to answer the question of what kind of person he will grow up to be. https://search.worldcat.org/en/title/1275433559
Notes On Self-Care For Creative Humans
last updated: 2024-06-07 08:12:48.913918
The Collected Stories of Jessica Zafra
last updated: 2024-05-29 21:25:08.747958
Sunny
last updated: 2024-11-26 15:28:56.673300
Comfort Woman: A Filipina's Story of Prostitution and Slavery under the Japanese Military
last updated: 2024-10-04 17:24:02.275173
Tokyo These Days
last updated: 2024-09-24 01:17:09.688473
After 30 years as a manga editor, Kazuo Shiozawa suddenly quits. Although he feels early retirement is the only way to atone for his failures as an editor, the manga world isn't done with him. On his final day as an editor, Shiozawa takes a train he's ridden hundreds of times to impart some last advice to a manga creator whose work he used to edit. Later, he is drawn to return to a bookshop at the request of a junior editor who wants his help dealing with an incorrigible manga creator who used to be edited by Shiozawa and now refuses to work with anyone else. For Shiozawa, Tokyo these days is full of memory and is cocooned in the inescapable bonds among manga creators, their editors, art, and life itself. https://search.worldcat.org/en/title/1384415137
The Narrow Road to the Interior
last updated: 2024-09-01 11:52:16.029098
A collection of over thirty poems by American poet Kimiko Hahn in which she explores her various identities. https://search.worldcat.org/en/title/68416904
What You Are Looking For Is in the Library
last updated: 2024-09-01 02:12:00.783992
The Drifting Classroom
last updated: 2024-08-03 22:48:03.504279
Out of nowhere, an entire school vanishes, leaving nothing but a hole in the ground. While parents mourn and authorities investigate, the students and teachers find themselves not dead but stranded in a terrifying wasteland where they must fight to survive. https://search.worldcat.org/title/1122865316
Cat-Eyed Boy
last updated: 2024-07-26 17:17:56.127777
Kazuo Umezz’s classic collection of horror stories featuring a strange cat-eyed boy, shunned by humans and demons alike.
Rules For A Knight
last updated: 2024-06-29 20:00:31.873597
It is 1483, and Sir Thomas Lemuel Hawke, a Cornish knight, is about to ride into battle. On the eve of his departure, he composes a letter to his four young children, consisting of twenty virtues that provide instruction on how to live a noble life, and on all the lessons, large and small, that he might have imparted to them himself were he not expecting to die on the battlefield. "Why am I alive? Where was I before I was born? What will happen to me when I die? Whatever well our lives are drawn from, it is deep, wild, mysterious, and unknowable ... "Rules for a Knight is many things: a code of ethics; an intimate record of a lifelong quest; a careful recounting of a knight's hardest won lessons, deepest aspirations, and most richly instructive failures; and an artifact, a relic of a father's exquisite love. Drawing on the ancient teachings of Eastern and Western philosophy and religion, on literature, and poetry, and on the great spiritual and political writings of our time, Ethan Hawke has written a parable that--in the story of a young man's journey toward a life of authenticity and meaning--captures the instinctive movement of the heart toward truth and beauty. https://search.worldcat.org/en/title/910622022
Some People Need Killing
last updated: 2024-06-29 20:00:21.686335
My job is to go to places where people die. I pack my bags, talk to the survivors, write my stories, then go home to wait for the next catastrophe. I don't wait very long.' Journalist Patricia Evangelista came of age in the aftermath of a street revolution that forged a new future for the Philippines. Three decades later, in the face of mounting inequality, the nation discovered the fragility of its democratic institutions under the regime of strongman Rodrigo Duterte. Some People Need Killing is Evangelista's meticulously reported and deeply human chronicle of the Philippines' drug war and Duterte's assault on the country's struggling democracy. For six years, Evangelista had the distinctive beat of chronicling the killings carried out by police and vigilantes in the name of Duterte's war on drugs - a war that has led to the slaughter of thousands - immersing herself in the world of killers and survivors and capturing the atmosphere of fear created when an elected president decides that some lives are worth less than others. https://search.worldcat.org/en/title/1375188300
