270 results for "World History"

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

How sweet it is!

Rosenbaum, Thane
Set in Miami Beach in 1972, this novel follows the Posner family--two Holocaust survivors, Sophie and Jacob, and their son, Adam--doing everything they can to avoid one another in a city with an infinite supply of colorful diversions. In '72 Miami hosted both the Republican and Democratic political conventions and experienced the rise of the counterculture, the Cold War, and the desegregation of the old South. Miami Beach was to be the Posner's salvation. Instead they discover their lives quickly turning into a Disney World of funhouse mirrors and chaotic rides that give them front row seats through a transformational year in American culture, politics, and history.
Mandel Vilar Press 2015 194 pages

Radek: a novel

Heym, Stefan
"Through this dramatic history by Stefan Heym, we become intimate with the story of the maverick and internationalist Karl Radek, known as the editor of the newspaper of record throughout the Soviet era, Isvestia. Beginning as Lenin's companion at the dawning of the October Revolution, Radek later became Stalin's favorite intellectual - only to find himself entangled in the great purges of the late 1930s and scripting his own trial. In this, his last historical novel, Heym reveals Radek as a brilliant Bolshevik journalist and politician who found himself at every turn of the wheel of fate. A central figure of the communist world, Radek was such a controversial and perennially ambiguous personality that even his historical biography seems a work of fiction. With his thick glasses and most non-Aryan appearance, marked by what some might have seen as distinctively Jewish argumentative skills and humor, Radek's enormous talent as a writer, political acumen, and continuous curiosity carried him through event after event. In the struggles of the revolutionary movement Radek changed sides several times and came into conflict with Stalin, was exiled to Siberia, capitulated and resumed his editorial duties at Isvestia -- only to get caught up in the purge trials and sentenced to prison, where he died. As Heym sculpts credible conversations with Lenin, Luxemburg, Liebknecht, Trotsky, Stalin, and many others (all seen from Radek's perspective) we come to know Radek as a man haunted by the fear that the insurgency will cease to move forward, living his life as a frenzied chase in pursuit of the continuation of the revolution, until the very end. Originally published in Munich in 1995, this first-ever English translation of Radek fashions the inner voice of a unique figure in the global revolutionary wave of the first half of the twentieth century"--
Monthly Review Press 2022 614 pages

In the days of Simon Stern: a novel

Cohen, Arthur A.
Nathan, a blind Jewish scribe, tells the story of the coming of the Messiah in the person of one Simon Stern—from his birth on the Lower East Side, through his career as a millionaire dealer in real estate, to his building of a refuge for the Jewish remnant of World War II. "A majestic work of fiction that should stand world literature's test of time, to be read and reread. A masterpiece."— Commonweal "This book ensnares one of the most extraordinarily daring ideas to inhabit an American novel in a number of years. For one thing, it is that risky devising, dreamed of only by the Thomas Manns of the world, a serious and vastly conceived fiction bled out of the theological imagination. For another, it is clearly an 'American' novel—altogether American, despite its Jewish particularity: it is not so much about the history of the Jews as it is about the idea of the New World as haven. . . . In its teeming particularity every vein of this book runs with a brilliance of Jewish insight and erudition to be found in no other novelist. Arthur Cohen is the first writer of any American generation to compose a profoundly Jewish fiction on a profoundly Western theme."—Cynthia Ozick, New York Times Book Review "This stately, ambitious amalgam of Jewish myth, history, theology, and speculations on the Jewish soul is like an enormous Judaic archeological ruin—often hard for the uninitiated to interpret, but impressive. . . . Intelligent, inventive, fascinating."— New Yorker
University of Chicago Press 1988 464 pages

The Last Secret of the Deverills

Santa Montefiore
Bestselling author Santa Montefiore’s spellbinding, historical trilogy reaches its sweeping and heartwarming conclusion in The Last Secret of the Deverills. A new generation of love and war at Castle Deverill... Ireland, 1939. Peace flourishes throughout the country, but much has changed for the Deverill family. In Dublin, Martha Wallace searches for her birth mother. Given up for adoption as a baby and raised in America, Martha returns to Ireland to connect with her Irish roots. Instead, she falls in love with the impossibly charming JP Deverill, and together they uncover the truth about her family. At Castle Deverill, the humble daughter of the castle’s former cook is now Countess di Marcantonio and mistress of the Castle. Bridie is determined to make the splendid surroundings her home, but to do so she must turn a blind eye to the failings of her husband and son. Kitty has settled into her life with Robert and their two children, but when Jack O’Leary returns to Ballinakelly with a family of his own, she realizes she never forgot her first love, even though his heart belongs elsewhere. As the Second World War hovers on the horizon, the Deverills uncover a secret that will forever change their lives. The Last Secret of the Deverills is the dramatic conclusion to a stunning saga about a family caught in the sweep of history, and the ties that keep them together.
Simon & Schuster UK 2019-01-01 480 pages

