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From invading hordes to enemy agents, a great fear haunts the West! The “yellow peril” is one of the oldest and most pervasive racist ideas in Western culture—dating back to the birth of European colonialism during the Enlightenment. Yet while Fu Manchu looks almost quaint today, the prejudices that gave him life persist in modern culture. Yellow Peril! is the first comprehensive repository of anti-Asian images and writing, and it surveys the extent of this iniquitous form of paranoia. Written by two dedicated scholars and replete with paintings, photographs, and images drawn from pulp novels, posters, comics, theatrical productions, movies, propagandistic and pseudo-scholarly literature, and a varied world of pop culture ephemera, this is both a unique and fascinating archive and a modern analysis of this crucial historical formation.

A book full of surprises and delights, On the Air with Dylan Thomas presents all of Thomas's BBC radio work (with the exception of "Under Milk Wood", which is available separately). Thomas served his broadcasting apprenticeship as a teenager with his friend Daniel Jones. They set up a "station" between the second and first floors of the Jones' home "Warmley," dubbing it the Warmley Broadcasting Company. Then, starting in 1943 and continuing to his death, Thomas often sat behind a BBC microphone, variously giving radio talks, introducing poetry selections, participating in round-table discussions, reading dramas, essays, and poems. His was a glorious voice and he had a special case and inventiveness on the air.

A beautiful gift for Christmas, this superb selection of writing, by celebrated Welsh poet Dylan Thomas, opens with his enchanting story A Child’s Christmas in Wales. This classic tale recalls magical days full of family, snowy countryside and the magic of Christmas, inspired by the author’s childhood in Wales. Thomas also revisits his youth in his series of stories Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog. Brilliantly evoking his life through boyhood and adolescence to emerge as a young man in a series of vivid, uncompromising stories peopled with finely drawn characters. Then come the poems, carefully chosen and featuring such greats as ‘And death shall have no dominion’, ‘Fern Hill’ and ‘Do not go gently into that good night’. Dylan Thomas was a twentieth-century bard, and was able to get to the root of people’s lives and to express human emotions with intense skill and originality. He is remembered for his love of words and a startling inventiveness which has yet to be beaten. A Child's Christmas in Wales & Other Stories and Poems is part of the Macmillan Collector’s Library; a series of stunning, pocket-sized classics bound in real cloth with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover.

The portrait of a very young Bob Dylan on the cover of 'The Times They Are a Changin' is probably one of the most recognizable and famous album covers of all time. Photographer Barry Feinstein took that photo, as well as many more of Dylan throughout his career. His images have been published throughout the world many times over, and have become synonymous with our perceptions of that place and time in rock and folk music history. Inspired by a series of photographs that Feinstein took in Hollywood during the 1950s and 60s, Bob Dylan wrote an extraordinary series of poems that have remained unpublished for decades. They are thought-provoking, witty and erudite observations of the world; through the lens of Feinstein's photographs, they speak volumes about the anonymous faces and places of Los Angeles, and offer wry commentary on images of stars and legends in the neighbourhood at the time. Photos of Frank Sinatra, Marlene Dietrich, Judy Garland float through the book, as do poignant images of starlets, casting couches, employment agencies and palm tree'd boulevards. Feinstein was there with a camera to capture some world-famous events, such as Marilyn Monroe's memorial service, and he photographed the forgettable moments, preserving them perfectly and timelessly. Bob Dylan's unsettling and distinctly unique perspective informs and enlivens every page, an irresistible interpretive voice narrating the visual images from photo to photo.

The original and classic The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas is available once again, now with a brilliant new preface by Paul Muldoon. The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas contains poems that Thomas personally decided best represented his work. A year before its publication Thomas died from swelling of the brain triggered by excessive drinking. (A piece of New Directions history: it was our founder James Laughlin who identified Thomas’ body at the morgue of St. Vincent’s Hospital.) Since its initial publication in 1953, this book has become the definitive edition of the poet’s work. Thomas wrote “Prologue” addressed to “my readers, the strangers” — an introduction in verse that was the last poem he would ever write. Also included are classics such as “And Death Shall Have No Dominion,” “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night,” and “Fern Hill” that have influenced generations of artists from Bob Dylan (who changed his last name from Zimmerman in honor of the poet), to John Lennon (The Beatles included Thomas’ portrait on the cover of Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band); this collection even appears in the film adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road when it is retrieved from the rubble of a bookshelf. And death shall have no dominion. Dead men naked they shall be one With the man in the wind and the west moon; When their bones are picked clean and their clean bones gone, They shall have stars at elbow and foot; Though they go mad they shall be sane, Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again, Though lovers be lost love shall not: And death shall have no dominion. (From “And Death Shall Have No Dominion”)

The most complete and current edition of Dylan Thomas' collected poetry in a beautiful gift edition celebrating the centenary of his birth The reputation of Dylan Thomas (1914-1953) as one of the greatest poets of the twentieth century has not waned in the fifty years since his death. A Welshman with a passion for the English language, Thomas’s singular poetic voice has been admired and imitated, but never matched. This exciting, newly edited annotated edition offers a more complete and representative collection of Dylan Thomas’s poetic works than any previous edition. Edited by leading Dylan Thomas scholar John Goodby from the University of Swansea, The Poems of Dylan Thomas contains all the poems that appeared in Collected Poems 1934-1952, edited by Dylan Thomas himself, as well as poems from the 1930-1934 notebooks and poems from letters, amatory verses, occasional poems, the verse film script for “Our Country,” and poems that appear in his “radio play for voices,” Under Milk Wood. Showing the broad range of Dylan Thomas’s oeuvre as never before, this new edition places Thomas in the twenty-first century, with an up-to-date introduction by Goodby whose notes and annotations take a pluralistic approach.

Bob Dylan is one of America's most influential and important cultural figures. W ith over 500 songs, 46 albums and an astonishing 110 million record sales to his name , Dylan, now in his early seventies , is turning increasingly to a nother mode of artistic expression ; one that has occupied him throughout his life, but for which he is much less well known . Although Dylan has sketched and drawn since childhood and painted since the late 1960 s , only relatively recently has he begun to exhibit his artworks . The twelve works collected in this beautifully produced volume represent his latest foray into portraiture : an exploration of British 'types'. In an illuminat ing essay, curator and art historian John Elderfield explains the story behind these works and Dylan's approach to his art. Previously, Elderfield has acknowledged that while it may be unsettling when an artist does not adhere to the thing for which we have come to admire him most, Dylan has often asked his audience to get over the discomfort of his changing: ' And don't speak too soon / For the wheel's still in spin ... ' For Elderfield, Dylan's paintings, like his songs, are 'product s of the same extraordinary, inventive imagination, the same mind and eye, by the same story - telling artist, for whom showing and telling - the temporal and the spatial, the verbal and the visual - are not easily separated.'