The Book of Tokyo
last updated: 2024-06-29 20:00:17.151308
A shape-shifter arrives at Tokyo harbour in human form, set to embark on an unstoppable rampage through the city’s train network… A young woman is accompanied home one night by a reclusive student, and finds herself lured into a flat full of eerie Egyptian artefacts… A man suspects his young wife’s obsession with picnicking every weekend in the city’s parks hides a darker motive… At first, Tokyo appears in these stories as it does to many outsiders: a city of bewildering scale, awe-inspiring modernity, peculiar rules, unknowable secrets and, to some extent, danger. Characters observe their fellow citizens from afar, hesitant to stray from their daily routines to engage with them. But Tokyo being the city it is, random encounters inevitably take place – a naïve book collector, mistaken for a French speaker, is drawn into a world he never knew existed; a woman seeking psychiatric help finds herself in a taxi with an older man wanting to share his own peculiar revelations; a depressed divorcee accepts an unexpected lunch invitation to try Thai food for the very first time… The result in each story is a small but crucial change in perspective, a sampling of the unexpected yet simple pleasure of other people’s company. As one character puts it, ‘The world is full of delicious things, you know.’ https://search.worldcat.org/en/title/868083750
Waiting For the Enemy
last updated: 2024-06-14 16:26:43.583499
Personal account, by a Filipino reserve officer (University of the Philippines Reserve Officer Training Corps) assigned to the 88th Field Artillery (Philippine Scouts), just after the outbreak of the war. https://fhl.omeka.net/items/show/925
Mismatch
last updated: 2024-06-14 11:29:12.615053
Sometimes designed objects reject their users: a computer mouse that doesn't work for left-handed people, for example, or a touchscreen payment system that only works for people who read English phrases, have 20/20 vision, and use a credit card. Something as simple as color choices can render a product unusable for millions. These mismatches are the building blocks of exclusion. In Mismatch, Kat Holmes describes how design can lead to exclusion, and how design can also remedy exclusion. https://search.worldcat.org/en/title/1025413063
Y/N
last updated: 2024-06-14 11:26:10.256219
A novel about a Korean American woman living in Berlin whose obsession with a K-pop idol sends her to Seoul on a journey of literary self-destruction. https://search.worldcat.org/en/title/1317841467
Ping Pong
finished: 2024-11-26 15:28:47.802652
Makoto “Smile” Tsukimoto and his friend Yutaka “Peco” Hoshino have been playing table tennis since they were kids, but as they enter high school, they find that the game has changed. Seeing potential in them that they themselves don’t fully realize, the coach recruits them for the school team. Bringing out their best will mean challenging the top players from rival schools in the summer tournament, including an ace Chinese exchange student who almost made the Olympic team. With the pressure on, can Smile and Peco take the heat and make it into the finals?
Tekkonkinkreet: Black & White 30th Anniversary Edition
finished: 2024-11-26 15:28:39.037400
The streets of Treasure Town are said to belong to "The Cats." They know everything that goes on in the city, and no one can stir up trouble without going through them first. In reality, The Cats are a pair of orphan boys called Black and White, who aren’t afraid of anything or anyone. But their rule of the streets is challenged when the Yakuza come to town and start making changes. The wild Black and the carefree White have no one to rely on but themselves to get their Treasure Town back to the way it was. But their bond is tested as they quickly realize going back to how things were may no longer be an option.
