314 results for "Literature"

A start in life

Brookner, Anita
Anita Brookner's first novel available as a Penguin Essential for the first time. 'Dr Weiss at forty knew that her life had been ruined by literature.' Ruth Weiss an academic is beautiful intelligent and lonely. Studying the heroines of Balzac in order to discover where her own childhood and adult life has gone awry she seeks not salvation but enlightenment. Yet in revisiting her London upbringing her friendships and doomed Parisian love affairs she wonders if perhaps there might not be a chance for a new start in life . . .
Penguin Books 2017-06 176 pages

Dreamers of the Ghetto

Israel Zangwill
Dreamers of the Ghetto (1892) is a collection of stories by Israel Zangwill. Raised in London by parents from Latvia and Poland, Zangwill understood the plight of the city's Jewish community firsthand. Having risen through poverty to become an educator and author, he dedicated his career to the voiceless, the oppressed, and the needy, advocating for their rights and bearing witness to their suffering in some of the most powerful novels and stories of the Victorian era. "This is a Chronicle of Dreamers, who have arisen in the Ghetto from its establishment in the sixteenth century to its slow breaking-up in our own day. Some have become historic in Jewry, others have penetrated to the ken of the greater world and afforded models to illustrious artists in letters..." As a Jewish immigrant who grew up in poverty in London, Israel Zangwill knows that the condition of life in the ghetto changes not just lives, but mentalities. In the third installment of his Ghetto series, Zangwill imagines the lives of such historical Jewish figures as Dutch philosopher Baruch Spinoza, German poet Heinrich Heine, and Prussian lawyer and political activist Ferdinand Lasalle. The tales of Jewish life in Dreamers of the Ghetto earned Zangwill comparisons to Dickens upon publication, and helped to establish him as an author with a gift for intensive character study and a passion for political themes. This edition of Israel Zangwill's Dreamers of the Ghetto is a classic of British literature reimagined for modern readers. Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book. With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.
West Margin Press 2021-10-12 382 pages

Revenge A Tale of Old Jamaica

H. G. De Lisser
Revenge: A Tale of Old Jamaica (1919) is a novel by H. G. de Lisser. Born and raised in Jamaica, H. G. de Lisser was one of the leading Caribbean writers of the early twentieth century. Concerned with issues of race, urban life, and modernization, de Lisser dedicated his career to representing the lives and concerns of poor and middle-class Jamaicans. In Revenge: A Tale of Old Jamaica , de Lisser portrays the deadly Morant Bay Rebellion of 1865, a protest by poor black laborers unsatisfied with the economic and political establishment and the widespread lack of opportunity for freedmen in Jamaica. In response to a period of scarcity brought on by drought and disease, as well as to acts of police brutality against peaceful protestors, a group of several hundred Jamaicans led by Paul Bogle took to the streets in an effort to fight for their rights. In de Lisser's fictionalized version of events, he explores the experiences of white and black Jamaicans in the days leading up to the violence. As signs of unrest grow impossible to ignore, those in power prove more than willing to reject the pleas of the oppressed, writing their anger off as nothing more than a passing phase. Seated on their veranda overlooking the mountains of the Jamaican countryside, the Carlton family observes a series of fires growing in the nearby hills. While the women see them as a sign of violence to come, the men seem entirely unphased by the threat of an uprising. In response to his mother's fears, Dick Carlton attempts to calm her: "'Our people are just now passing through one of their periodical fits of depression, and you will probably hear them expressing fears of negro uprisings and all that sort of thing [...] and you may be frightened. Don't allow yourself to be. The danger is purely imaginary.'" As night falls with no end to the fires, however, and as the songs and cries of the oppressed grow closer, his sense of security will prove a foolish thing indeed. This edition of H. G. de Lisser's Revenge: A Tale of Old Jamaica is a classic of Jamaican literature reimagined for modern readers. Since our inception in 2020, Mint Editions has kept sustainability and innovation at the forefront of our mission. Each and every Mint Edition title gets a fresh, professionally typeset manuscript and a dazzling new cover, all while maintaining the integrity of the original book. With thousands of titles in our collection, we aim to spotlight diverse public domain works to help them find modern audiences. Mint Editions celebrates a breadth of literary works, curated from both canonical and overlooked classics from writers around the globe.
West Margin Press 2021-05 200 pages

