Critics in Britain are already raving about Charlotte Mendelson’s excoriatingly funny yet deeply humane novel about a glamorous London family that happens to be falling apart. The Rubins are the perfect family. They’re wonderfully happy and very glamorous. The mother, Claudia, is the ultimate Jewish a powerful rabbi known for her charm, brains, and determination. Now this dynastic Jewish family is getting ready to marry off the perfect eldest son. History, community, and even gastronomy unite the guests lucky enough to attend this joyous occasion. But when the groom -- one minute before exchanging vows -- bolts with the wrong woman, the myths that have defined this family take on darker overtones. Mendelson’s astonishing eye for detail, as well as her just-right balance of plot and character, makes the unfolding of this story an uncommon treat. In a marvelously compressed style that also bursts with life, she reveals how all four adult Rubin children, and their parents, struggle with huge secrets, sexual frustration and sexual experimentation, and many betrayals. Charlotte Mendelson opens a window on a realm rarely explored in British the complicated world of English Jewry. But to watch this seemingly blessed family drastically, disastrously fall apart before regaining balance is to understand that their struggles -- like all of ours -- are universal ones.

In Menachem's Seed , Carl Djerassi , world-renowned scientist and inventor of the birth-control pill, brings us a new novel that explores the human--and passionate--side of science. Melanie Laidlaw and Menachem Dvir meet at a series of international conferences where jet-setting scientists come together to discuss the global implications of their discoveries. Melanie runs a foundation that awards grants for innovations in reproductive technology; Menachem is an infertile nuclear engineer and a married man. Naturally, they fall in love. What follows is a story of sexual steam, stolen seed, and religious conversion--a very modern romance that hinges on a cutting-edge scientific breakthrough. As Melanie and Menachem discover, what science makes possible, only two hearts can make right.

There are many, many more things that nobody knows. Do animals have a sense of humor? Why do we have five fingers? How long can humans live? What did Jesus do in his youth? Which speech did Lincoln deliver at Gettysburg? Does the appendix have any use? Is there an odd perfect number? In this witty and enlightening follow-up to The Things that Nobody Know s, William Hartston takes us on a guided tour of 501 further gaps in our knowledge of cosmology, mathematics, animal behavior, medical science, music, art, and literature.

Almost everything you know about heroin addiction is wrong. Not only is it wrong, but it is obviously wrong. Heroin is not highly addictive; withdrawal from it is not medically serious; addicts do not become criminals to feed their habit; addicts do not need any medical assistance to stop taking heroin; and contrary to received wisdom, heroin addiction most certainly IS a moral or spiritual problem. Based on his experience as a prison doctor and as a psychiatrist in a large general hospital in Birmingham, Dr. Dalrymple argues that addiction to heroin is not an illness at all, and that doctors only make it worse. They deceive both the addicts and themselves by pretending that they have something to offer. In this brilliant, entertaining and provocative book, Theodore Dalrymple explains how and why a literary tradition dating back to De Quincey and Coleridge, and continuing up to the deeply sociopathic William Burroughs and beyond, has misled all Western societies for generations about the nature of heroin addiction. These writers' self-dramatizing and dishonest accounts of their own addiction have been accepted uncritically, and have been more influential by far in forming public attitudes than the whole of pharmacological science. As a result, a self-serving, self-perpetuating and completely useless medical bureaucracy has been set up to deal with the problem. With scathing wit, implacable logic and savage denunciation, Dr. Dalrymple exposes the mythology surrounding heroin addiction. Moving seamlessly between literature, pharmacology, history and philosophy, he demonstrates what happens when the nature of a social problem is so thoroughly misunderstood, and when human beings are regarded as inanimate objects rather than as agents of their own destiny. His scintillating, iconoclastic little book has an importance far beyond its immediate subject matter.

Menahem-Mendl is one of Sholom Aleichem's richest characterizations. An incurable optimist, whose every venture ends in disaster, he is the perennial Luftmensch who never ceases to build castles in the air. The exchange of letters between Menahem-Mendl, trying his luck in the bigger cities of Czarist Russia, and his wife, who remains behind in a small town in the hinterlands, relates his hilarious, but frustrating, experiences as he seeks his fortune-first as a currency and stock speculator (who cannot speculate), as a matchmaker (who cannot arrange marriages), as an author (who cannot write), and as an agent (who buys what he cannot sell). As his hopes repeatedly rise only to vanish in smoke, as he becomes involved with rascals and rogues, rich men and poor, the reader is at once amused and astounded by the predicaments in which he becomes entangled. But no more so than his long-suffering, ever-faithful wife, Sheineh-Sheindl -- scolding and querulous, but ever ready to succor him in his most desperate moments. In re-creating a vanished way of life with warmth and considerable verve, the book reflects the eternal human condition, equally true and meaningful today. "The adventures of Menahem-Mendl" is a memorable achievement-a masterwork by an eminent figure of world literature.

