Around the turn of the last century, James Henry Breasted took on the challenge of assembling all the available historical documents of ancient Egypt and translating them into English. This prodigious undertaking involved traveling to the monuments extant in the Nile valley and in outlying areas of Egyptian conquest, as well as to museums throughout Europe where Egyptian relics were housed. Breasted made his own copies of hundreds of Egyptian records inscribed on papyrus or leather or carved in stone and engaged in a thorough study of the published records of Egyptian history in conjunction with his own transcription of the documents themselves. This five-volume compendium is the result.
 
Breasted's monumental work, originally published from 1906 to 1907, encompasses twenty-six dynasties spanning more than three millennia: from ca. 3050 B.C. to 525 B.C. For each document, Breasted provides information on location, condition, historical significance, and content. Beginning with the earliest known official annals of Egypt, the Palermo Stone, Breasted catalogs the realm's official activities, including royal succession, temple construction, property distribution, and foreign conquest. He tracks the careers of scores of kings, queens, government officials, military leaders, powerful statesmen, and influential courtiers, reproducing their autobiographies, letters of favor, paeans, mortuary gifts, and tomb inscriptions. Clearly annotated for the lay reader, the documents provide copious evidence of trade relations, construction activities, diplomatic envoys, foreign expeditions, and other aspects of a vigorous, highly organized, and centrally controlled society.
 
Breasted's commentary is both rigorously documented and accessible, suffused with a contagious fascination for the events, the personalities, the cultural practices, and the sophistication these records indicate. A herculean assemblage of primary documents, many of which have deteriorated to illegibility in the intervening century, Ancient Records of Egypt illuminates both the incredible complexity of Egyptian society and the almost insuperable difficulties of reconstructing a lost civilization.
 
This first paperback edition of Ancient Records of Egypt features a new introduction and supplementary bibliographies by Peter A. Piccione. Setting Breasted's work in the context of the development of American Egyptology, Piccione discusses Breasted's establishment of the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago, with corporate support by John D. Rockefeller and other benefactors, and surveys the ambitious body of publications with which Breasted laid the foundation for future Egyptian studies.
 

In this issue

Letter from the Editor Ying Zhu Hong Kong and Social Movements

Hong Kong Unraveled: Social Media and the 2019 Protest Movement
Anonymous

Unleashing the Sounds of Silence: Hong Kong’s Story in Troubled Times
Andrea Riemenschnitter

Tragedy of Errors at Warp Speed
Sam Ho

Imagining a City-Based Democracy: Review of The Appearing Demos: Hong Kong During and After the Umbrella Movement by Laikwan Pang, University of Michigan Press, 2020
Enoch Tam

Building and Documenting National and Transnational Cinema

China and the Film Festival
Richard Peña

Nationalism from Below: State Failures, Nollywood, and Nigerian Pidgin Jonathan Haynes Collective Memory and the Rhetorical Power of the Historical Fiction Film
Carl Plantinga

From Nations to Worlds: Chris Marker’s Si j’avais quatre dromadaires
Michael Walsh

Sino-US Relations

American Factory and the Difficulties of Documenting Neoliberalism
Peter Hitchcock

R.I.P. Soft Power: China’s Story Meets the Reset Button: Review of Soft Power with Chinese Characteristics: China’s Campaign for Hearts and Minds edited by Kingsley Edney, Stanley Rosen, and Ying Zhu, Routledge, 2019
Robert A. Kapp

The Narrative of Virus

Review: On Epidemics, Epidemiology, and Global Storytelling
Carlos Rojas

In this issue
Letter from the Editor - YING ZHU
Research Articles
Consuming the Pastoral Desire: Li Ziqi, Food Vlogging, and the Structure of Feeling in the Era of Microcelebrity - LIANG LIMIN
This Is Not Reality (Ceci n’est pas la réalité): Capturing the Imagination of the People Creativity, the Chinese Subaltern, and Documentary Storytelling - PAOLA VOCI
The Networked Storyteller and Her Digital Tale: Film Festivals and Ann Hui’s My Way - GINA MARCHETTI
“Retweet for More”: The Serialization of Porn on the Twitter Alter Community - RUEPERT CAO
Book Reviews
Dazzling Revelations - Review of Negative Exposures: Knowing What Not to Know in Contemporary China by Margaret Hillenbrand, Duke University Press, 2020 - HARRIET EVANS
Speaking Nations, Edge Ways - Reviews of Postcolonial Hangups in Southeast Asian Cinema: Poetics of Space, Sound and Stability by Gerald Sim, Amsterdam University Press, 2020; and Southeast Asia on Screen: From Independence to Financial Crisis (1945–1998) edited by Gaik Cheng Khoo, Thomas Barker, Mary Ainslie, Amsterdam University Press, 2020 - MIN HUI YEO
Film Reviews
Nomadland: An American or Chinese Story? Review of Nomadland, directed by Chloe Zhao, 2020 - YING ZHU
New from Netflix: Mank, Fincher, and A Hollywood Creation Tale - Review of Mank, directed by David Fincher, 2020 - THOMAS SCHATZ
Superheroes: The Endgame - Review of Superhero Movies - PETER BISKIND
Short Essay
Love and Duty: Translating Films and Teaching Online through a Pandemic - CHRISTOPHER REA
Report
Narrating New Normal: Graduate Student Symposium Report - RUEPERT JIEL DIONISIO CAO, MINOS-ATHANASIOS KARYOTAKIS, MISTURA ADEBUSOLA SALAUDEEN, DONGLI CHEN, & YANJING WINNIE WU

Esteemed as a literary critic and poet, Edgar Allan Poe was most highly acclaimed for his tales and sketches. He transformed the short story from anecdote to art, virtually created the detective story, and perfected the psychological thriller. This volume is the first of two, edited by the consummate Poe scholar Thomas Ollive Mabbott, collecting all the tales of this master of the uncanny, the unnerving, and the terrifying.
 
Poe's stories reflect his professed method of "writing as if the author were firmly impressed with the truth, yet astonished at the immensity of the wonders he related." Marrying grotesque inventiveness with superb plot construction, Poe's strikingly original tales often use only one main character and one main incident. In many of them, horror and suspense, revenge and torture, are laced with hilarious satire. Each volume is enriched with Mabbott's detailed and authoritative notes on sources, the history and collation of all known texts authorized by Poe, and variants of Poe's "final" version.
 
Volume 1 includes Poe's earliest parodies, beginning in 1831, and gathers his gothic tales written through 1842. The stories collected in this volume include "Ms. Found in a Bottle," the horrific "Berenice," "Ligeia" (which Poe considered his finest tale), "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," and one of his most famous stories, "The Fall of the House of Usher."
 
Promising spine-tingling delights and sleepless nights, this annotated edition of Tales and Sketches is a treasure trove for scholars and general readers alike, confirming Poe's status as one of literary art's "most brilliant but erratic stars."