Alice in Wonderland
finished: 2024-10-02 00:00:00
Journey with Alice down the rabbit hole into a world of wonder where oddities, logic and wordplay rule supreme. Encounter characters like the grinning Cheshire Cat who can vanish into thin air, the cryptic Mad Hatter who speaks in riddles and the harrowing Queen of Hearts obsessed with the phrase "Off with their heads!" This is a land where rules have no boundaries, eating mushrooms will make you grow or shrink, croquet is played with flamingos and hedgehogs, and exorbitant trials are held for the theft of tarts. Amidst these absurdities, Alice will have to find her own way home. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland began as a story told to three little girls in a rowboat, near Oxford. Ten year old Alice Liddell asked to have the story written down and two years later it was published with immediate success. Carroll's unique play on logic has undoubtedly led to its lasting appeal to adults, while remaining one of the most beloved children's tales of all time. Rating: ★★★☆☆
Shoplifter
finished: 2024-10-03 00:00:00
It's Lonely At the Centre of the Earth
finished: 2024-09-15 00:00:00
Cartoonist Zoe Thorogood records 6 months of her own life as it falls apart in a desperate attempt to put it back together again in the only way she knows how. IT'S LONELY AT THE CENTRE OF THE EARTH is an intimate and metanarrative look into the life of a selfish artist who must create for her own survival. https://search.worldcat.org/title/1306523951 Rating: ★★★★★
New Dark Age
finished: 2024-08-31 00:00:00
We live in times of increasing inscrutability. Our news feeds are filled with unverified, unverifiable speculation, much of it automatically generated by anonymous software. As a result, we no longer understand what is happening around us. Underlying all of these trends is a single idea: the belief that quantitative data can provide a coherent model of the world, and the efficacy of computable information to provide us with ways of acting within it. Yet the sheer volume of information available to us today reveals less than we hope. Rather it heralds a new Dark Age: a world of ever-increasing incomprehension. In his brilliant new work, leading artist and writer James Bridle offers us a warning against the future in which the contemporary promise of a new technologically assisted enlightenment may just deliver its opposite: an age of complex uncertainty, predictive algorithms, surveillance, the hollowing out of empathy. Surveying the history of art, technology and information systems he reveals the dark clouds that gather over discussions of the digital sublime. https://search.worldcat.org/en/title/1001444157 Rating: ★★★★★
A Magical Girl Retires
finished: 2024-08-24 00:00:00
A millennial turned magical girl must combat climate change and credit card debt in this delightful, witty, and wildly imaginative ode to magical girl manga. Twenty-nine, depressed, and drowning in credit card debt after losing her job during the pandemic, a millennial woman decides to end her troubles by jumping off Seoul's Mapo Bridge. But her suicide attempt is interrupted by a girl dressed all in white?her guardian angel. Ah Roa is a clairvoyant magical girl on a mission to find the greatest magical girl of all time. And our protagonist just may be that special someone. But the young woman's initial excitement turns to frustration when she learns being a magical girl in real life is much different than how it's portrayed in stories. It isn't just destiny?it's work. Magical girls go to job fairs, join trade unions, attend classes. And for this magical girl there are no special powers and no great perks, and despite being magical, she still battles with low self-esteem. Her magic wand . . . is a credit card?which she must use to defeat a terrifying threat that isn't a monster or an intergalactic war. It's global climate change. Because magical girls need to think about sustainability, too. Park Seolyeon reimagines classic fantasy tropes in a novel that explores real-world challenges that are both deeply personal and universal: the search for meaning and the desire to do good in a world that feels like it's ending. A fun, fast-paced, and enchanting narrative that sparkles thanks to award-nominated translator Anton Hur, A Magical Girl Retires reminds us that we are all magical girls?that fighting evil by moonlight and winning love by daylight can be anyone's game. https://search.worldcat.org/en/title/1433705579 Rating: ★★☆☆☆
Clover
