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An English language ‘tourist guide’ to life in the ‘caliphate’.

The online book reads like a travel brochure, focussing on life “under the just shade of Islamic law in the Caliphate”. Al Britani describes the street food available and speculates that “in the near future we will be eating curries and chow meins on the streets of Raqqah and Mosul,” in reference to the worldwide recruitment that has been undertaken by Islamic State (IS).

He describes the weather as “Mediterranean”, and writes approvingly of the “bright fluffy snow” in the winters. Although the guide doesn’t contain instructions on terrorism, or how to join IS, it meanders around topics such as global domination while explaining the transport system.

The publication is peppered with British colloquialisms, with al-Britani claiming that IS is “dead serious about state building.” In a chapter regarding technology, the creation of anti-aircraft weaponry is raised, acknowledging that such a thing would be a “game changer”. The “real movers and shakers” are on the battlefield.

It concludes with the threat, “When we descend on the streets of London, Paris and Washington the taste will be far bitterer [sic], because not only will we spill your blood, but we will also demolish your statues, erase your history and most painfully, convert your children who will then go on to champion our name and curse their forefathers.”

An English language ‘tourist guide’ to life in the ‘caliphate’.

The online book reads like a travel brochure, focussing on life “under the just shade of Islamic law in the Caliphate”. Al Britani describes the street food available and speculates that “in the near future we will be eating curries and chow meins on the streets of Raqqah and Mosul,” in reference to the worldwide recruitment that has been undertaken by Islamic State (IS).

He describes the weather as “Mediterranean”, and writes approvingly of the “bright fluffy snow” in the winters. Although the guide doesn’t contain instructions on terrorism, or how to join IS, it meanders around topics such as global domination while explaining the transport system.

The publication is peppered with British colloquialisms, with al-Britani claiming that IS is “dead serious about state building.” In a chapter regarding technology, the creation of anti-aircraft weaponry is raised, acknowledging that such a thing would be a “game changer”. The “real movers and shakers” are on the battlefield.

It concludes with the threat, “When we descend on the streets of London, Paris and Washington the taste will be far bitterer [sic], because not only will we spill your blood, but we will also demolish your statues, erase your history and most painfully, convert your children who will then go on to champion our name and curse their forefathers.”

A wry, cutting deconstruction of the Communist empire by one of Eastern Europe’s exceptional authors.

Called “a perceptive and amusing social critic, with a wonderful eye for detail” by The Washington Post, Slavenka Drakulić—a native of Croatia—has emerged as one of the most popular and respected critics of Communism to come out of the former Eastern Bloc. In A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism, she offers a eight-part exploration of Communism by way of an unusual cast of narrators, each from a different country, who reflect on the fall of Communism. Together they constitute an Orwellian send-up of absurdities during the final years of European Communism that showcase this author’s tremendous talent.

A wry, cutting deconstruction of the Communist empire by one of Eastern Europe's exceptional authors.

Called "a perceptive and amusing social critic, with a wonderful eye for detail" by The Washington Post, Slavenka Drakulic-a native of Croatia-has emerged as one of the most popular and respected critics of Communism to come out of the former Eastern Bloc. In A Guided Tour Through the Museum of Communism, she offers a eight-part exploration of Communism by way of an unusual cast of narrators, each from a different country, who reflect on the fall of Communism. Together they constitute an Orwellian send-up of absurdities during the final years of European Communism that showcase this author's tremendous talent.

A Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2013

Synthesizing several decades of scholarship by historians East and West, Barbara Evans Clements traces the major developments in the history of women in Russia and their impact on the history of the nation. Sketching lived experiences across the centuries, she demonstrates the key roles that women played in shaping Russia's political, economic, social, and cultural development for over a millennium. The story Clements tells is one of hardship and endurance, but also one of achievement by women who, for example, promoted the conversion to Christianity, governed estates, created great art, rebelled against the government, established charities, built the tanks that rolled into Berlin in 1945, and flew the planes that strafed the retreating Wehrmacht. This daunting and complex history is presented in an engaging survey that integrates this scholarship into the field of Russian and post-Soviet history.

The “War Against Drugs”: who started it, and why? What are its consequences in real terms, not mere statistics, for the people most affected by it?

One hundred thousand deaths later — with the vast majority of those killed innocent citizens, such as the 43 teachers college students recently killed in Guerrero — the solution to peace requires a radical rethinking of how America, and its neighbors, approach the illegal drug trade.

