A poetic meditation on the last year of tenor saxophonist Lester Young’s life, of joyful playing and self-willed dying. In 1959, at the age of fifty, jazz greaet Lester Young―a lyrical player, his airy tone haunted by a breathy melancholy―died alone in the Arvin Hotel in Manhattan. As Meltzer explains, “No Eyes is a book about death, and Young sits in for a metaphor for the artist living and dying for and with his art.” An “inside” biography, No Eyes is a brilliant jazz-world evocation, composed in free verse whose flow is arrested to capture significant moments, Meltzer creates a layered narrative of vivid colors and textures, the material facts of Young’s story dissolving into internalized, projected truths of erotic understanding and spiritual sympathy with the “sweet and isolate lovely other.”

This is a fascinating portrait of Miami's Cuban population, the most successful group of immigrants to settle in the United States since the Jews of the nineteenth century. David Rieff has provided an engrossing look at a group exiled from its homeland, showing how America has affected these immigrants, and what it means to become an American in the late twentieth century.

'A revelatory novel' Sunday Times 'Brilliance on every page' Samantha Harvey, author of Orbital A propulsive, hypnotic novel about a man who is unravelled by a series of events beyond his grasp. Fifteen-year-old Istvan lives with his mother in a quiet apartment complex in Hungary. New to the town and shy, he is unfamiliar with the social rituals at school and soon becomes isolated, with his neighbour - a married woman close to his mother's age - as his only companion. These encounters shift into a clandestine relationship that Istvan himself can barely understand, and his life soon spirals out of control. As the years pass, he is carried gradually upwards on the twenty-first century's tides of money and power, moving from the army to the company of London's super-rich, with his own competing impulses for love, intimacy, status and wealth winning him unimaginable riches, until they threaten to undo him completely. Spare and penetrating, Flesh is the finest novel yet by a master of realism, asking profound questions about what drives a life- what makes it worth living, and what breaks it. Chosen as a 'Best Book of 2025' by the Guardian , Observer , Financial Times , Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail ' Flesh is a wonderful novel - so brilliant and wise on chance, love, sex, money' David Nicholls, author of One Day 'It's been a long time since I've been swallowed whole by a novel the way I was by this one ... So much searing insight into the way we live now' Observer 'Compelling and elegant, merciless and poignant. David Szalay is an extraordinary writer ' Tessa Hadley

The Big Chill meets The Group in Deborah Copaken Kogan’s wry, lively, and irresistible new novel about a once-close circle of friends at their twentieth college reunion. Clover, Addison, Mia, and Jane were roommates at Harvard until their graduation in 1989. Clover, homeschooled on a commune by mixed-race parents, felt woefully out of place. Addison yearned to shed the burden of her Mayflower heritage. Mia mined the depths of her suburban ennui to enact brilliant performances on the Harvard stage. Jane, an adopted Vietnamese war orphan, made sense of her fractured world through words. Twenty years later, their lives are in free fall. Clover, once a securities broker with Lehman, is out of a job and struggling to reproduce before her fertility window slams shut. Addison’s marriage to a writer’s-blocked novelist is as stale as her so-called career as a painter. Hollywood shut its gold-plated gates to Mia, who now stays home with her four children, renovating and acquiring faster than her director husband can pay the bills. Jane, the Paris bureau chief for a newspaper whose foreign bureaus are now shuttered, is caught in a vortex of loss. Like all Harvard grads, they’ve kept abreast of one another via the red book, a class report published every five years, containing brief autobiographical essays by fellow alumni. But there’s the story we tell the world, and then there’s the real story, as these former classmates will learn during their twentieth reunion weekend, when they arrive with their families, their histories, their dashed dreams, and their secret yearnings to a relationship-changing, score-settling, unforgettable weekend.

Kevin is a thirtysomething homebody, happily committed to his hydroponics-expert girlfriend, Amber, as they grow weed in their basement in Vancouver. Out of the blue, Amber announces that she has been selected for a reality show where she will compete for one of two seats on the first human-led mission to Mars. If selected, she must stay on Mars for good, because the technology to come home doesn'[Bokinfo]

