An anthology of selections from eight of Philip Roth's early novels, with a definitive version of The Breast and the previously uncollected story Novotny's Pain, alongside the essay-story Looking At Kafka.

Peter Ustinov was revered as one of the world's truly legendary entertainers. As an actor, producer, director, novelist, playwright, and columnist, his body of work was not only vast and thoroughly impressive, but enduring. Add a Dash of Pity, a superb collection of short stories, shows Sir Peter at his narrative, perceptive best. Ustinov possessed the uncommon ability to amuse and touch readers simultaneously, a talent which has nowhere been better displayed than in this fascinating array of short stories, which includes: "The Man Who Took It Easy," "The Wingless Icarus," "The Man in the Moon," "A Place in the Shade," "A Word in the World's Ear," "There Are 43,200 Seconds in a Day," "The Aftertaste," and the title piece, "Add a Dash of Pity."

PETER BERGER, renowned sociologist and social critic, theologian and novelist, here brings his many gifts to bear on the endlessly interesting, if also painful, predicament of living in the modern world. In discussions ranging all the way from such private experiences as marriage and psychoanalysis to such public issues as the secularization of religion, the corruptions of pornography, or the growing indifference to murder, he brilliantly demonstrates how that predicament has grown out of the modern disbelief in God and the weakening of the institutions of community. The modernity which constitutes the central preoccupation of this book raises questions of both a very general and a very particular kind: "How," in Peter Berger's own words, "can one understand that peculiar reality we know as modern society?" Beyond understanding it, how can one actually engage in meaningful political action in its American version? And how does modernity constrain or condition a man's religious quest? The author's answers, based on a sure sense of history combined with an infinitely patient yet toughminded grasp of the way societies actually work, bring new illumination to virtually every page. For those who have not accepted Peter Berger's views about the nature of our present predicament as well as for those who have-indeed, for everyone concerned with understanding himself as a modern person and as a citizen of a modern state-Facing Up to Modernity is an experience in self- discovery

Dracula! Vampires! The blood runs red under the moon! In late summer of 2009, Moonstone follows up its fang-favorite monster anthology, Werewolves: Dead Moon Rising , with this second installment in the Moonstone Monsters series, this time focusing on those enigmatic creatures of the night, Vampires! Two extra-sized special Dracula stories serve to open and close this collection of ten all-new vampire tales by some of the industry's favorite horror writers. Vampire stories are timeless and continue to dominate horror-fiction in books, as well as the big screen and television. L.A. Banks, P.N. Elrod, and Elaine Bergstrom are all celebrated for the runs of popular Vampire novels, Martin Powell demonstrates his intimate familiarity with the mythos of Count Dracula... these and other stories contained in this gruesome horror anthology are sure to appeal to an audience that can't get enough of these ages-old bloodsuckers!

"This flip book features two separate novellas: In Sickness and In Health: Lily's most cherished goal in life has always been to be "normal," so as an adult she has painstakingly constructed a "normal" life for herself, with family, friends, and career. But her need to keep hidden her invisible disability, due to its stigma and her shame, now threatens to destroy everything she has worked so hard for. Yom Kippur in a Gym: Five isolated strangers in a synagogue on Yom Kippur - a day of intense reflection and soul-searching - are each struggling with a major personal crisis, when unexpectedly they are thrown together by an emergency that, in one hour, changes all their lives forever"--

In this engrossing biography, acclaimed novelist Muriel Spark recreates Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's turbulent life and career and persuasively defends the enigmatic writer's place among the giants of literary history.

KQED Radio's Michael Krasny is one of the country's leading interviewers of literary luminaries, a maestro for educated listeners who prefer their discourse high and civil. He is a writer's interviewer. But it didn't start out that way. In Off Mike , Krasny, host of one of public radio's most popular and intellectually compelling programs, talks of his strong desire to become a novelist in the footsteps of Bellow and Philip Roth, and then discovering his real talent as a communicator—a deft ability to draw others out as an interlocutor. In a mix of memoir and reportage, Krasny takes readers inside his world. He gives an account of the polarizing transformation of talk radio, from his early days at KGO commercial radio, through to his current role at NPR, where he manages to keep the flow of talk in his San Francisco based show animated and politically balanced. Forum fans and lovers of literature will be riveted by the insightful and amusing vignettes and behind the scenes accounts. They will get a taste of the sharp commentary from his encounters with panels of experts, and interviews with cultural and political personalities as well as writers.

