When Eli Rubinstein marries a German woman (nicknamed Beast) who may or may not be homosexual and may or may not be Hitler youth, it's not surprising that things go horribly wrong. In an effort to get rid of this nightmarish female, Eli finds himself fighting for survival in the slums of London, handing out payoffs to crooked cops in Chicago, and finally ending up in the gay-friendly climes of San Francisco during the waning days of the Haight Ashbury drug and free love culture. Though this dark, perverse, funny, erotic, and somewhat insane story is ultimately about Eli's battle for freedom, disparate tales about Crowley Magick, the professional world of chess and backgammon, a vampire attack in San Francisco's golden gate park, UFOs in the Oregon woods, and the wise lessons of a Haight Ashbury holy man paint a picture of a colorful time, not so long ago, that no longer exists.

Ghetto Tragedies (1899) 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. "People who have been living in a Ghetto for a couple of centuries, are not able to step outside merely because the gates are thrown down, nor to efface the brands on their souls by putting off the yellow badges. The isolation imposed from without will have come to seem the law of their being." 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 fourth installment of his Ghetto series, Zangwill imagines the lives of everyday Jewish people. Zillah and Jossel, successful boot makers; Daniel Peyser, a father of seven daughters; Isaac Levinsky, the son of a pious Rabbi. These are the lives so lovingly shaped in the author's skillful hands, people whose experiences with love, loss, doubt, and faith are not so different from our own. The tales of Jewish life in Ghetto Tragedies 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 Ghetto Tragedies 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.

Ghetto Comedies (1907) 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. "People who have been living in a Ghetto for a couple of centuries, are not able to step outside merely because the gates are thrown down, nor to efface the brands on their souls by putting off the yellow badges. The isolation imposed from without will have come to seem the law of their being." 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 fifth and final installment of his Ghetto series, Zangwill imagines the lives of everyday Jewish people. A German painter searches for a Jewish model for his painting of Jesus Christ; Solomon Cohen, or S. Cohn, rises to prominence as a Town Councillor in Sudminster while suppressing his Jewish heritage; Bloomah Beckenstein, a young Jewish girl, is blamed for spreading smallpox at her school in London. These are the lives that take shape in the author's skillful hands, people whose experiences with love, loss, doubt, and faith are not so different from our own. The tales of Jewish life in Ghetto Comedies 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 Ghetto Comedies 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.

“A moving act of absolution . . . . This strong novel about a girl who is debased but never destroyed pushes the reader to a new level of understanding of the things people do—and the things that are done to them.”— Washington Post Book World She has hair of ginger and lovely green eyes, and she has just been transported with her family from Terezín to Auschwitz. In short order, her father commits suicide, and her mother and younger brother are dispatched to the gas chambers, but fifteen-year-old Hanka Kauderzová is still alive. Faced with the choice of certain death in the camp or working in a German military brothel, she chooses a chance at life. Passing for an Aryan, Hanka spends her days in the brothel cold, hungry, fearful, and ashamed. She is sustained only by her loathing of the men who visit her and by a fierce, indomitable will to live. This devastatingly beautiful novel explores and delineates the impossible choices one sometimes has to make in life, when the fabric of the world is rent asunder. Soaring beyond the nightmare, it leaves the reader with a transcendent sense of hope. Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade, Yucca, and Good Books imprints, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in fiction—novels, novellas, political and medical thrillers, comedy, satire, historical fiction, romance, erotic and love stories, mystery, classic literature, folklore and mythology, literary classics including Shakespeare, Dumas, Wilde, Cather, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

"Celebrated stage actress Mona Zahid wakes up on Thanksgiving morning to the clamor of guests packed into her Manhattan apartment and to a wave of dread: her in-laws are lurking on the other side of the bedroom door; she's still fighting with her husband; and in just a few weeks she will begin rehearsals as Shakespeare's Cleopatra, the hardest role in theater. In an impulsive burst, Mona bounds out the door with the family dog in tow ("I forgot the parsley!" is her lame excuse) to find her estranged mentor, Milton Katz, who was recently forced out of the legendary theater company he founded amid accusations of sexual misconduct. Mona's escape turns into an overnight adventure that brings her face-to-face with her past, with her creative power and its limitations, and ultimately, with all the people she has ever loved. Beguilingly approachable and intricately constructed, at once funny and sad and wise, Mona Acts Out is a novel about acting and telling the truth, about how we play roles to get through our days, and how the great roles teach us how to live."--Amazon