finished: 2024-08-16 00:00:00
Kazuhiko is a young, but already deeply wounded black ops agent of a baroque, retro-tech future-- is pulled out of retirement to escort Sue, a mysterious waif, to a destination she alone knows. Sue and Kazuhiko have never met, yet she knows him, having grown up since the age of four with her only human contact being two distant voices: that of her elderly 'grandma'-- Kazuhiko's commander, General Ko, and of Kazuhiko's dead girlfriend, the beautiful singer Ora. Sue has been kept in that cage all these years because of what she is, and what the Clover Leaf Project found her to be: a military top secret, and the most dangerous person in the world! https://search.worldcat.org/en/title/221154968 Rating: ★★★☆☆
Extra Focus: The Quick Start Guide to Adult ADHD
finished: 2024-08-08 00:00:00
https://www.extrafocusbook.com/ Rating: ★★★★☆
Designing Your Life
finished: 2024-08-03 23:52:00.997498
Magilumiere Magical Girls Inc. 1
finished: 2024-07-21 00:00:00
There's never a dull day at the office when you're a magical girl! Are you looking for something new? Something challenging? Something very highly paid? Exterminating monsters is an exciting, fast-paced field that will get you out from behind a desk and into the action. With over 500 magical girl companies now in operation, you're sure to find a position--and a uniform--that fits. Start your career as a magical girl today! Kana Sakuragi is an excellent candidate for the job. Any job! She's motivated and organized, and has a fantastic memory. So why has she interviewed at over 15 companies without receiving a single offer? She's trying to keep a positive attitude, but it seems like her bad luck is only getting worse when a monster crashes her latest interview. As havoc ensues, she finds herself helping the magical girl who comes to their rescue and ends up with more than just her life in return. Meet the newest magical girl at Magilumiere Magical Girls Inc.! https://search.worldcat.org/en/title/1384412345 Rating: ★★★☆☆
Hello Tokyo
finished: 2024-07-24 21:33:24.857791
Presents a series of handicraft projects that create Japanese-inspired items, including notebooks, charm bracelets, party decorations, gift wrapping, napkins, planters, and collage magnets. https://search.worldcat.org/en/title/980949316 Rating: ★★★☆☆
The Little Prince
finished: 2024-07-22 00:00:00
An aviator whose plane is forced down in the Sahara Desert encounters a little prince from a small planet who relates his adventures in seeking the secret of what is important in life. https://search.worldcat.org/en/title/624419898 Rating: ★★★★★
A Fist Made and Then Un-Made
finished: 2024-07-23 03:15:47.377289
Pluto
finished: 2022-06-30 00:00:00
In a distant future where sentient humanoid robots pass for human, someone or something is out to destroy the seven great robots of the world. Europol's top detective Gesicht is assigned to investigate these mysterious robot serial murders-the only catch is that he himself is one of the seven targets. Rating: ★★★★★
The Velveteen Rabbit
finished: 2024-04-07 04:00:00
Chronicles the story of a stuffed rabbit's desire to become real through the love of his owner. Rating: ★★★★★
The Woman Next Door
finished: 2023-07-30 00:00:00
A collection of late-period Yoshiharu Tsuge stories, originally published 1981-1985. Rating: ★★★★★
Innocent Rouge
finished: 2024-07-01 04:00:00
The eve of the French revolution, 1772: The eldest brother of the Sanson family, Charles-Henri, has grown as an executioner, while his sister Marie-Joseph has been living freely in Versailles. But then Marie-Joseph's first love, a man named Alain, is killed by aristocrats. The histories of innocents plunges into the arc of the crimson revolution, Rouge. Rating: ★★★★★
Innocent
finished: 2024-06-30 00:00:00
In the 18th century, seeking "freedom and equality," the event that became the starting point of modern French society, the French Revolution, began. There was one more protagonist that lived within the darkness, Charles-Henri Sanson. He was the fourth generation family head of the Sanson family, and the executioner of Paris. This is the story of him nobly facing his harsh fate... Rating: ★★★★★
Billy Bat
finished: 2024-06-30 19:23:33.260459