A happy marriage: a novel

Yglesias, Rafael
Enrique and Margaret Sabas have been married for 30 years. Now, Margaret is under hospice care in the final stages of cancer and asks Enrique to control access to her during her final days so that she can say good-bye to a select few on her own terms. Enrique does so, patiently waiting for his own turn. As he waits, he remembers their life together, from their first conversation forward. The story alternates between past and present, contrasting the budding and then mature relationship to the sad reality of its end.
Scribner 2010-08-10 371 pages

And this is the light

Goldberg, Leah
It is set in the summer of 1931, when twenty-year-old Nora Krieger returns to her small-town home in Lithuania from university in Berlin ready to present her new, mature self. Instead, her time at home becomes a period of unrequited love, difficult memories and introspection. Hopeful that her long wallks and intellectual banter with Albert Arin will lead to romance. Nora must abandon the notion when she discovers Arin's affair with his daughter's friend. Determined to come to terms with her relationship with her father, who was driven to madness after being tortured in the First World War, Nora must confront her own fear of losing her sanity. Young, educated and Jewish, she must accept the limits imposed on her by a class-conscious, increasingly anti-Semitic society.
Toby Press 2011 222 pages

Criminal practices: Symon's on crime writing 60's to 90's

Symons, Julian
This is a collection of articles, reviews, interviews and essays by the 1990 Cartier Diamond Dagger award winner - critic and writer, Julian Symons. Following an introduction entitled The Crime Story Yesterday, Today, Tommorrow, this book offers a collection of Symons's writing on crime fiction from Britain, the United States and elsewhere, plus a section on real life stories, such as The Hiss Affair and the Yorkshire Ripper.
Macmillan 1994 229 pages

The sensualist: a novella

Torday, Daniel
"Raised in Baltimore in the '90s, 17-year-old Samuel Gerson is ready to be rid of his high school baseball team, his protective upbringing, and the tight-knit Jewish community in which he's spent his whole life. But when he befriends enigmatic Dmitri Zilber, a recent Russian Jewish immigrant who is obsessed with the works of Dostoevsky, Samuel's world begins to shift. In the wake of his grandfather's suicide, as his life increasingly entangles with that of Dmitri and his beautiful sister Yelizaveta, it sets in motion a series of events that culminates in a disturbing act of violence. A quietly devastating portrait of late adolescence, The Sensualist examines the culture we inherit as it collides with the one we create"--from the cover.
Nouvella 2012 177 pages

The season of Pepsi Meyers

Rotenberg, Abie
The year is 2040 and it's been thirteen years since the New York Yankees played post-season baseball. With the number one pick in the draft, they choose a remarkably gifted ballplayer from the Binghamton, New York area, named Pepsi Meyers. Although just eighteen years old, Pepsi earns a place on the Major League roster and revitalizes the Yankees with his spectacular play. Pepsi also happens to be Jewish. As the season progresses, the city is energized by the newfound success of its beloved team. At the same time, Pepsi and his family discover a world they never knew existed, as they are exposed for the first time, to Torah and the way of life it endorses. Pepsi's struggle with the tug-of-war between the spiritual and the mundane and how it affects him, his teammates and the City of New York is both an entertaining baseball tale, and a study into the priorities and meaningful choices we all have to make in our lives.
Audley Street Books 2015-08-25 245 pages

The Spy

Maksim Gorky,Thomas Seltzer
"The Spy: The Story of a Superfluous Man" by Maksim Gorky plunges readers into the turbulent heart of Russia during a period of revolution and political upheaval. This gripping historical fiction, set against the backdrop of the 1905-1907 Russian Revolution, explores themes of political intrigue and the shadowy world of espionage. Gorky, a master of Russian literature, crafts a compelling narrative that resonates with timeless relevance. Delve into a society rife with secrets and betrayals, where the lines between loyalty and treachery blur. "The Spy" offers a glimpse into the complex forces that shaped Russia's destiny. This meticulously prepared print edition preserves the integrity of Gorky's original work, making it a valuable addition to any collection of classic literature and historical fiction. Experience the drama and tension of a nation on the brink in this powerful story of a man caught in the crossfire. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Creative Media Partners, LLC 2025-03-28 222 pages

The Invisible Book

Sergei Dovlatov
One of the heroes of late Soviet literature, Sergei Dovlatov was as admired and beloved in the United States as he was among the Soviet intelligentsia. A regular contributor to The New York Times and The New Yorker , the “delightful” ( The New Yorker ) Dovlatov captured all that was ridiculous and brutal about Soviet life, but always with the lightest touch. The Invisible Book is a marvelously funny novel about the daily compromises and humiliations of life as a Soviet writer. Featuring letters from stubborn editors and foolish officials, The Invisible Book is unflinching in its portrait of a cruel bureaucracy, but, at the same time, never less than hilarious.
Overlook Press 2014-09-24 144 pages