The Mayakovsky tapes: a novel

Littell, Robert
"In March 1953, four women meet in Room 408 of Moscow's deluxe Metropole Hotel. They have gathered, not altogether willingly, to reminisce about Vladimir Mayakovsky, the poet who in death had become a national idol of Soviet Russia. In life, however, he was a much more complicated figure. Each of these ladies loved Mayakovsky in the course of his life, and as they piece together their memories of him, a portrait of the artist emerges. From his early years as a leader of the Futurist movement to years as a propagandist for the Revolution, to the censorship battles that turned him against the State, Mayakovsky is revealed as a passionate, complex man who lived at the center of history and fought to hold onto his ideals even in the face of a world changing for the worse. The Mayakovsky Tapes is an ambitious, impressive novel that captures the tumultuous life of one of the most significant writers of the Soviet era"--
Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press 2016-11-22 243 pages

The Womanizer A Man of His Time

Rick Salutin
Award-winning novelist, journalist, and playwright Rick Salutin takes us into the world of his protagonist, Max -- economist, leftist, and reluctant but incorrigible womanizer. Max’s amorous adventures begin at the age of eight when the young Casanova finds himself running from the scene of his first crime, a surreptitious kiss on the couch with the neighbour’s daughter. For the next few decades women become participants in Max’s awkward and often hilarious journey to self-discovery -- some willing, some reluctant, some unwitting. We follow Max from the 50s to the 90s, through shifting sexual codes and practices, from Toronto to London and Paris, and, most importantly, from one woman to another. He is doomed to repeat this history until he learns from it. Resonant with authority, experience, and self-deprecating insight, The Womanizer explores the riddles of growing up and the discovery that we understand ourselves only through others and that our most intimate moments are clues to our true selves.
National Geographic Books 2003-10-07 336 pages

Blockbuster

Marx, Patricia
Former Saturday Night Live writers Patricia Marx and Douglas G. McGrath take aim at Hollywood in this wicked, satirical novel about the making of the flop of flops. Through the 1930s and 40s, X. Y. Schwerdloff brought us the best: the best comedies ( Let's Play Golf ), the best dramas ( Surprise Witness ), the best musicals ( Sing-a-ling ), even the best World War II propaganda ( Tokyo, Kansas ). But by the 60s, the legendary Schwerdloff studio had fallen on hard times. To get out of accepting an assignment at the studio, many actors served in Vietnam. Fugitives liked to appear in a Schwerdloff film because they would be safe from being seen. Now, it is up to Bucky Schwerdloff to save his father's studio. He must produce a blockbuster. To do so, he hires the most successful director in Hollywood, Ferris Keneally, whose last film, The Blinkies, broke box office records. Bucky promises Keneally that he can make whatever film he wants. Thus begins the hilarious drama of the most breathtaking flop in Hollywood history. There has never been a film to match Keneally's version of The Pilgrim's Progress, about which one film critic wrote: "You are mesmerized by it . . . the same way you can't take your eyes away from a bad car accident." "One of the most original and witty takeoffs on Hollywood . . . a delicious read."--Judith Crist
Bantam Books 1988 219 pages

Before You Go

Jerome Weidman
The Sarno family, with a history of practicing the alternative medicine of ‘cupping’, is entrenched in New York’s lower East Side. Celia is eager to break away from her life and family and when Ben Ivey shows an interest, she sees him as a means of escape. Ben needs the ‘cupping’ to recover from a withdrawal, both physical and mental. When he recovers he fades from the Sarno’s lives only to reappear later to ask Celia to marry him. She comes to Oregon to see him bringing Julie, her sister. The twists and turns, anger and resentment continues until Julie is needed to help Ben with an important World War II assignment. Complex and multi-situational; this is not necessarily an easy read, but is worth the effort.
Pinnacle Books 1976-12 438 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

The emperor's tomb

Roth, Joseph
An intensely beautiful book about one of history’s bleakest periods The Emperor’s Tomb – the last novel Joseph Roth wrote – is a haunting elegy to the vanished world of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and a magically evocative paean to the passing of time and the loss of hope. The Emperor’s Tomb runs from 1913 to 1938, from the eve of one world war to the eve of the next, from disaster to disaster. Striped with beauty and written in short propulsive chapters – full of upheavals, reversals and abrupt twists of plot – the novel powerfully sketches a time of change and loss. Prophetic and regretful, intuitive and exact, Roth tells of one man’s foppish, sleepwalking, spoiled youth and then his struggle to come to terms with the uncongenial society of post-First World War Vienna, financial ruin, and the first intimations of Nazi barbarities.
New Directions 2013-04-22 167 pages