The origins of this cataclysm of violence go back a century: and no two writers are better suited to this investigation than Carmen Boullosa and Mike Wallace, two legendary prize-winning writers, one Mexican and the other American. Through them we learn of economic disaster, mass migration of families fleeing violence, and the chaos that has ensued as direct results of this disastrous policy promulgated by the U.S. Government. Before the attack on a supposedly rampant drug “problem,” Mexico had one of the lowest crime rates and lowest addiction rates in Latin America. Now, it may be the most crime-ridden, drug-infested country on the planet.

From the author of the international bestseller What I Loved, a provocative collection of autobiographical and critical essays about writing and writers.

Whether her subject is growing up in Minnesota, cross-dressing, or the novel, Hustvedt's nonfiction, like her fiction, defies easy categorization, elegantly combining intellect, emotion, wit, and passion. With a light touch and consummate clarity, she undresses the cultural prejudices that veil both literature and life and explores the multiple personalities that inevitably inhabit a writer's mind. Is it possible for a woman in the twentieth century to endorse the corset, and at the same time approach with authority what it is like to be a man? Hustvedt does. Writing with rigorous honesty about her own divided self, and how this has shaped her as a writer, she also approaches the works of others-Fitzgerald, Dickens, and Henry James-with revelatory insight, and a practitioner's understanding of their art.

Now a major motion picture starring Rosamund Pike, Stanley Tucci, and Jamie Dornan, A Private War is the story of legendary war correspondent Marie Colvin, who died in 2012 while covering the Syrian civil war.

In February 2012, Marie Colvin crossed into Syria on the back of a motorcycle. A veteran war correspondent known for her fearlessness, outspokenness, and signature eye patch, she was defying a government decree preventing journalists from entering the country. Accompanied by photographer Paul Conroy, she was determined to report on the Syrian civil war, adding to a long list of conflicts she had covered, including those in Egypt, Chechnya, Kosovo, and Libya. She had witnessed grenade attacks, saved more than one thousand women and children in an East Timor war zone when she refused to stop reporting until they were evacuated, and even interviewed Muammar Qaddafi. But she had no idea that the story she was looking for in Syria would be her last, culminating in the explosion of an improvised device that sent shock waves across the world.

In A Private War, Marie Brenner brilliantly chronicles the last days and hours of Colvin’s life, moment by moment, to share the story of a remarkable life lived on the front lines. This collection also includes Brenner’s classic encounters with Donald Trump, Roy Cohn, Malala Yousafzai, Richard Jewell, and others.

In this exuberantly praised book — a collection of seven pieces on subjects ranging from television to tennis, from the Illinois State Fair to the films of David Lynch, from postmodern literary theory to the supposed fun of traveling aboard a Caribbean luxury cruiseliner — David Foster Wallace brings to nonfiction the same curiosity, hilarity, and exhilarating verbal facility that has delighted readers of his fiction, including the bestselling Infinite Jest.

1 November 2006. Alexander Litvinenko is brazenly poisoned in central London. Twenty two days later he dies, killed from the inside. The poison? Polonium; a rare, lethal and highly radioactive substance. His crime? He had made some powerful enemies in Russia.

Based on the best part of a decade’s reporting, as well as extensive interviews with those closest to the events (including the murder suspects), and access to trial evidence, Luke Harding’s A Very Expensive Poison is the definitive inside story of the life and death of Alexander Litvinenko. Harding traces the journey of the nuclear poison across London, from hotel room to nightclub, assassin to victim; it is a deadly trail that seemingly leads back to the Russian state itself.

Harding argues that Litvinenko’s assassination marked the beginning of the deterioration of Moscow’s relations with the west and a decade of geo-political disruptions – from the war in Ukraine, a civilian plane shot down, at least 7,000 dead, two million people displaced and a Russian president’s defiant rejection of a law-based international order. With Russia’s covert war in Ukraine and annexation of the Crimea, Europe and the US face a new Cold War, but with fewer certainties.

This is a shocking real-life revenge tragedy with corruption and subterfuge at every turn, and walk-on parts from Russian mafia, the KGB, MI6 agents, dedicated British coppers, Russian dissidents. At the heart of this all is an individual and his family torn apart by a ruthless crime.

In this ambitious book, acclaimed writer Marilynne Robinson applies her astute intellect to some of the most vexing topics in the history of human thought — science, religion, and consciousness. Crafted with the same care and insight as her award-winning novels, Absence of Mind challenges postmodern atheists who crusade against religion under the banner of science. In Robinson’s view, scientific reasoning does not denote a sense of logical infallibility, as thinkers like Richard Dawkins might suggest. Instead, in its purest form, science represents a search for answers. It engages the problem of knowledge, an aspect of the mystery of consciousness, rather than providing a simple and final model of reality.

