Yearning for a life of the mind, Ruth Puttermesser finds herself mired in the lowest circles of city bureaucracy. Her love life hopeless, her fantasies more influential than wan reality, she nevertheless turns out to be the best mayor New York City has ever elected. Soon enough, though, paradise gained becomes paradise lost, and--even for a wistful visionary like Puttermesser--the problem of disappointment remains unresolved.

Cynthia Ozick is an American master at the height of her powers in Heir to the Glimmering World, a grand romantic novel of desire, fame, fanaticism, and unimaginable reversals of fortune. Ozick takes us to the outskirts of the Bronx in the 1930s, as New York fills with Europe"s ousted dreamers, turned overnight into refugees. Rose Meadows unknowingly enters this world when she answers an ambiguous want ad for an "assistant" to a Herr Mitwisser, the patriarch of a large, chaotic household. Rosie, orphaned at eighteen, has been living with her distant relative Bertram, who sparks her first erotic desires. But just as he begins to return her affection, his lover, a radical socialist named Ninel (Lenin spelled backward), turns her out. And so Rosie takes refuge from love among refugees of world upheaval. Cast out from Berlin"s elite, the Mitwissers live at the whim of a mysterious benefactor, James A'Bair. Professor Mitwisser is a terrifying figure, obsessed with his arcane research. His distraught wife, Elsa, once a prominent physicist, is becoming unhinged. Their willful sixteen-year-old daughter runs the household: the exquisite, enigmatic Anneliese. Rosie's place here is uncertain, and she finds her fate hanging on the arrival of James. Inspired by the real Christopher Robin, James is the Bear Boy, the son of a famous children's author who recreated James as the fanciful subject of his books. Also a kind of refugee, James runs from his own fame, a boy adored by the world but grown into a bitter man. It is Anneliese's fierce longing that draws James back to this troubled house, and it is Rosie who must help them all resist James's reckless orbit. Ozick lovingly evokes these perpetual outsiders thrown together by surprising chance. The hard times they inherit still hold glimmers of past hopes and future dreams. Heir to the Glimmering World is a generous delight. --

'A strange and compelling new book from one of America's greatest living authors' Times Literary Supplement 'As cunning and rich as anything Ozick's written' Wall Street Journal 'One of our era's central writers. About a man ensnared by history, Antiquities is at once a warning against the hazards of nostalgia and an invitation to take a longer view of how we got to where we are' The New Yorker 'Ozick's prose urges the breathless reader along, her love of language rolling excitedly through her sentences like an ocean wave' New York Review of Books I remember nothing. I remember everything. I believe everything. I believe nothing. In 1949, Lloyd Wilkinson Petrie returns as a Trustee to the long-defunct boarding school that he attended as a child. There he is preparing a memoir about the subtle anti-Semitism that pervaded the school, about his fascination with the Egyptian archaeological adventures of his distant cousin, about the passions of a boyhood friendship with named Ben-Zion Elefantin, a mystifying older pupil. In this novella, and the three stories published alongside it, one of our most preeminent writers weaves together myth and mania, history and illusion to capture the shifting meanings of the past.