FIRST EDITION The world's most distinguished author of the literature of the fantastic presents his most extraordinary stories of worlds lost and dreams fulfilled... In his illustrious forty-five year career as a novelist and author of short fiction, Robert Silverberg has belonged in the company of the best writers of the 20th century. His writing has been compared to Conrad, Huxley, and Orwell. In this definitive collection Silverberg presents the novellas that have won him multiple Hugo and Nebula Award nominations, including his Nebula Award winning achievement, "Sailing To Byzantium." Here are the virtuoso performances of the third phase of Silverberg's astounding the Nebula Award nominee "Homefaring"; the Hugo Award nominee "The Secret Sharer"; "Thomas The Proclaimer" and "We Are For The Dark." If you are a lover of Silverberg's work or are simply looking for a place to begin a relationship with the literature of science fiction and fantasy, this is the place to start.

A remarkable collection, Robots through the Ages includes stories from some of the best writers of science fiction, both old and new. This anthology, with an introduction by Robert Silverberg, offers a sweeping survey of robots as depicted throughout literature. Since the Iliad--in which we are shown golden statues built by Hephaestus "with minds and wisdoms"--humans have been fascinated by the idea of artificial life. From the Argonautica to the medieval Jewish legend of the Golem and Ambrose Bierce's tale of a chess-playing robot, the idea of what robots are--and who creates them--can be drastically different. This book collects a broad selection of short stories from celebrated authors such as Philip K. Dick, Seanan McGuire, Roger Zelazny, Connie Willis, and many more. Robots through the Ages not only celebrates the history of robots and the genre of science fiction, but the dauntless nature of human ingenuity.

When Patrick Modiano was awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize for LIterature he was praised for using the 'art of memory' to bring to life the Occupation of Paris during the Second World War. The Night Watch is his second novel and tells the story of a young man of limited means, caught between his work for the French Gestapo informing on the Resistance, and his work for a Resistance cell informing on the police and the black market dealers whose seedy milieu of nightclubs, prostitutes and spivs he shares. Under pressure from both sides to inform and bring things to a crisis, he finds himself driven towards an act of self-sacrifice as the only way to escape an impossible situation and the question that haunts him - how to be a traitor without being a traitor. In this astonishing, cruel and tender book, Modiano attempts to exorcise the past by leading his characters out on a fantasmagoric patrol during one fatal night of the Occupation.

Romanticism is a worldview that finds expression over a whole range of cultural fields—not only in literature and art but in philosophy, theology, political theory, and social movements. In Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre formulate a theory that defines romanticism as a cultural protest against modern bourgeois industrial civilization and work to reveal the unity that underlies the extraordinary diversity of romanticism from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century. After critiquing previous conceptions of romanticism and discussing its first European manifestations, Löwy and Sayre propose a typology of the sociopolitical positions held by romantic writers-from “restitutionist” to various revolutionary/utopian forms. In subsequent chapters, they give extended treatment to writers as diverse as Coleridge and Ruskin, Charles Peguy, Ernst Bloch and Christa Wolf. Among other topics, they discuss the complex relationship between Marxism and romanticism before closing with a reflection on more contemporary manifestations of romanticism (for example, surrealism, the events of May 1968, and the ecological movement) as well as its future. Students and scholars of literature, humanities, social sciences, and cultural studies will be interested in this elegant and thoroughly original book.

The philosophy of religion and the quest for spiritual truth preoccupied Albert Einstein--so much that it has been said "one might suspect he was a disguised theologian." Nevertheless, the literature on the life and work of Einstein, extensive as it is, does not provide an adequate account of his religious conception and sentiments. Only fragmentarily known, Einstein's ideas about religion have been often distorted both by atheists and by religious groups eager to claim him as one of their own. But what exactly was Einstein's religious credo? In this fascinating book, the distinguished physicist and philosopher Max Jammer offers an unbiased and well-documented answer to this question. The book begins with a discussion of Einstein's childhood religious education and the religious atmosphere--or its absence--among his family and friends. It then reconstructs, step by step, the intellectual development that led Einstein to the conceptions of a cosmic religion and an impersonal God, akin to "the God of Spinoza." Jammer explores Einstein's writings and lectures on religion and its role in society, and how far they have been accepted by the general public and by professional theologians like Paul Tillich or Frederick Ferré. He also analyzes the precise meaning of Einstein's famous dictum "Science without religion is lame, religion without science is blind," and why this statement can serve as an epitome of Einstein's philosophy of religion. The last chapter deals with the controversial question of whether Einstein's scientific work, and in particular his theory of relativity, has theologically significant implications, a problem important for those who are interested in the relation between science and religion. Both thought-provoking and engaging, this book aims to introduce readers, without proselytizing, to Einstein's religion.