By defending the importance of individual reflection, Robinson celebrates the power and variety of human consciousness in the tradition of William James. She explores the nature of subjectivity and considers the culture in which Sigmund Freud was situated and its influence on his model of self and civilization. Through keen interpretations of language, emotion, science, and poetry, Absence of Mind restores human consciousness to its central place in the religion-science debate.

What is really going on here? For decades Renata Adler has been asking and answering this question with unmatched urgency. In her essays and long-form journalism, she has captured the cultural zeitgeist, distrusted the accepted wisdom, and written stories that would otherwise go untold. As a staff writer at The New Yorker from 1963 to 2001, Adler reported on civil rights from Selma, Alabama; on the war in Biafra, the Six-Day War, and the Vietnam War; on the Nixon impeachment inquiry and Congress; on cultural life in Cuba. She has also written about cultural matters in the United States, films (as chief film critic for The New York Times), books, politics, television, and pop music. Like many journalists, she has put herself in harm’s way in order to give us the news, not the “news” we have become accustomed to — celebrity journalism, conventional wisdom, received ideas — but the actual story, an account unfettered by ideology or consensus. She has been unafraid to speak up when too many other writers have joined the pack. In this sense, Adler is one of the few independent journalists writing in America today.

This collection of Adler’s nonfiction draws on Toward a Radical Middle (a selection of her earliest New Yorker pieces), A Year in the Dark (her film reviews), and Canaries in the Mineshaft (a selection of essays on politics and media), and also includes uncollected work from the past two decades. The more recent pieces are concerned with, in her words, “misrepresentation, coercion, and abuse of public process, and, to a degree, the journalist’s role in it.” With a brilliant literary and legal mind, Adler parses power by analyzing language: the language of courts, of journalists, of political figures, of the man on the street. In doing so, she unravels the tangled narratives that pass for the resolution of scandal and finds the threads that others miss, the ones that explain what really is going on here — from the Watergate scandal, to the “preposterous” Kenneth Starr report submitted to the House during the Clinton impeachment inquiry, to the plagiarism and fabrication scandal of the former New York Times reporter Jayson Blair. And she writes extensively about the Supreme Court and the power of its rulings, including its fateful decision in Bush v. Gore.

Nir Rosen’s Aftermath, an extraordinary feat of reporting, follows the contagious spread of radicalism and sectarian violence that the U.S. invasion of Iraq and the ensuing civil war have unleashed in the Muslim world.

Rosen—who the Weekly Standard once bitterly complained has “great access to the Baathists and jihadists who make up the Iraqi insurgency”— has spent nearly a decade among warriors and militants who have been challenging American power in the Muslim world. In Aftermath, he tells their story, showing the other side of the U.S. war on terror, traveling from the battle-scarred streets of Baghdad to the alleys, villages, refugee camps, mosques, and killing grounds of Jordan, Syria, Egypt, Lebanon, and finally Afghanistan, where Rosen has a terrifying encounter with the Taliban as their “guest,” and witnesses the new Obama surge fizzling in southern Afghanistan.

Rosen was one of the few Westerners to venture inside the mosques of Baghdad to witness the first stirrings of sectarian hatred in the months after the U.S. invasion. He shows how weapons, tactics, and sectarian ideas from the civil war in Iraq penetrated neighboring countries and threatened their stability, especially Lebanon and Jordan, where new jihadist groups mushroomed. Moreover, he shows that the spread of violence at the street level is often the consequence of specific policies hatched in Washington, D.C. Rosen offers a seminal and provocative account of the surge, told from the perspective of U.S. troops on the ground, the Iraqi security forces, Shiite militias and Sunni insurgents that were both allies and adversaries. He also tells the story of what happened to these militias once they outlived their usefulness to the Americans.

Aftermath is both a unique personal history and an unsparing account of what America has wrought in Iraq and the region. The result is a hair-raising, 360-degree view of the modern battlefield its consequent humanitarian catastrophe, and the reality of counterinsurgency.