Billy Bat is a comic-in-a-comic and the real protagonist is a Japanese-American artist named Kevin Yamagata who draws Billy Bat for “Marble Comics”. Shortly after they transition to the artist in his studio with his assistant, two actual detectives, who look like Laurel and Hardy in Dick Tracy era suits and trench coats, knock on the door and appropriate Kevin’s room for the purpose of conducting surveillance on a room in an adjacent building. One of the detectives, the skinny “Laurel”, sees Kevin’s work and it turns out he’s a Billy Bat fan. The other chubby “Hardy” detective picks up a page and says that the characters look familiar and accuses Kevin of translating an old “Jap” comic. As Hardy remembers the comic he thinks Kevin is ripping off, we make another Urasawaesque time jump to 1949 Tokyo. Rating: ★★★★★
The Poe Clan
finished: 2022-12-22 00:00:00
The Poe Clan: a race of "vampirnellas" who feed on the energy of the living, whiling away the centuries in a village of roses where time and geography have no meaning. A brother and sister, Edgar and Marybelle, are initiated into the clan too young and, unless a wooden stake or a silver bullet should lead to their demise, are doomed to live for eternity. https://search.worldcat.org/en/title/1138132818 Rating: ★★★★★
They Were Eleven
finished: 2022-12-29 00:00:00
Ten young space cadets are put onto a decommissioned spaceship as their final test. If they pass this test, their lifelong dreams of being valued people in their respective societies will come true. Their orders are to survive as long as they can with what they have. Once they arrive at the ship, they find that their crew has gained an eleventh member—and no one can remember the original lineup well enough to recognize which of them is the newcomer. As the days pass, the eleven cadets must deal with their suspicions of each other as well as the sudden knowledge that the spaceship is in a decaying orbit around a star, which is causing the temperature on the ship to rise. With this rise in temperature, a sickness begins to spread among the crew as they work to stabilize their orbit and determine who among them is the spy. Rating: ★★★★☆
Squire
finished: 2024-06-22 00:00:00
Aiza has always dreamt of becoming a Knight. It's the highest military honor in the once-great Bayt-Sajji Empire, and as a member of the subjugated Ornu people, Knighthood is her only path to full citizenship. Ravaged by famine and mounting tensions, Bayt-Sajji finds itself on the brink of war once again, so Aiza can finally enlist in the competitive Squire training program. It's not how she imagined it, though. Aiza must navigate new friendships, rivalries, and rigorous training under the unyielding General Hende, all while hiding her Ornu background. As the pressure mounts, Aiza realizes that the "greater good" that Bayt-Sajji's military promises might not include her, and that the recruits might be in greater danger than she ever imagined. In this breathtaking and timely story, Aiza will have to choose, once and for all: loyalty to her heart and heritage, or loyalty to the Empire. https://search.worldcat.org/en/title/1249797769 Rating: ★★★★★
Space Ship EE
finished: 2024-06-16 00:00:00
The first manga book by artist Aya Takano. She has taken the same creative approach as she does to her paintings, that is, to integrate the realm of extreme Sci-Fi imagination with the tiny gems she's found in her daily life. The narrative is inspired by the artist's own experiences where she struggled to come in terms with her daytime jobs, and those people who 'looked' against her. A Japanese girl called Noshi, or Takano herself portrayed as the protagonist, follows her desire to reach the stars in a stolen spacecraft until she gets lost and rescued by a traveling object called Spaceship EE. The ship carried thousands of war refugees from a colony planet traveling for 300 years in search of their home planet. She joined the passengers and was soon assigned to fight a real war instead of the battles in arcade games she used to be unbeatably good at on the earth. Rating: ★★★☆☆
20th Century Boys
finished: 2022-12-21 00:00:00
Humanity, having faced extinction at the end of the 20th century, would not have entered the new millennium if it weren't for them. In 1969, during their youth, they created a symbol. In 1997, as the coming disaster slowly starts to unfold, that symbol returns. This is the story of a gang of boys who try to save the world. https://search.worldcat.org/en/title/878466616 Rating: ★★★★★
There Is No Right Way to Meditate
finished: 2024-06-18 12:21:52.764633
Take a moment and breathe. With Yumi's uplifting guidance, you will dig deeper into your soul to discover the tranquility already surrounding you. In There Is No Right Way to Meditate, award-winning artist Yumi Sakugawa helps you tap into your inner self and finally find the peace that you've been seeking. https://search.worldcat.org/en/title/1381779024 Rating: ★★★★★