At one time an underground hero in the world of journalism, with prose on a par with Tolstoy and Kafka, Joseph Roth now looms large in the pantheon of European literature. Indeed, the last five years have seen a major Roth revival culminating in Report from a Parisian Paradise, a haunting epitaph by the greatest foreign correspondent of his age. An exile in Paris, Roth captured the essence of France in the 1920s and 1930s. From the port town of Marseille to the erotic hill country around Avignon, Report from a Parisian Paradise—superbly translated by Michael Hofmann—paints the sepia-tinted landscapes, enchanting people, and ruthless desperation of a country hurtling toward dissolution. Roth's book is not only a paean to a European order that could no longer hold but also a miraculous and revelatory work of transcendent philosophical clarity.

A bravura exploration of politics and writing in dark times. In "The Last Resistance," Jacqueline Rose explores the power of writing to create and transform our political lives. In particular Rose examines the role of literature in the Zionist imagination: here, literature is presented as a unique form of dissidence, with the power to expose the unconscious of nations, and often proposing radical alternatives to their dominant pathways and beliefs. While Israel-Palestine is the repeated focus, "The Last Resistance" also turns to post-apartheid South Africa, to American national fantasy post-9/11, and to key moments for the understanding of Jewish culture and memory. Rose also underscores the importance of psychoanalysis, both historically in relation to the unfolding of world events, and as a tool of political understanding. Examining topics ranging from David Grossman, through W. G. Sebald, Freud, Nadine Gordimer, the concept of evil, and suicide bombers, "The Last Resistance" offers a unique way of responding to the crises of the times.

Many of the pieces are frank in celebrating the transformative force of sex, lust, desire, and the recognition that one is desired. Zaftig women, described variously as full-figured and pleasingly plump, have long been a source of fetish and humor in erotic literature. Now the publisher of Best Women's Erotica turns the tables with surprising, steamy stories showcasing the sex lives of women of size and their admirers. Not only is Blank's work infused with humor and mischievous irony, her delight in her own body and her sexuality is fabulously contagious: she makes you feel good about yourself in every way, shape, and form.

""The Medical Man and the Witch During the Renaissance"" by Gregory Zilboorg is a historical account of the relationship between medicine and witchcraft during the Renaissance period. The book explores how medical professionals, such as physicians and surgeons, interacted with individuals accused of practicing witchcraft and the role they played in the persecution of witches. Zilboorg delves into the cultural and social context of the time, examining the beliefs and superstitions that shaped the attitudes towards witches and the methods used to diagnose and treat supposed witchcraft. The book also examines the impact of the witch trials on the medical profession and the development of medical knowledge during this period. Overall, ""The Medical Man and the Witch During the Renaissance"" provides a fascinating insight into the intersection of medicine and witchcraft during a tumultuous period in European history.Publications Of Institute Of The History Of Medicine, The Johns Hopkins University, Third Series, V2.This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the old original and may contain some imperfections such as library marks and notations. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions, that are true to their original work.

Many women, and a minority of men, are deciding that "adequate" marriages are inadequate. They are driving an explosion of "grey" divorce and remarriage in the over-50s. With children departing into their own journeys and ever-longer lives stretching out ahead, more mature adults are leaping, unconventionally and aspirationally, at a last chance at love. Most of the existing literature discourages them. The dominant mantra of books, counsellors and media is that "staying together" is the superior, admirable choice. They insist that romantic dreams of great sex and soul mates are the Disney-esque yearnings of the naively immature. This book argues the contrary. Great relationships are not only attainable; they are a natural and admirable goal for ageing humans. And if your current mate isn't interested in working with you to craft an ever-deeper and finer partnership, then it may be your mate that requires changing a not your dreams. As a gender expert, Avivah Wittenberg-Cox frames her reflections in the context of an unprecedented, millennial shift in gender relations. As women's educational, social and economic empowerment increases, they continue to demand more for the world a and from it. This is true both at home and at work. Settling for anything less than mutually supportive, seductive and stretching relationships is so yesterday. As the number of late leavers and lovers swells, their thirst for more is redefining what relationships look like in a greying, gender-balanced world. And it looks pretty good. Many women, and a minority of men, are deciding that aadequate' marriages are inadequate. They are driving an explosion of agrey' divorce and remarriage in the over-50s. With children departing into their own journeys and ever-longer lives stretching out ahead, more mature adults are leaping, unconventionally and aspirationally, at a last chance at love. Most of the existing literature discourages them. The dominant mantra of books, counsellors and media is that astaying together' is the superior, admirable choice. They insist that romantic dreams of great sex and soul mates are the Disney-esque yearnings of the naively immature. This book argues the contrary. Great relationships are not only attainable; they are a natural and admirable goal for ageing humans. And if your current mate isn't interested in working with you to craft an ever-deeper and finer partnership, then it may be your mate that requires changing a not your dreams. As a gender expert, Avivah Wittenberg-Cox frames her reflections in the context of an unprecedented, millennial shift in gender relations. As women's educational, social and economic empowerment increases, they continue to demand more for the world a and from it. This is true both at home and at work. Settling for anything less than mutually supportive, seductive and stretching relationships is so yesterday. As the number of late leavers and lovers swells, their thirst for more is redefining what relationships look like in a greying, gender-balanced world. And it looks pretty good.