From Booklist

This could not be a more timely or trenchant examination of the repercussions of the U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan. Journalist Rosen has written for The New Yorker, the New York Times Magazine, and Harper’s, among other publications, and authored In the Belly of the Green Bird: The Triumph of the Martyrs in Iraq (2006). His on-the-ground experience in the Middle East has given him the extensive contact network and deep knowledge—advantages that have evaded many, stymied by the great dangers and logistical nightmares of reporting from Iraq and Afghanistan. This work is based on seven years of reporting focused on how U.S. involvement in Iraq set off a continuing chain of unintended consequences, especially the spread of radicalism and violence in the Middle East. Rosen offers a balanced answer to the abiding question of whether our involvement was worth it. Many of his points have been made by others, but Rosen’s accounts of his own reactions to what he’s witnessed and how he tracked down his stories are absolutely spellbinding.

— Connie Fletcher

In the winter of 2009, Rachel Cusk's marriage of ten years came to an end. In the months that followed, life as she had known it came apart, 'like a jigsaw dismantled into a heap of broken-edged pieces'. 'Aftermath' chronicles this perilous journey as the author redefines herself as a single woman.

« J'ai vécu la tension de négociations à haut risque avec les Khmers rouges, les forces serbes de Slobodan Milosevic, les terroristes d'Al-Qaïda… Je n'ai toujours eu qu'une seule boussole pour agir : l'intérêt supérieur de la Nation. À d'innombrables reprises, j'ai mis ma vie en jeu pour défendre la France, toujours dans l'ombre. Clandestinement. Mon nom est "Personne", ou plutôt “n'importe qui”. Je suis agent secret. »

Jean-Marc Gadoullet a appartenu pendant quinze ans — une longévité exceptionnelle — au 11^e Choc, une unité d'élite du service Action de la DGSE. Deux présidents de la République ont épinglé sur son uniforme les plus hautes distinctions, la Croix de guerre et la Légion d'honneur.

Assistance à des chefs rebelles, contre-terrorisme, infiltration secrète, empêchement d'un coup d'État, diplomatie parallèle… Ce livre dévoile la vie de l'un des meilleurs agents secrets français. Comment intègre-t-on le Bureau des légendes ? Comment jongle-t-on entre plusieurs identités fictives ? Et comment part-on en mission sans jamais savoir pour combien de temps et sans pouvoir donner de nouvelles à sa famille ?

Voici le témoignage unique d'un véritable héros qui, dans une seconde vie, de 2010 à 2013, a été l'artisan discret de la libération des sept otages d'Areva et de Vinci retenus au Mali par Abou Zeid, l'émir redouté d'Al-Qaïda au Maghreb islamique. Jean-Marc Gadoullet révèle ici les coulisses de cette négociation explosive et dénonce le « business » des otages.

Pour la première fois, un agent secret français raconte son quotidien.

AN AUTHENTIC GLIMPSE OF A NORTH KOREA WE’VE NEVER SEEN BEFORE, BY A PRIZE-WINNING FILMMAKER

Anna Broinowski is the only Westerner ever granted full access to North Korea’s propaganda machine, its film industry. Aim High in Creation! is her funny, surreal, insightful account of her twenty-one-day apprenticeship there. At the same time it is a fresh-eyed look, beyond stereotypes, at life in that most secretive of societies.

When Anna learned that fracking had invaded downtown Sydney and a coal seam gas well was planned for Sydney Park, she had a brilliant idea: she would seek guidance for a kryptonite-powerful anti-fracking movie from the world’s greatest propaganda factory, apart from Hollywood. After two years of trying, she was allowed to make her case in Pyongyang and was granted full permission to film. She worked closely with the leading lights of North Korean cinema, even playing an American in a military thriller. “Filmmakers are family,” Kim Jong-il’s favorite director told her, and a love of nature and humanity unites peoples. Interviewing loyalists and defectors alike, Anna explored the society she encountered. She offers vivid, sometimes hilarious descriptions of bizarre disconnects and warm friendships in a world without advertisements or commercial culture. Her book, like the prize-winning documentary that resulted from her visit, is a thoughtful plea for better understanding.

Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade imprint, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in history—books about World War II, the Third Reich, Hitler and his henchmen, the JFK assassination, conspiracies, the American Civil War, the American Revolution, gladiators, Vikings, ancient Rome, medieval times, the old West, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

Актуальний «Луганський щоденник»!

Десять років тому герої «Anarchy in the Ukr» здійснили ідейну подорож Східною Україною, місцями бойової слави Нестора Махна. Мандруючи Донбасом, вони шукали відповіді на питання – що ж таке воля-свобода-анархія? Чи є межа між ними та де вона пролягає? Сьогодні автор знову відвідав територію, що колись була територією анархізму. Але цього разу – в дуже наелектризованій атмосфері, коли саме повітря просякнуте війною… Вже не давнішньою, часів Нестора Івановича, а більш ніж сучасною…