The woman who wrote the Bible: a comedy of truly biblical proportions

Scliar, Moacyr
"Moacyr Scliar was the preeminent literary voice of the Jewish immigrant experience in modern Brazil. Now his most ambitiously satirical and irreverent novel is at last translated into English, offering not just a significant contribution to Latin American and Jewish literature but to world literature as well. In a past-life therapy session, a mysterious woman makes a remarkable breakthrough when she discovers that in a previous life she was one of King Solomon's seven hundred wives. In language that hilariously mixes modern jargon and biblical diction, she sets out to tell the story of her earlier incarnation three thousand years in the past, revealing how she went from a provincial nobody to a queen. Yet being royalty isn't all it's cracked up to be. As the least desirable of King Solomon's wives and concubines, she is unceremoniously discarded and forgotten in his harem. But as luck would have it, she possesses a unique gift: she is a woman who knows how to read and write. Once her talent is discovered, King Solomon charges her with writing what will become one of the most important texts in human history. Along the way our nameless narrator leverages her newfound status as royal scribe to bring about her own secret agenda. A brilliant feminist critique skewering the absurdities of patriarchy, The Woman Who Wrote the Bible is a comic masterpiece of truly biblical proportions"-- Provided by publisher.
University of New Mexico Press 2026-03-17 136 pages

HebrewPunk

Lavie Tidhar
THE CLASSIC COLLECTION OF JEWISH FANTASY! "Marks a milestone in the literature of the fantastic." - Paul Di Filippo, author of The Steampunk Trilogy In HebrewPunk , World Fantasy Award winning author Lavie Tidhar had reinvented pulp fantasy fiction in Jewish terms, creating a hidden world where fantasy, horror and history intertwine. Featuring the Rabbi, the Rat and the Tzaddik, their stories take us on a journey from an expedition to an alternate world in Kenya in 1904 to the drug-soaked streets of 1920s London and to Transylvania in the Second World War. "Imagine Hard-Boiled Kabbalah... If you like your otherworld fun noir, have I got a book for you!" - Kage Baker, author of In the Garden of Iden "Wondrous, adventurous, and thought-provoking." - Ellen Datlow, co-editor of The Year's Best Fantasy and Horror "Tidhar writes a sort of intensified supernatural action-surrealism that fair rattles along and is full of surprises--not only plot twists and thrills but a level of conceptual surprise, a reinvigoration of some of the more tired conventions of the fantasy-horror genre... not to be missed." - Adam Roberts, author of The Thing Itself
Jabberwocky Literary Agency, Incorporated 2023-04-18 188 pages

Running Fiercely Toward a High Thin Sound A Novel

Judith Katz
25th ANNIVERSARY EDITION Nadine Pagan's dyke sister Jane wants to find her. Her lover Rose wants to marry her. And her mother Fay wants to forget her. All Nadine wants is to stop the buzzing in her head. Running Fiercely Toward a High Thin Sound follows Nadine's (née Morningstar) adventures as she escapes from her incendiary Jewish family into the lesbian town of New Chelm--and far beyond. This is the novel Isaac Bashevis Singer might have written if he'd been a lesbian with a keen eye for contemporary middle-class assimilation. It's Jewish magical lesbian realism, a good story, and a dynamic piece of writing. Includes an all new introduction by the author Judith Katz is the author of two published novels, The Escape Artist and Running Fiercely Toward a High Thin Sound , which won the 1992 Lambda Literary Award for Best Lesbian Fiction. She teaches cultural studies and literature courses for the University of Minnesota's Center for Jewish Studies.
Firebrand Books 1992 186 pages

