Is the Bible actually a love story between a deity and a people? And what does this love story have to do with the modern world? In With All Thine Heart distinguished cultural critic Ilan Stavans speaks to freelance writer Mordecai Drache about love in the Bible. Presented in an engaging, conversational format and touched with striking artwork, the textured dialogue between Stavans and Drache is meant to show how the Bible is a multidimensional text and one that, when considered over the course of history, still has the power to shape our world. The theme of love provides the connective tissue that binds this work. Addressing a wide range of topics, from biblical archaeology and fundamentalism to Hollywood movies, lexicography, and the act of praying, With All Thine Heart suggests that the Hebrew Bible is a novel worth decoding patiently, such as one does with classics like Don Quixote de la Mancha, In Search of Lost Time, and Anna Karenina. Similar to the protagonists in these tales, biblical characters, although not shaped with the artistic nuance of modern literature, allow for astonishing insight. This exploration of love through the pages of the Bible--organized chronologically from Genesis to Exodus and followed by insightful meditations on the Song of Songs and the Book of Job--is a delightful intellectual and spiritual treat . . . Shema Ysrael!

Fascinated by the idea of Western civilization as being a sequence of numerous misinterpretations and misrepresentations, these nineteen essays cover a broad range of topics with the unifying theme being the crossroads where politics and the imagination meet. An essay on linguistics and culture discusses the shaping of Latin America's collective identity; Peru's modern history is approached as a bloody battle between enlightenment and darkness; and in critiques of Octavio Paz and Gabriel García Márquez, Stavans reflects on the dichotomy between pen and sword in the Hispanic world. In 'Letter to a German Friend', Stavans returns to his fate as a Jew in the Southern Hemisphere, and in 'The First Book,' he connects his passion for literature to his initiation into Jewishness. Finally, in a meditation on Columbus's afterlife, he reflects on the many ways in which we reinvent ourselves in order to make sense of the chaotic world that surrounds us.

Haunting and enigmatic, these nine loosely connected stories are evidence of the growing field of Jewish-Latin American fiction. "A Heaven Without Crows," structured as a letter from Kafka to his friend Max Brod, details the labyrinthine paths of his tortured soul. "The Invention of Memory," awarded the Gamma Literature Prize, is also a tribute to Eastern European letters, in which a Czech man with a portentous memory is diagnosed with a deteriorating illness. He travels to Mexico to look for his past and fight against oblivion by carefully staging his vanishing reminiscences. "Three Nightmares" proves that fantasy and reality, people and things, are form-shifting aspects of one another. And the title story is a bizarre tale, a succinct and tangential homage to Felisberto Hernandez's piano narratives and to Oliver Sacks's neurological anecdotes, in which a young woman loses touch with one of her hands. The volume concludes with an autobiographical essay, "Lost in Translation," in which Stavans comments on his experience growing up Jewish in Mexico. Told with wit and precision, these stories are at once a meditation on politics and the imagination in the Hispanic world, compelling allegories on the nature of freedom and individuality, a study of guilt, and a savage satire on the rigorous banality of life. The delicious secrets of Stavans's imagination unfold in these endearing tales with the authority of dreams, questioning our philosophical assumptions and portraying the universe as a vast, mysterious theater where everything is sacred but nothing is absolute.