"Denise Levertov's New & Selected Essays gathers three decades' worth of the poet's most important critical statements. Her subjects are various - poetics, the imagination, politics, spirituality, other writers - and her approach independent minded and richly complex. Here in a single volume are recent essays exploring new ground broken by Levertov in the past decade as well as the finest and most useful prose pieces from The Poet in the World (1973) and Light Up the Cave (1981). With their combination of sensitivity and practicality, the New & Selected Essays will prove enormously helpful to the writer and reader of poetry. As Kirkus Reviews remarked about her prose: "This is humanism in its true sense - her attitude as evidenced (not described) by her writing is such that the reader cannot help but experience life, at least temporarily, with more intensity, joy, and imagination.""--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Touted as the "Jerusalem of the Balkans," the Mediterranean port city of Salonica (Thessaloniki) was once home to the largest Sephardic Jewish community in the world. The collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the city's incorporation into Greece in 1912 provoked a major upheaval that compelled Salonica's Jews to reimagine their community and status as citizens of a nation-state. Jewish Salonica is the first book to tell the story of this tumultuous transition through the voices and perspectives of Salonican Jews as they forged a new place for themselves in Greek society. Devin E. Naar traveled the globe, from New York to Salonica, Jerusalem, and Moscow, to excavate archives once confiscated by the Nazis. Written in Ladino, Greek, French, and Hebrew, these archives, combined with local newspapers, reveal how Salonica's Jews fashioned a new hybrid identity as Hellenic Jews during a period marked by rising nationalism and economic crisis as well as unprecedented Jewish cultural and political vibrancy. Salonica's Jews—Zionists, assimilationists, and socialists—reinvigorated their connection to the city and claimed it as their own until the Holocaust. Through the case of Salonica's Jews, Naar recovers the diverse experiences of a lost religious, linguistic, and national minority at the crossroads of Europe and the Middle East.

Part memoir, part humor, and part myth, this entertaining and inspirational volume explores the moment the author realized his high-school basketball career would not last forever and examines why women continue to be perplexed by men's fascination with sports.

From the shores of Europe to the Mexican-US border, mass migration is one of the most pressing issues we face today. Yet at the same time, calls to defend national sovereignty are becoming ever more vitriolic, with those fleeing war, persecution, and famine vilified as a threat to our security as well as our social and economic order. In this book, written amidst the dark resurgence of appeals to defend 'blood and soil', Donatella Di Cesare challenges the idea of the exclusionary state, arguing that migration is a fundamental human right. She develops an original philosophy of migration that places the migrants themselves, rather than states and their borders, at the centre. Through an analysis of three historic cities, Athens, Rome and Jerusalem, Di Cesare shows how we should conceive of migrants not as an other but rather as resident foreigners. This means recognising that citizenship cannot be based on any supposed connection to the land or an exclusive claim to ownership that would deny the rights of those who arrive as migrants. Instead, citizenship must be disconnected from the possession of territory altogether and founded on the principle of cohabitation - and on the ultimate reality that we are all temporary guests and tenants of the earth. Di Cesare's argument for a new ethics of hospitality will be of great interest to all those concerned with the challenges posed by migration and with the increasingly hostile attitudes towards migrants, as well as students and scholars of philosophy and political theory. --

Doc Paskowitz started surfing in the Gulf of Mexico on Galveston Island in 1930. He's 93, and he's still surfing ( now riding in heaven) While he would never agree, Doc can be considered one of the earliest pioneers of the shape of today's surf culture. He spent nearly 25 years on the road, living in a succession of used campers. It is, quite possibly, the world's longest surf trip. He and his wife raised nine children in those campers, soaking them in the ocean and their idea of how life should be lived. Take a trip with Doc Paskowitz and his family. This easy read is honest and can help you understand his passion for Surfing and Health,

The question of the collaboration of Jews with the Nazi regime during the persecution and extermination of European Jewry is one of the most difficult and sensitive issues surrounding the Holocaust. How could people be forced to cooperate in their own destruction? Why would they help the Nazi authorities round up their own people for deportation, managing the ‘collection points’ and handling the people being deported until the last moment? This book is a major new study of the role of the Jews, and more specifically the ‘Judenrat’ or Jewish Council, in Holocaust Vienna. It was in Vienna that Eichmann developed and tested his model for a Nazi Jewish policy from 1938 onwards, and the leaders of the Viennese Jewish community were the prototypes for all subsequent Jewish councils. By studying the situation in Vienna, it is possible to gain a unique insight into the way that the Nazi regime incorporated the Jewish community into its machinery of destruction. Drawing on recently discovered archives and extensive interviews, Doron Rabinovici explores in detail the actions of individual Jews and Jewish organizations and shows how all of their strategies to protect themselves and others were ultimately doomed to failure. His rich and insightful account enables us to understand in a new way the terrible reality of the victim’s plight: faced with the stark choice of death or cooperation, many chose to cooperate with the authorities in the hope that their actions might turn out to be the lesser evil.