When a beautiful stranger comes to hear him preach, Pastor Daniel Vedra soon finds himself falling in love with another man's wife. With the brilliance and humanity that have made him a major figure in world literature, Ivan Klima explores the universal themes of love, adultery and God.

Ivan Klima has been acclaimed by The Boston Globe as "a literary gem who is too little appreciated in the West" and a "Czech master at the top of his game." In No Saints or Angels, a Washington Post Best Book of 2001, Klima takes us into the heart of contemporary Prague, where the Communist People's Militia of the Stalinist era marches headlong into the drug culture of the present. Kristyna is in her forties, the divorced mother of a rebellious fifteen-year-old daughter, Jana. She is beginning to love a man fifteen years her junior, but her joy is clouded by worry -- Jana has been cutting school, and perhaps using heroin. Meanwhile Kristyna's mother has forced on her a huge box of personal papers left by her dead father, a tyrant whose Stalinist ideals she despised. No Saints or Angels is a powerful book in which "Mr. Klima's keen sense of history, his deep compassion for the ordinary people caught up in its toils, and his abiding awareness of the fragility and resilience of human life shine through.... Like Anton Chekhov, Mr. Klima is a writer able to show us what's extraordinary about ordinary life." (The Washington Times). "Ultimately, it's Prague, with its centuries of glory and misery, that gives No Saints or Angels its humane power." -- Melvin Jules Bukiet, The Washington Post Book World" A compassionate realist, [Klima] unflinchingly presents the problems facing modern Prague and civilization in general ... [and] fills it with mercy." -- Jennie Yabroff, San Francisco Chronicle "Stirring and valuable." -- Jules Verdone, The Hartford Courant

In artfully crafted interlocking flashbacks set against a vividly drawn scrim of New York City, Busch lets his hapless hero tell his story of the angst-driven complications of both licit and illicit love. It was Greenwich Village in the Sixties, and Zimmer was writing copy for a sleazy PR agency. Rhona was a voluptuous Nazi-hunting librarian who taught him introductory love and guilt and drove him into the arms of the tall blonde shiksa Lillian.

To six-year-old Dori, everything seems possible. To her family and their Peers-secular, left-leaning North American Jews-the young state of Israel seems to offer the same promise, as the starry-eyed kibbutz movement prepares the ground for their ideals of justice and cooperation to take root and flourish. They settle on Eldar in northern Galilee, determined to create a new utopia, but life on this remote hill, three kilometres from the Lebanese border, is far more complex than any of its inhabitants could have imagined. "The Last Rain" tells the story of Eldar's emergence as a kibbutz through the eyes of Dori, as well as through documentary fragments that take the reader on a labyrinthine journey through the characters' collective past. With humour, sensitivity, and a deep love for the land, "The Last Rain" follows the coming of age not only of a young girl, but also of a country in the first fraught years of its existence.

Love's Shadow (1908) is a novel by Ada Leverson. Having established herself as a journalist and short story writer, Leverson published her debut novel in 1907 to moderate acclaim. Entertaining and effortlessly witty, Leverson's prose paints a stunning portrait of the Edwardian era, a time when hope and relative peace proved prosperous for many. Often compared to her close friend Oscar Wilde, Leverson, a pioneering Jewish woman, remains a unique and refreshing voice in English literature. Love's Shadow is the first installment in her Little Ottleys trilogy, a series of novels exploring the romantic lives of a hilariously diverse group of friends. Edith and Bruce Ottley seem to have it all--a charming flat, a healthy child, and a group of entertaining friends. Although they are far from perfect--Bruce can be jealous and quite the hypochondriac at times--their marriage remains strong and their home remains a place of refuge to their frequently lovelorn comrades. Among a dizzying array of faces and names, Hyacinth Verney, Mrs. Eugenia Raymond, Cecil Reeve, and Lord Selsey stand out. Although Hyacinth loves Cecil, a match favored by his uncle Lord Selsey, the young man seems inexplicably smitten with the widow Eugenia, who has no interest in marrying again. Edith and Bruce do their best to make themselves hospitable while defending their home against the hostilities of love, but the hearts and minds of their eclectic guests prove difficult to assuage. Love's Shadow is a humorous tale of romance and desire from Ada Leverson, an underappreciated novelist of the Edwardian era. This edition of Ada Leverson's Love's Shadow is a classic work 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.