Bad Connections

Joyce Johnson
The award-winning author of Minor Characters writes with delicious transparency about a love that cannot be harnessed and a woman who refuses to be deceived In the great wave of husband-leaving ushered in by the Sexual Revolution, Molly Held frees herself from her cold, flagrantly unfaithful husband after their final quarrel turns violent. With her five-year-old son, she lights out for an Upper West Side apartment and the new life she hopes to find with Conrad Schwartzberg-the charismatic radical lawyer who has recently become her lover. Having escaped from a desert, she lands in a swamp. While Conrad radiates positive energy, he is unable to tell Molly-or anyone who loves him-the truth. No longer the wronged wife, Molly now finds herself the Other Woman. She is sharing Conrad with Roberta, another refugee from marriage-with Conrad's movements between the two of them disguised by his suspiciously frequent out-of-town engagements. Roberta either knows nothing or prefers to look the other way, but Molly's maddening capacity for double vision takes over her mind. What saves her from herself is her well-developed sense of irony, which never fails her-or the reader. "Ironic, witty and always graceful." -Marilyn French, author of The Women's Room "Johnson . . . reveals a knack for lyric bitterness." -Kirkus Reviews "Another superb novel of feminine risk-taking." -Ann Douglas " Bad Connections] is controlled, smooth, deftly written: it evokes scene and character with admirable sure swiftness. . . . Joyce Johnson's touches are all true." -Harper's Magazine "Joyce Johnson is a writer of wit and perception . . . and she has a keen eye for the irony of modern life." -The New York Times Book Review "Often funny, sometimes cathartically angry, always skillful in rendering the small, excruciating moments that add up to the misery of love gone bad." -The Village Voice "The new literature of the aggrieved woman has produced something here quite memorable, a sad, beautiful casebook of unrequited love, unrequited humanity." -E. L. Doctorow "Painfully perceptive, psychologically accurate." -Judith Rossner "A subtle, witty, rueful tour de force of that strange new territory which all of us now inhabit: modern women's modern lives." -Barbara Probst Solomon Joyce Johnson was born in 1935 in New York City, the setting for all her fiction: Come and Join the Dance, recognized as the first Beat novel by a woman writer, Bad Connections, and In the Night Caf . She is best known for her memoir Minor Characters, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1983 and dealt with coming of age in the 1950s and with her involvement with Jack Kerouac. She has published two other Beat-related books: Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters, and The Voice Is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac. She has also written a second memoir, Missing Men, and the nonfiction title What Lisa Knew: The Truths and Lies of the Steinberg Case.
Open Road Integrated Media, Incorporated 2014-06-17 264 pages

Judgment A Novel

David Bergelson
Never before available in English, Judgment is a work of startling power by David Bergelson, the most celebrated Yiddish prose writer of his era. Originally published in 1929 and set in 1920 during the Russian civil war, Judgment traces the death of the shtetl and the birth of the “new, harsher world” created by the 1917 revolution. Jews and non-Jews smuggle people, goods, and anti-Bolshevik literature back and forth across the new political border. Filipov acts as the arbiter of "judgment" to prisoners in a Bolshevik outpost, who include Spivak, a counterrevolutionary; Lemberger, a pious and wealthy Jew; a seductive woman referred to as "the blonde"; and a memorable cast of smugglers and criminals. Ordinary people, depicted in a grotesque and modernist style—comparable to Isaac Babel’s Red Cavalry —confront the overwhelming forces of history, whose ultimate outcome remains unknown.
Northwestern University Press 2017-09-15 272 pages

Ziff: a life? : a novel

Lelchuk, Alan
Ziff: A Life? is the latest tour de force by an extraordinary novelist with explosive verbal energy and intelligence, sexual sensibility, and drive, who has been acclaimed by Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and Wallace Stegner. Who is Arthur Ziff? One of our greatest living writers or an impertinent provocateur? A true literary master or a clever tactician who seduces the reading public? It is narrator Danny Levitan’s job to find out who Ziff really is, in a compelling novel about the writing life that is at once comic and provocative, producing a memorable reading experience. Sensational publishing and serious literature collide when Levitan, a has-been writer, is offered a hefty advance to write a biography of Ziff, the scourge of myriad Jewish-American readers and a titan among the world’s literary giants. For years, Ziff has been sharing secrets, manuscripts, and sexual escapades with his longtime and less successful friend Danny. But, old friendships aside, Ziff hardly welcomes an incendiary study of his life, and is determined to thwart Danny, with legal roadblocks and personal humiliation. Danny must decide whether to accept the advance and risk the rollercoaster of recriminations that will surely follow. He recounts with humor and often wrenching anguish his journey of discovery into the land of Ziff, and the hard-won truths he finds there—original insights into a man who has crafted his novels, often savagely, from the lives of his friends, including Danny’s life. An unabashed look at the ruthless forging of literary careers and a heady brew of books within a book, Ziff: A Life? will enthrall readers of great fiction everywhere and anyone eager for a peek through the keyhole of contemporary literary celebrity.
Carroll & Graf Publishers 2003 408 pages