Max Brod, a successful novelist, was a boyhood companion of Kafka's and remained closely tied to him until Kafka's death in 1924. He was undoubtedly the one man whom Kafka trusted more than any other, and it is to Brod, as his literary executor and editor, that we are indebted for rescuing and bringing to light Kafka's work. Out of a lifelong devoted friendship, Brod drew this account of Kafka's youth, family and friends, his struggle to recognize himself as a writer, his sickness, and his last days. Franz Kafka gives us not only a more vivid and lifelike picture of Kafka than that painted by any of his contemporaries, but also a fascinating portrayal of the complicated interaction between two writers of different temperaments but similar backgrounds who together helped shape the future of twentieth-century literature.

With trenchant realism and profound understanding, Matthew Josephson presents in VICTOR HUGO the realistic biography of a great romantic who wrote Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre Name, among others. Of tremendous sweep and scope, it is a penetrating analysis of a literary titan, who as a political pamphleteer, playwright, novelist, and romantic lover, dominated his time, influenced his peers, and moved the hearts of men. Matthew Josephson, whose Stendhal, Zola, The Robber Barons, and Rousseau defined him as a master of the art of biography, has given us in VICTOR HUGO a highly readable account of this vigorous, zestful, and fruitful career. VICTOR HUGO is the final and definitive work on "France's prince of poets and lord of language." EARLIER BOOK REVIEWS "Matthew Joseph's third full-blown biography of a great French writer.is the best. There is more color and drive in it .because the materials are so rich." New York Times Book Review (1942) "Victor Hugo's varied and colorful career offered Josephson a perfect opportunity to display again his gift for spirited narrative and keen characterization. He skillfully traces Hugo's conversion from literary great to political hero. Along the way he adds texture to his portrait by interweaving the fascinating components of Hugo's personal life -his marriage to Adèle Foucher, his fifty-year liaison with Juliette Drouet, and his friendship and betrayal by Sainte-Beuve.Victor Hugo's life was a success story without parallel, and it provided an apotheosis of Josephson's point about the duty of writers in times of social and political crisis. The critics again praised Josephson's talents as a biographer." - David E. Shi, Matthew Josephson: Bourgeois Bohemian, Yale University Press, 1981

Reminiscent of the novels of Nora Ephron, this brilliantly written, hilariously touching tale explores a contemporary woman's quirky love life. Katinka O'Toole has discovered that a degree from Harvard does not always lead to fame and fortune. Divorced and struggling to make a living as a writer, the highlight of her day has become the arrival of the mail. Or, more precisely, the mailman. Yes, she hopes for an acceptance letter, but she also has a fierce crush on Louie Capetti, her gorgeous postal carrier, who she hopes will carry her away to romantic bliss. So while she has taken to receiving her mail in "discount Dior", she also has to deal with her pretentious ex-husband (a noted Joycean scholar), her class-conscious mother, the unwanted affections of a corporate lawyer, and various other roadblocks to true love that plague smart women in today's society.

Venice for Lovers is a memorable collaboration by two fine stylists who have fashioned their own personal homages to Venice, one with a novella, the other with a personal essay. Every year for all the thirty they have been married, Begley and Muhlstein have escaped to Venice to write. In her contribution to the book, Muhlstein charmingly describes how she and her husband dine at the same restaurant every night for years on end, and how becoming friends with restaurateurs has been an unsurpassed means of getting to know the city and its inhabitants, far from the tourists in San Marco Square. In his short novella, Begley writes a story of falling in love with--and in--Venice. His twenty-year-old protagonist, enamored with an older, far worldlier woman of twenty-seven, is lured by her to the City of Water, only to be unceremoniously dumped and left to fend for himself after a brief rendezvous. But he discovers a lasting love for Venice itself--not an uncommon romance, as Begley's brilliant literary essay on the city's place within world literature demonstrates: Henry James, Marcel Proust, and Thomas Mann were all illustrious predecessors.