The house of Rajani

Hilu, Alon
"The year is 1895, Jaffa. Salah Rajani, a troubled Muslim boy living in a dilapidated mansion surrounded by orange groves, suffers from peculiar visions about a disaster which is set to befall his people. His life is changed by the arrival of a handsome young man, a dynamic Jewish settler, new to the city, by the name of Isaac Luminsky. Luminsky covets both the fertile lands of the Rajani estate and Salah's beautiful mother Afifa, and his friendship with the boy is destined to lead to violence and tragedy." "This rich and colourful novel is made up of the two opposing journals of Hilu's intriguing and extraordinary protagonists as they negotiate love, honour and betrayal in the changing world of nineteenth-century Palestine." --Book Jacket.
Harvill Secker 2010 279 pages

Men Without Bones

Gerald Kersh
Venture into this alarmingly convincing world, meet the horse whose stubbornness changed history, or the man damned to everlasting love, or the murderer who confessed... and confessed... and confessed. Learn, too the secret of the Mona Lisa's smile, or what really happened to Ambrose Bierce. And ponder, if you can, the case of Simple Simon, who lost the only important thing he had--and never even missed it. Lean back, relax, take a long look at the world of Kersh. You may never recover.
Disruptive Publishing 2007-03 200 pages

The Great American Novel

William Carlos. Williams
The Great American Novel (1923) is an experimental novel by William Carlos Williams. Although he is predominately known as a poet, Williams frequently pushed the limits of prose style throughout his career. In the defining decade of Modernism, Williams sought to try his hand at the so-called "Great American Novel," a concept fueling impassioned debate in academic and artistic circles nationwide. Far from conventional, Williams' novel is a metafictional foray into matters more postmodern than modern, a commentary masquerading as narrative and a satire of the all-American overreliance on cliché in form and content. "If there is progress then there is a novel. Without progress there is nothing. Everything exists from the beginning. I existed in the beginning. I was a slobbering infant. Today I saw nameless grasses--I tapped the earth with my knuckle. It sounded hollow. It was dry as rubber. Eons of drought. No rain for fifteen days. No rain. It has never rained. It will never rain." Williams' novel begins with the word and a birth. Language describes the experience of awakening to experience, of coming into consciousness as a living being in a living world. Using words from everyday speech, he builds a novel out of observations, a book that remains conscious of itself throughout. Like the child whose first experience with the written word often comes from names and slogans stretched over trucks and billboards, the reader eventually comes to accept their new reality, a world where people love and succeed and fail, where history and art intercede to make meaning where they can. The Great American Novel showcases Williams' experimental form, stretching the meaning of "novel" to its outermost limit. This edition of William Carlos Williams' The Great American Novel is a classic of American 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.
Mint Editions 2021-05 72 pages

Joseph Perl's Revealer of secrets: the first Hebrew novel

Perl, Joseph
The dawning of the nineteenth century found the Jews of Eastern Europe torn between the forces of progress and reaction as they took their first tentative steps toward the modern world. In a war of words and of books, Haskala—the Jewish Enlightenment—did battle with the religious revival movement known as Hasidism. Perl, an ardent advocate of Enlightenment, unleashed the opening salvo with the publication in 1819 of Revealer of Secrets. The novel tried to pass itself off as a hasidic holy book when it was, in fact, a broadside against Hasidism—a parody of its teachings and of the language of its holy books. The outraged hasidim responded by buying up and burning as many copies as they could.Dov Taylor's careful translation and commentary make this classic of Hebrew literature available and accessible to the contemporary English-speaking reader while preserving the integrity and bite of Perl's original. With Hasidism presently enjoying a remarkable rebirth, the issues in Revealer of Secrets are all the more relevant to those seeking to balance reason and faith. As the first Hebrew novel, the work will also be of great interest to students of modern Hebrew literature and modern Jewish history.
Westview Press 1997 377 pages

Joseph Perl's Revealer of secrets: the first Hebrew novel

Perl, Joseph
The dawning of the nineteenth century found the Jews of Eastern Europe torn between the forces of progress and reaction as they took their first tentative steps toward the modern world. In a war of words and of books, Haskala—the Jewish Enlightenment—did battle with the religious revival movement known as Hasidism. Perl, an ardent advocate of Enlightenment, unleashed the opening salvo with the publication in 1819 of Revealer of Secrets. The novel tried to pass itself off as a hasidic holy book when it was, in fact, a broadside against Hasidism—a parody of its teachings and of the language of its holy books. The outraged hasidim responded by buying up and burning as many copies as they could.Dov Taylor's careful translation and commentary make this classic of Hebrew literature available and accessible to the contemporary English-speaking reader while preserving the integrity and bite of Perl's original. With Hasidism presently enjoying a remarkable rebirth, the issues in Revealer of Secrets are all the more relevant to those seeking to balance reason and faith. As the first Hebrew novel, the work will also be of great interest to students of modern Hebrew literature and modern Jewish history.
Westview Press 1997 377 pages