Living in a rat-infested hotel in Franco’s post-war Spain, André Bennett, a Canadian painter, loves Toni, his girl friend, who wants him to return home. Roger Kraus, a Nazi on the run, shadows the young artist day and night. They meet on a bridge during the last night of the fiesta, and as the sky is shredded by exploding fireworks, the story draws to its violent climax. Originally published in 1954, The Acrobats marks Mordecai Richler’s stunning debut as a novelist.

Last Seen, Matt Cohen's penultimate novel, was a finalist for the Governor General's Literary Award and the Trillium Book Award. Last Seen is a darkly comic story of two brothers and a woman who brings them both back to life. Harold, the older brother, is handsome and charming but dying of cancer. Alex is bookish and a scholar in Europe. With Francine, a nurse they both once loved, Alec cares for Harold until he dies. One day, Alec goes into a bar full of Elvis impersonators and there meets Francine--and Harold. Why has Harold come back from the dead? In this fragmentary tale of obsessive grieving, Cohen mixes moments of wry humour with touching pathos. Last Seen demonstrates that it takes more than death to untie the knot between two brothers. From the eBook edition.

The hallucinatory, unforgettable account of a moment - or an eternity - in an uncertain love affair The man has actually come to tell his lover that he wants to leave her, but as soon as he walks in he realizes he won't be able to tell her. The woman rolls a joint. They smoke it. And as they drift into another state of mind, he approaches the border zones between being and nonbeing, between living and imagining, or is it between life and death? From the acclaimed author of A Book of Memories we now have this unsettling and strangely beautiful exploration of the impossibility of love. The mysterious musicality and physical intensity of the narration will be familiar to readers of Nadas's other fiction, but Love is a radical new departure.

While living in exile in Berlin, the formidable literary critic Viktor Shklovsky fell in love with Elsa Triolet. He fell into the habit of sending Elsa several letters a day, a situation she accepted under one condition: he was forbidden to write about love. Zoo, or Letters Not about Love is an epistolary novel born of this constraint, and although the brilliant and playful letters contained here cover everything from observations about contemporary German and Russian life to theories of art and literature, nonetheless every one of them is indirectly dedicated to the one topic they are all required to avoid: their author's own unrequited love.

MODERN & CONTEMPORARY FICTION (POST C 1945). Harriet Mansfield, brave, wry and handsome, is determined to triumph no matter what. With a decade of therapy under her belt and a new large inheritance, it seems there is nothing she cannot achieve. So she decides to open the school of her dreams. To her precious little girls, rich in everything but care, she vows to provide the happiest childhoods in the world. For everyone knows that early years passed in delightful ways can set you up for life. But can this ambitious new departure spill some retrospective sweetness onto Harriet's own harsh beginnings, or better still cancel them out altogether? Will the family she's estranged from ever grant her the recognition she craves? Written with deep psychological insight and coal-black humour The Small Hours is a stunning meditation on love, self-love and forgiveness, and their shadowy opposites.

John has crossed the line from performance to reality, from stage to street, from imagination to visceral breath - and he needs to take control before all is lost. Themes that haunt the Berkoff canon are present in this startling novel: his luxurious verbosity; his counterpoint of crude street patter and elegiac proclamation; sex wars; class wars; dislocation and abandonment of love in a thankless and unyielding world. This is a challenging, brutally honest novel that will inspire, enrage and divide - and live on long after the final word. Sod the Bitches! is testament to the power of words. It will shock, amaze, inspire and horrify. This is a book for the brave - a novel to expand your mind and challenge your moral compass and beliefs.