Analytical studies trace the development theme of the individual in selected novels, letters, and poems from the end of the eighteenth century to the present

A Nick Hoffman / Academic Mystery, Book 1 - Nick Hoffman has everything he's ever wanted: a good teaching job, a beautiful house, and a solid relationship with his lover, Stefan Borowski, a brilliant novelist and writer-in-residence at the State University of Michigan. But when Perry Cross shows up, Nick's peace of mind is shattered. Not only does he have to share his office with the nefarious Perry, who managed to weasel his way into a tenured position without the right qualifications, he also discovers that Perry played a destructive role in Stefan's past. When Perry turns up dead, Nick wonders if Stefan might be involved, while the campus police force is wondering the same about Nick. Originally published in 1996, this first book in the Nick Hoffman Academic Mystery series is now back in print, with a 2019 foreword by the author. EDITORIAL REVIEWS: "Deliciously wicked... The perfect book to take away for a weekend in the country... a genuinely funny modern comedy of manners." - Washington Post Book World "The Borgias would not be bored at the State University of Michigan, that snake pit of academic politics." - New York Times Book Review "Clever and sharp social satire." - Los Angeles Times "Lev Raphael skewers academic pretensions with wicked glee [and] Dickensian flair." - Chicago Sun-Times Lev Raphael offers "a delightful take on death in academe." - San Francisco Chronicle A "witty and devastating backstage view of college life." - San Diego Union-Tribune "Some of the most pointed and funny put-downs of academics in my memory." - Detroit Free Press Raphael "elegantly skewers ivory-tower pretensions, petty politics, incompetencies and hypocrisies." - Booklist Lev Raphael combines "stylish literary mystery with an intimate look at the jungle of academia... witty, impeccably written." - The Mystery Review "Marvelous humor and satisfying mystery... wickedly fun." - Drood Review of Mystery "Bright, breezy, and laugh-aloud funny." - Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine

Epstein first introduced Leib Goldkorn in "The Steinway Quintet". In this volume, Goldkorn - Holocaust survivor, flautist, and pianist - is back in an expanded account of the original novella along with two other long tales that continue his richly comic spiral of misadventures that are at once comedies of manners and serious accounts of culture colliding with casual violence.

Product Description Journeys beyond the Pale is the first book to examine how Yiddish writers, from Mendele Moycher Sforim to Der Nister to the famed Sholem Aleichem, used motifs of travel to express their complicated relationship with modernization. The story of the Jews of the Pale of settlement encompasses current-day Russia, the Ukraine, Belarus, and Poland. Review "This book is deliciously subversive. Garrett demonstrates that the major writers in Yiddish, a language without its own territory, wrote as if their Jewish subjects lived and traveled freely at the center of the world; not on its margins, not in a ghetto, not in a valorized state of exile."—David G. Roskies, Jewish Theological Seminary "Garrett’s work goes a long way towards conceptualizing and analyzing a phenomenon omnipresent in Yiddish short stories, novels, poetry, and drama, combining theoretical considerations of the journey in general and specific, nuanced readings of Jewish journeys in particular."—Jeremy Dauber, Columbia University "This kind of scholarship is vital for the further progress in Yiddish studies and its integration into the mainstream humanities."—Mikhail Krutikov, Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and author of Yiddish Fiction and the Crisis of Modernity, 1905–1914 From the Back Cover "This book is deliciously subversive. Garrett demonstrates that the major writers in Yiddish, a language without its own territory, wrote as if their Jewish subjects lived and traveled freely at the center of the world; not on its margins, not in a ghetto, not in a valorized state of exile."-David G. Roskies, Jewish Theological Seminary "Garrett's work goes a long way towards conceptualizing and analyzing a phenomenon omnipresent in Yiddish short stories, novels, poetry, and drama, combining theoretical considerations of the journey in general and specific, nuanced readings of Jewish journeys in particular."-Jeremy Dauber, Columbia University "This kind of scholarship is vital for the further progress in Yiddish studies and its integration into the mainstream humanities."-Mikhail Krutikov, Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and author of Yiddish Fiction and the Crisis of Modernity, 1905-1914 About the Author Leah V. Garrett is assistant professor of Judaic studies and English literature at the University of Denver, Colorado.