Tsubaki-chou Lonely Planet
finished: 2024-06-18 00:00:00
Fumi Oono, second-year high-school student. Stuck with the debts of her father, she needs a job—fast. While she did indeed manage to find one as a housekeeper for THE Akatsuki Kibikino, it leaves much to be desired. After all, the novelist has a mean glare and an even worse attitude...And on top of that, she has to live with him?! Rating: ★★★☆☆
Warrior of the Light
finished: 2024-06-18 00:00:00
A collection of philosophical stories and observations invites readers to live out dreams, embrace the uncertainty of life, and rise to a personal destiny. https://search.worldcat.org/en/title/55739331 Rating: ★★★★★
Rental Person Who Does Nothing
finished: 2024-06-16 00:00:00
Shoji Morimoto was constantly being told that he was a 'do-nothing' because he lacked initiative. Dispirited and unemployed, it occurred to him that if he was so good at doing nothing, perhaps he could turn it into a business. And with one tweet, he began his business of renting himself out to do nothing. Morimoto, aka Rental Person, provides a fascinating service to the lonely and socially anxious. Sitting with a client undergoing surgery, accompanying a newly-divorced client to her favorite restaurant, visiting the site of a client's suicide attempt are just a few of his thousands of true life adventures. He is dependable, non-judgmental and committed to remaining a stranger and the curious encounters he shares are revelatory about both Japanese society and human psychology. In Rental Person Who Does Nothing, Morimoto chronicles his extraordinary experiences in his unique line of work and reflects on how we consider relationships, jobs and family in our search for meaningful connection and purpose in life. https://search.worldcat.org/en/title/1402810620 Rating: ★★★☆☆
My Suicide
finished: 2022-12-26 00:00:00
Henri Roorda – a Swiss anarchist, math teacher, and columnist – shot himself in 1925, but left behind this essay, which examines his life and philosophy of “joyful pessimism.” In this baleful, little-known treatise, Henri Roorda presents debt and boredom in a world of capital as “his reasons for going,” and he dissects these motivations with such astuteness that his anatomy of himself and his perceived failures becomes spellbinding. My Suicide is both melancholy and humorous, political and deeply personal – a meditation on unfulfilled desires and the “uselessness of old age.” Rating: ★★★☆☆
The End of the Moment We Had
finished: 2024-06-14 00:00:00
On the eve of the Iraq War, a man and a woman meet in a nightclub in Tokyo. They go to a love hotel, and spend the next five days in a torrid affair. Written in a stream of consciousness, with the reader's perceptions shifting and melting into one another, what is remarkable in this story is not what happens, but the ability of the writer to enter the minds and memories of the protagonists. In the second story, a woman living in a damp flat obsesses on the filthy state of her dwelling. She remains in bed for the duration of the narrative, but the drama and tension of her inner life - spiralling further and further into her memories and anxieties… https://search.worldcat.org/en/title/1010696330 Rating: ★★★☆☆
The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On
finished: 2022-12-22 00:00:00
Many have called our time dystopian. But The World Keeps Ending, and the World Goes On reminds us that apocalypse has already come in myriad ways for marginalized peoples. With lyric and tonal dexterity, these poems spin backwards and forwards in time—from Korean comfort women during World War II, to the precipice of climate crisis, to children wandering a museum in the future. They explore narrative distances and queer linearity, investigating on microscopic scales before soaring towards the universal. Wrestling with the griefs and distances of this apocalyptic world, Choi also imagines what togetherness--between Black and Asian and other marginalized communities, between living organisms, between children of calamity and conquest—could look like. https://search.worldcat.org/en/title/1291876979 Rating: ★★★★☆
Floating, Brilliant, Gone
finished: 2022-12-22 00:00:00
Beginning in loss and ending in reflective elation, Floating, Brilliant, Gone explores life as a brief impossibility, "infinite / until it isn't." https://search.worldcat.org/en/title/1300869738 Rating: ★★★★★