Examines the efforts of creationists to require the teaching of the biblical account of creation in American schools and analyzes the reactions of the scientific community to the controversy

"Thirty-one, in part or in full, of the forty-six Constant Reader pieces are gathered here for the first time in book form. They not only belong with the body of her work, but also express the essence of the period in a telling way" -- Front jacket flap.

Dorothy Parker ( 1893 to 1967) was an American poet and satirist, best known for her wit, wisecracks, and eye for 20th century urban foibles. From a conflicted and unhappy childhood, Parker rose to acclaim, both for her literary output in such venues as The New Yorker and as a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table. Following the breakup of the circle, Parker traveled to Hollywood to pursue screenwriting. Her successes there, including two Academy Award nominations, were curtailed as her involvement in left wing politics led to a place on the infamous Hollywood blacklist. Parker went through three marriages (two to the same man) and survived several suicide attempts, but grew increasingly dependent on alcohol. Dismissive of her own talents, she deplored her reputation as a "wisecracker". Nevertheless, her literary output and reputation for her sharp wit have endured. She sold her first poem to Vanity Fair magazine in 1914 and, some months later, she was hired as an editorial assistant for another Condé Nast magazine, Vogue. She moved to Vanity Fair as a staff writer following two years at Vogue. In 1917, married a Wall Street stock broker, Edwin Pond Parker II but they were separated by his army service in World War I. She had ambivalent feelings about her Jewish heritage given the strong antisemitism of that era and joked that she married to escape her name. In the 1920s alone she published some 300 poems and free verses in outlets including the aforementioned Vanity Fair, Vogue, "The Conning Tower" and The New Yorker along with Life, McCall's and The New Republic. She published her first volume of poetry, Enough Rope, a collection of previously published work along with new material in 1926. The collection sold 47,000 copies]and garnered impressive reviews. The Nation described her verse as "caked with a salty humor, rough with splinters of disillusion, and tarred with a bright black authenticity."

Most histories of Reconstruction deal primarily with political issues and the larger conflicts between Democrats and Republicans, notherners and southerners. The Trouble They Seen departs from this approach to examine in their own words the lives of ordinary ex-slaves who had few skills and fewer opportunities. People are by now familiar with names like Frederick Douglass, Martin R. Delany, and Robert Smalls, but they know little of the men and women of more modest distinction, less still of the anonymous millions whose lives have been recorded in letters, diaries, newspaper accounts, and official documents. Editor Dorothy Sterling has drawn on these primary sources and with cogent commentary depicts the African American experience during Reconstruction, from 1865 to 1877. The period unfolds with immediacy and drama in the voices of African Americans: the problems and promise of the first year; the role of the Freedmen's Bureau; anti-black violence; the initiation of political participation; the development of black colleges; the renaissance in the African American community, a time of unprecedented progress in the fields of politics, education, economics, and culture; and the inevitable tragic struggle by African Americans against southern white efforts to resume political power and to fetter black freedom with a thousand chains more durable than slavery.

Spanning the birth of the industry to its first few decades, this book has approximately 100 full-color portraits of the legends of American comic books―publishers, editors, and artists. Its subjects are popular and obscure, men and women, and it includes several pioneering artists of color.

"This memoir is the story of how curiosity led me to investigate some of the greatest political mysteries of our time, including the JFK assassination in Dallas, the Vatican banking scandal in Rome and the diamond cartel in South Africa. To learn about them, I often found myself a fly-on-the-wall at the highest reaches of the establishment where I saw how presidents, tycoons, bankers and media moguls secretly greased the wheels of power. Some accuse me of being a conspiracist, but that is not correct. I am essentially a puzzle solver. Instead of accepting the received wisdom of the media, I search for a puzzle's missing pieces, such as the autopsy photographs of President John F. Kennedy that were kept from the investigation conducted by the Warren Commission Finding suppressed or overlooked evidence often has the result of overturning the established narrative, as happened when I published my book Inquest on the Commission, but that is very different from seeking a conspiracy. Sometimes, it is true. my work results in uncovering a deep conspiracy, as happened in my investigation of the world diamond cartel; other times, however, it results in discrediting belief in a conspiracy, as happened in my investigation of the murders of numerous Black Panthers (which caused the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times and other newspapers, whose reporting had suggested the existence of an FBI conspiracy, to issue editorial apologies following the publication of my investigation in The New Yorker.) My prime interest has always been in finding gaps in the conventional wisdom about an event. How I came to be a pursuer of lost truths is a curious story of self-actualization"--