Shuttling between cultural comedies and political tragedies, Lawrence Weschler's articles have throughout his long career intrigued readers with his unique insight into everything he examines, from the ordinary to the extraordinary. Uncanny Valley continues the page–turning conversation as Weschler collects the best of his narrative nonfiction from the past fifteen years. The title piece surveys the hapless efforts of digital animators to fashion a credible human face, the endlessly elusive gold standard of the profession. Other highlights include profiles of novelist Mark Salzman, as he wrestles with a hilariously harrowing bout of writer's block; the legendary film and sound editor Walter Murch, as he is forced to revisit his work on Apocalypse Now in the context of the more recent Iraqi war film Jarhead; and the artist Vincent Desiderio, as he labors over an epic canvas portraying no less than a dozen sleeping figures. With his signature style and endless ability to wonder, Weschler proves yet again that the "world is strange, beautiful, and connected" (The Globe and Mail). Uncanny Valley demonstrates his matchless ability to analyze the marvels he finds in places and people and offers us a new, sublime way of seeing the world.

With enervating experimentation but touching directness, postmodern novelist Acker (Portrait of an Eve, 1992; My Mother: Demonology, 1993; etc.) explores art, politics, and being in her first essay collection. Subjects are various, ranging from William Burroughs to Goya to San Francisco; many of the pieces have been published previously (prefaces to books, articles in Marxism Today, the Critical Quarterly, etc.). Despite the variety of subjects and sources, the collection is neatly structured: Essays are grouped agreeably by subject-'On Art and Artists,' 'The City,' 'Bodies of Work.' Though Acker says she aims to 'destroy' the essay form, she does more of what the form openly invites--to tinker and confess. For example, she interweaves stories into a piece on artist Nayland Blake and applies Wittgenstein's 'language games' to bodybuilding: 'In a gym, verbal language or language whose purpose is meaning occurs, if at all, only at the edge of becoming lost.' But she also reveals her current weightlifting goals and describes a childhood desire to be a pirate. Not surprisingly, her most accessible works are those written for a wide audience, particularly an illuminating essay for the Village Voice on film director Peter Greenaway and a moving piece for the MMLA on copyright in the age of the Internet. In all, these essays are serious and reflective of a discontented mind bent on deconstruction. Some may find dreary her tale of patriarchy, dualism, and linearity of time; her elliptical tales and stark sentences may lack immediate clarity. For sure, her essays aren't casually authoritative like Updike's or reassuringly religious like Dillard's. Read Acker when you're patient and don't want to be comforted--or even satisfied. An unthreatening introduction to a vexing writer.-Kirkus

As delightful and playful as it is profound and serious, The Language of Names is an absolute original -- a fascinating book that reveals us to ourselves, that demonstrates the endless variety of ways in which names shape our daily lives. Drawing on social and literary history, psychology and anthropology, anecdotes, and life stories, biographer Justin Kaplan and novelist Anne Bernays have written a fascinating account of names and naming in contemporary society that touches on class structure, ethnic and religious practices, manners, and everyday life. Graceful, eloquent, and richly informed, The Language of Names explores and illuminates our favorite subject -- ourselves.

150 essential rules from the award-winning co-writer of Yes Minster and Yes Prime Minister , Hollywood movie director, producer, novelist and actor. A host of hugely enjoyable examples drawn from Lynn's varied and successful career bring these rules to life, covering everything from inspiration, collaboration and the Seven Deadly Sins to the perils of unmotivated comic business, pitching screenplays in LA, sexist jokes and lunch with the Inland Revenue. Along the way, we meet a cast of luminaries including Leonard Rossiter, John Landis, Nigel Hawthorne, Paul Eddington, Jack Rosenthal and Jonathan's long-time co-writer, Antony Jay. As we travel with him from his first digs in Coventry to the sushi bars of Hollywood, Comedy Rules offers an enlightening journey into the world of comedy and an indispensible companion to the elusive art of its creation.

The legendary Claudette Colbert starred on Broadway in this suspense drama about an internationally successful mystery novelist whose relatives wouldn't mind killing her to get their hands on her art collection. Other characters include a live in doctor who was once the novelist's lover and a savvy Indian butler who uses words like "chutzpa." The badinage between the novelist and the butler and between the novelist and the doctor provides comic delight and relief from the mayhem being planned by the family. This exciting comic thriller was produced on BBC TV starring Angela Lansbury and Sir Lawrence Olivier. Fans of 'Murder, She Wrote' will enjoy A Talent for Murder, a merry murder mystery that is perfect for summer stock, dinner theatres and community theatres.