PTSD Radio
finished: 2022-12-29 00:00:00
Carried into modern Japan from a forgotten past, the being known as Ogushi haunts and tortures humans of all kinds. Little is know about Ogushi's curse, except that it resides in an unexpected place: human hair. PTSD Radio takes something everyday and weaves it into a series of chilling, cryptic, twisted, repellant, and alluring manga stories that become more than what they first seem. https://search.worldcat.org/en/title/1294284967 Rating: ★★★★★
I Want to Die But I Want to Eat Tteokbokki
finished: 2022-12-29 00:00:00
Baek Sehee is a successful young social media director at a publishing house when she begins seeing a psychiatrist about her - what to call it? - depression? She feels persistently low, anxious, endlessly self-doubting, but also highly judgmental of others. She hides her feelings well at work and with friends; adept at performing the calmness, even ease, her lifestyle demands. The effort is exhausting, overwhelming, and keeps her from forming deep relationships. This can't be normal. But if she's so hopeless, why can she always summon a desire for her favourite street food, the hot, spicy rice cake, tteokbokki? Is this just what life is like? Recording her dialogues with her psychiatrist over a 12-week period, Baek begins to disentangle the feedback loops, knee-jerk reactions and harmful behaviours that keep her locked in a cycle of self-abuse. https://search.worldcat.org/en/title/1334494607 Rating: ★★★☆☆
Convenience Store Woman
finished: 2022-12-22 00:00:00
This is the story of Tokyo sales clerk Keiko Furukura. Keiko is an unusual person. She's someone who has never fit in - but when she takes a job at Smile Mart, she finally finds peace and purpose in her daily tasks. But there is also huge pressure on Keiko - to pursue a "real" career, to find a husband - and she feels forced to take desperate action in order to please the people around her. Is there room in this "normal" world for someone as strange as Keiko? https://search.worldcat.org/en/title/1055687262 Rating: ★★★☆☆
Soft Science
finished: 2022-12-22 00:00:00
Soft Science explores queer, Asian American femininity. A series of Turing Test-inspired poems grounds its exploration of questions not just of identity, but of consciousness — how to be tender and feeling and still survive a violent world filled with artificial intelligence and automation. We are dropped straight into the tangled intersections of technology, violence, erasure, agency, gender, and loneliness. https://search.worldcat.org/en/title/1048659059 Rating: ★★★★★
All the Lovers in the Night
finished: 2022-08-23 00:00:00
Fuyuko Irie is a freelance copy editor in her mid-thirties. Working and living alone in a city where it is not easy to form new relationships, she has little regular contact with anyone other than her editor, Hijiri, a woman of the same age but with a very different disposition. When Fuyoku stops one day on a Tokyo street and notices her reflection in a storefront window, what she sees is a drab, awkward, and spiritless woman who has lacked the strength to change her life and decides to do something about it. As the long overdue change occurs, however, painful episodes from Fuyuko's past surface and her behavior slips further and further beyond the pale. All the Lovers in the Night is acute and insightful, entertaining and engaging; it will make readers laugh, and it will make them cry, but it will also remind them, as only the best books do, that sometimes the pain is worth it. https://search.worldcat.org/en/title/1280045825 Rating: ★★★☆☆
The Woman in the Purple Skirt
finished: 2022-08-23 00:00:00
A bestselling, prizewinning novel of obsession and psychological intrigue about two enigmatic unmarried women, one of whom manipulates the other from afar, by one of Japan's most acclaimed young writers. https://search.worldcat.org/en/title/1202305919 Rating: ★★★☆☆
My Alcoholic Escape From Reality
finished: 2022-06-26 00:00:00
My Lesbian Experience With Loneliness
finished: 2022-06-26 00:00:00
The heart-rending autobiographical manga that's taken the internet by storm! My Lesbian Experience with Loneliness is an honest and heartfelt look at one young woman's exploration of her sexuality, mental well-being, and growing up in our modern age. Told using expressive artwork that invokes both laughter and tears, this moving and highly entertaining single volume depicts not only the artist's burgeoning sexuality, but many other personal aspects of her life that will resonate with readers. https://search.worldcat.org/en/title/963745449 Rating: ★★★★★