One of the funniest moments in the history of Olympia came when the South African poet Sinclair Beiles entered Girodias' office with sheets of paper adorned by Chinese characters. Telling Girodias a story about youth spent among missionaries in China, Beiles indicated his reams of parchment, and stated that they were unique erotic writings from that nation, and all he'd need to translate this phenomenal document would be some money each week for a new chapter... As it turns out, Beiles was working from an earlier translation of the 15th century erotic classic Jin Ping Mei, a work about Hsi Men (Ximen Qing) and his six wives that, with its graphic descriptions and instructions, is said to have inspired the Kama Sutra, among other books. The Jin, Ping and Mei in the title are the later three wives, and the most interesting ones for our purposes. One of those later spouses, whose name translates as Golden Lotus, is a character from the classic "Outlaws of the Marsh," delightful woman lady who poisons her ugly, smelly, not-getting-it-done first husband to marry the libertine Hsi Men, and is punished for this crime by the tiger-slaying, heroic brother of husband one. In Jin Ping Mei, Hsi Men is able to take advantage of the corrupt regime and have that heroic brother sent far, far away, while he continues to enjoy his wives and lifestyle. Beiles simplified and improved upon his translation, removing tedious interviews with court officials and drawing out some of the more intimate scenes. The work is also known, in English, as "Golden Lotus," "The Love Pagoda," "The Six Wives of Hsi Men," etc...

This moving novel from Peretz Markish is a beautiful exploration of love and loss. Focusing on the character of Stam, readers will follow his journey as he navigates the tumultuous world of early twentieth-century Russia. A must-read for lovers of literary fiction and those interested in Eastern European history. 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.

A "shamelessly funny" ( Kirkus ) and utterly original new novel from Mark Leyner about a father and his intense and devout relationship with his daughter and with alcohol. An anthropologist and his daughter travel to Kermunkachunk, the capital of Chalazia, to conduct research for an ethnography on the Chalazian Mafia Faction (a splinter group of the Chalazian Children's Theater). The book takes place over the course of a night at the Bar Pulpo, Kermunkachunk's #1 spoken-word karaoke bar. Moreover, it's Thursday, "Father/Daughter Nite," when the bar is frequented by actual fathers and daughters as well as couples cosplaying fathers and daughters. Somehow emanating from the letters on an optometrist's eye chart, from karaoke screens in the bar, and from posters on a piazza that's the scene of phantasmagorical and unending mob wars, Last Orgy of the Divine Hermit relentlessly pulls the rug out from under itself, leaving you suspended in a state of perpetual exhilaration. Leyner, one of the most blazingly imaginative and influential writers of the last thirty years, has not only written his funniest novel, he's broken through to something entirely unprecedented. Imagine tripping on a hallucinogen made by an alien intelligence and then wanting to immediately call your dad (in this world or the next) and tell him that you love him--that's what reading Last Orgy of the Divine Hermit is like. It's a novel about the deep pleasures of reading and drinking, the tumultuous reign of a cabal of mystic mobsters, and, of course, the transcendent love of a father for his daughter. Last Orgy of the Divine Hermit is like nothing else you've ever read before.

Step back in time and immerse yourself in the vibrant social tapestry of Paris with Leonard Merrick's "To Tell You the Truth." This collection of short stories offers a glimpse into the romanticism and cultural nuances of Parisian life. Explore tales woven with the delicate threads of human connection, exploring themes of love, friendship, and the everyday dramas that unfold against the backdrop of the iconic city. Merrick's prose paints a vivid picture of Parisian customs and social interactions, capturing the essence of a bygone era. This meticulously prepared edition brings these timeless narratives to life, allowing you to experience the charm and allure of classic French culture. "To Tell You the Truth" is a literary journey into the heart of Paris, a celebration of its enduring romantic spirit and the complexities of its social life. Perfect for readers who appreciate literary fiction and stories steeped in atmosphere. 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.