Lives and embers

Rosenberg, Yaakov ben Gershon
Remarkable prose collection from a notable Australian poet. If life is a cosmic stage where illusions are the only reality, says Jacob G. Rosenberg, it is through these illusions that we can sometimes better recognize our world, our fellows, and ourselves. Such is the author's hope in this book. The stories in the first part, Lives, explore dimensions of the human landscape. The shorter pieces that make up Embers, inspired by the midrashic tradition of biblical interpretation, investigate the eternal human drama through the prisms of scripture, history, and folklore.
University of Alabama Press 2007 183 pages

Stateless

Alan Gold,Mike Jones
In this next thrilling story from Alan Gold and Mike Jones, we meet Shalman, a freedom-fighter turned peacenik and archaeologist, and his young beautiful wife, Judit, a refugee from the horrors of Stalin's USSR. As the Second World War draws to a close, and the world begins to learn the truth about Hitler's genocide, the foundation of the State of Israel as a permanent home for what's left of the Jewish people becomes increasingly urgent. In Palestine, Arab and Jewish forces fight each other and the British for supremacy and the right to own the land, causing a nightmare environment of hatred and suspicion. But a deeply buried global conspiracy, which has its origin in Stalin's Russia, seeks to undermine Israel's future as an independent nation. A plot to fashion the fledgling nation as a puppet of the Soviet Union rests upon a handful of committed Jewish Communists, led secretly by Judit. But is she a heartless assassin, a disciple of the evils of Beria and the Kremlin, or a committed fusion of Zionist and Communist? And in the darkest recesses of ancient history, we meet Shalman's ancestors, themselves descendants of the builders of Solomon's Temple. As the family escapes the nightmare of the Roman occupation of Jerusalem, it witnesses the glories of the Islamic renaissance in Baghdad and the rampages of the Crusaders through the region. Another exciting instalment in this story of the births of nations and of the strength of their people.
Simon & Schuster 2014 480 pages

Joseph Perl's Revealer of secrets: the first Hebrew novel

Perl, Joseph
The dawning of the nineteenth century found the Jews of Eastern Europe torn between the forces of progress and reaction as they took their first tentative steps toward the modern world. In a war of words and of books, Haskaia-the Jewish Enlightenment-did battle with the religious revival movement known as Hasidism. Perl, an ardent advocate of Enlightenment, unleashed the opening salvo with the publication in 1819 of Revealer of Secrets . The novel tried to pass itself off as a hasidic holy book when it was, in fact, a broadside against Hasidism-a parody of its teachings and of the language of its holy books. The outraged hasidim responded by buying up and burning as many copies as they could. Dov Taylor's careful translation and commentary make this classic of Hebrew literature available and accessible to the contemporary English-speaking reader while preserving the integrity and bite of Perl's original. With Hasidism presently enjoying a remarkable rebirth, the issues in Revealer of Secrets are all the more relevant to those seeking to balance reason and faith. As the first Hebrew novel, the work will also be of great interest to students of modern Hebrew literature and modern Jewish history.
Routledge 2019-06-07 377 pages

The king at the edge of the world: novel

Phillips, Arthur
Queen Elizabeth’s spymasters recruit an unlikely agent—the only Muslim in England—for an impossible mission in a mesmerizing novel from “one of the best writers in America” ( The Washington Post ) “Evokes flashes of Hilary Mantel, John le Carré and Graham Greene, but the wry, tricky plot that drives it is pure Arthur Phillips.”— The Wall Street Journal NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW AND THE WASHINGTON POST The year is 1601. Queen Elizabeth I is dying, childless. Her nervous kingdom has no heir. It is a capital crime even to think that Elizabeth will ever die. Potential successors secretly maneuver to be in position when the inevitable occurs. The leading candidate is King James VI of Scotland, but there is a problem. The queen’s spymasters—hardened veterans of a long war on terror and religious extremism—fear that James is not what he appears. He has every reason to claim to be a Protestant, but if he secretly shares his family’s Catholicism, then forty years of religious war will have been for nothing, and a bloodbath will ensue. With time running out, London confronts a seemingly impossible question: What does James truly believe? It falls to Geoffrey Belloc, a secret warrior from the hottest days of England’s religious battles, to devise a test to discover the true nature of King James’s soul. Belloc enlists Mahmoud Ezzedine, a Muslim physician left behind by the last diplomatic visit from the Ottoman Empire, as his undercover agent. The perfect man for the job, Ezzedine is the ultimate outsider, stranded on this cold, wet, and primitive island. He will do almost anything to return home to his wife and son. Arthur Phillips returns with a unique and thrilling novel that will leave readers questioning the nature of truth at every turn.
Random House 2020 264 pages