Over the last forty years, Aaron Lansky has jumped into dumpsters, rummaged around musty basements, and crawled through cramped attics. He did all of this in pursuit of a particular kind of treasure, and he's found plenty. Lansky's treasure was any book written in Yiddish, the language of generations of European Jews. When he started looking for Yiddish books, experts estimated there might be about 70,000 still in existence. Since then, the MacArthur Genius Grant recipient has collected close to 1.5 million books, and he's finding more every day.

Critical essays are the basic mode of expression that students of literature at universities and colleges are expected to master, yet they are given no special instruction in this discipline. To make good the deficiency, Philip Hobsbaum demonstrates that there are techniques in writing criticism which can be both taught and learned. He himself learned his craft from such major figures as F.R. Leavis and William Empson, and has had many years' experience as a professional critic and a teacher of literature. After defining the uses of criticism, he provides invaluable guidance on such topics as what to say about a poem, English prose style and structuring an essay, in each case taking examples from the works of well-known authors. Here at last is the means of bridging the gap between the student as reader and the student as writer.

Peter Dronke illuminates a unique literary tradition: the narrative that mixes prose with verse. Highlighting a wide range of texts, he defines and explores the creative ways in which mixed forms were used in Europe from antiquity through the thirteenth century. Verse with Prose distinguishes for the first time some of the most significant uses of mixed forms. Dronke looks at the way prose and verse elements function in satirical works, beginning in the third century B.C. with Menippus. He examines allegorical techniques in the mixed form, giving especially rewarding attention to Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy. His lucid analysis encompasses a feast of medieval sagas and romances, ranging from Iceland to Italy, including vernacular works by Marguerite Porete in France and Mechthild in Germany. A number of the medieval Latin texts presented have remained virtually unknown, but emerge here as narratives with unusual and at times brilliant literary qualities. To enable not only specialists but all who love literature to respond to the works discussed, they are quoted in fresh translations, as well as in the originals.

For most people literary criticism is a mystery that often seems inaccessible, written for an in-group. Even worse, a Battle of the Books has broken out between neoconservatives and neoradicals-all the more reason to steer clear of the fray. Geoffrey Hartman argues that ignoring the culture wars would be unwise, for what is at stake is the nature of the arts we prize and our obligation to remain civil and avoid the apocalyptic tone of most political prophecy. Hartman's book is both a survey of the history of modern literary criticism and a strategic intervention. First he presents an account of the culture of criticism in the last one hundred years. He then widens the focus to provide a picture of the critical essay from 1700 to the present in order to show that a major change in style took place after 1950. Two chapters focus on F. R. Leavis and Paul de Man, central-and controversial-figures in academic criticism. Hartman attends to major developments on the continent and in Anglo-American circles that have disrupted the calm of what he calls the friendship or conversational style. On the one hand, critics and thinkers have pursued strange gods in order to enrich and sharpen their critical style. This change Hartman welcomes. On the other hand, along with a renewed interest in politics and historical speculation, a didactic and moralistic tone has again entered the scene. Hartman rejects this new moralism. The author is an eloquent defender of reading the text of criticism as carefully as the text of literature. He argues for a broader conception of critical style, one that would support the open and conversational voice of the public critic as well as the inventive and innovative practice of the technical critic. Hartman sets before us an ideal of literary criticism that can acknowledge theory yet does not shrink from a sustained, text-centered response. Minor Prophecies is a major book by one of our finest critics.

Using an orange and a flashlight, a father explains to his children why the sun goes down.