Almond
finished: 2022-06-26 00:00:00
Colorful
finished: 2022-03-27 00:00:00
The soul of the deceased narrator, cleansed of all its memories of its past life, is heading toward the darkness when it suddenly encounters an angel. 'Congratulations!' the angel exclaims. 'You're the winner of our lottery! You're being given a second chance!' The next thing it knows, the soul is back on earth, occupying the body of fifteen-year-old Makoto who is planning to poison himself. Makoto is friendless, and his family shows him little love. Unable to feel affection for the people around him, he spends his time drawing or playing cards with the angel. But when it comes to discussions of which high school he should go to, Makoto is surprised to realize that his family and his teachers genuinely care about him. He has words with the angel: 'I want to give back Makoto's family the real Makoto.' The angel agrees, but on one condition: the soul has to remember his original mistake. 'Look around you,' adds the angel. 'There are clues everywhere.' Eventually, the soul remembers: he killed someone. And the person he killed? Himself, which is to say, Makoto Kobayashi…" https://search.worldcat.org/en/title/1157753768 Rating: ★★★★★
Breasts and Eggs
finished: 2022-05-22 00:00:00
Breasts and Eggs paints a portrait of contemporary womanhood in Japan and recounts the intimate journeys of three women as they confront oppressive mores and their own uncertainties on the road to finding peace and futures they can truly call their own. It tells the story of three women: the thirty-year-old Natsu, her older sister, Makiko, and Makiko's daughter, Midoriko. Makiko has traveled to Tokyo in search of an affordable breast enhancement procedure. She is accompanied by Midoriko, who has recently grown silent, finding herself unable to voice the vague yet overwhelming pressures associated with growing up. Her silence proves a catalyst for each woman to confront her fears and frustrations. On another hot summer's day ten years later, Natsu, on a journey back to her native city, struggles with her own indeterminate identity as she confronts anxieties about growing old alone and childless. https://search.worldcat.org/en/title/1144895160 Rating: ★★★★★
Heaven
finished: 2023-12-29 00:00:00
A bold foray into new literary territory, Kawakami's novel is told in the voice of a 14-year-old student subjected to relentless torment for having a lazy eye. Instead of resisting, the boy chooses to suffer in complete resignation. The only person who understands what he is going through is a female classmate who suffers similar treatment at the hands of her tormentors. These raw and realistic portrayals of bullying are counterbalanced by textured exposition of the philosophical and religious debates concerning violence to which the weak are subjected. https://search.worldcat.org/en/title/1299444175 Rating: ★★★★★
I Think I Am In Friend-Love With You
finished: 2024-05-28 00:00:00
Through a confessional letter, comic book artist Yumi Sakugawa illustrates the deep, however platonic, nature of friend-love. https://search.worldcat.org/en/title/869298694 Rating: ★★★★★
Ms Ice Sandwich
finished: 2024-05-16 00:00:00
A young boy returns obsessively to a supermarket sandwich counter, entranced by the beauty of the woman who works there. Her aloof demeanour and electric blue eyelids make him feel the most intense joy he's ever known. He calls her Ms Ice Sandwich, and he wants nothing more than to spend his days watching her coolly slip sandwiches into bags. But life keeps getting in the way -- there's his beloved grandmother's illness, and a faltering friendship with his classmate Tutti, who she invites him into her private world. Wry, intimate and wonderfully skewed, Ms Ice Sandwich is a poignant depiction of the naivety and wisdom of youth, just as it is passing… https://search.worldcat.org/en/title/1202287820 Rating: ★★★★☆
Phantom Thief Jeanne
finished: 2024-06-13 00:00:00
High school student Maron Kusakabe has a secret: she's Phantom Thief Jeanne. She sneaks into private art collections to steal paintings in which demons reside. Jeanne's task is to seal the demons before they can devour human hearts. So far she's been able to evade the police on her midnight outings, but now another thief has come onto the scene—Phantom Thief Sinbad— and he's trying to take the paintings before she does! https://search.worldcat.org/en/title/871691459 Rating: ★★☆☆☆