The Wrong Door is the first English-language translation of the complete plays of Italian writer Natalia Ginzburg (1916-1991). Bringing together the eleven plays Ginzburg wrote between 1965 and the months before her death, this volume directs attention to Ginzburg's unique talent as a dramatist. Ginzburg's plays, like her novels and short stories, are incisive, finely tuned studies of family drama, of the breakdown of relations between the sexes, and of the tribulations of Italian domestic life. The plays showcase Ginzburg's fearless social commentary, her stark and darkly comic observations of Italian life, and her prescient analyses of the socio-economic changes that have transformed modern Italy. Along the way, Ginzburg creates memorable female characters in a series of fascinating roles. In this fluent and faithful translation, Wendell Ricketts highlights Ginzburg's scalpel-sharp dialogue and lays bare the existential absurdities that lie at the heart of her plays. Including an introduction by the translator and two essays by Ginzburg on her approach to the theatre, The Wrong Door adds a new dimension to the literary portrait of one of Italy's most significant modernist writers.

ÔThis one of those marvelous books that not only illuminates an important chain of historical events, but provides timeless Ñ and especially timely Ñ lessons for our own age É [an] impassioned, thoughtfully argued, well-expressed book.Õ Martin Rubin, The Washington Times For almost 500 years, the Jews of Europe were kept apart, confined to ghettos or tiny villages in the countryside. Then, in one extraordinary moment in the French Revolution, the Jews of France were emancipated. Soon the ghetto gates were opened all over Europe. The era of Emancipation had begun. What happened next would change the course of history. Emancipation tells the story of how this isolated minority emerged from the ghetto and against terrible odds very quickly established themselves as shapers of history, as writers, revolutionaries, social thinkers, and artists. Their struggle to create a place for themselves in Western European life led to revolutions and nothing less than a second renaissance in Western culture. The book spans the era from the French Revolution to the beginning of the twentieth century. The story is told through the lives of the people who lived through this momentous change. Some are well-known: Marx, Freud, Mahler, Proust, and Einstein; many more have been forgotten. Michael Goldfarb brings them all to life. This is an epic story, and Goldfarb tells it with the skill and eye for detail of a novelist. He brings the empathy and understanding that has marked his two decades as a reporter in public radio to making the characters come alive. It is a tale full of hope, struggle, triumph, and, waiting at the end, a great tragedy. This is a book that will have meaning for anyone interested in the struggle of immigrants and minorities to succeed. We live in a world where vast numbers are on the move, where religions and races are grinding against each other in new combinations; Emancipation is a book of history for our time.

Gay culture has become a nightmare of consumerism, whether it's an endless quest for Absolut vodka, Diesel jeans, rainbow Hummers, pec implants, or Pottery Barn. Whatever happened to sexual flamboyance and gender liberation, an end to marriage, the military, and the nuclear family? As backrooms are shut down to make way for wedding vows, and gay sexual culture morphs into "straight-acting dudes hangin' out," what are the possibilities for a defiant faggotry that challenges the assimilationist norms of a corporate-cozy lifestyle? Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots? challenges not just the violence of straight homophobia but the hypocrisy of mainstream gay norms that say the only way to stay safe is to act straight: get married, join the military, adopt kids! Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore reinvokes the anger, flamboyance, and subversion once thriving in gay subcultures in order to create something dangerous and lovely: an exploration of the perils of assimilation; a call for accountability; a vision for change. A sassy and splintering emergency intervention! Called "startlingly bold and provocative" by Howard Zinn, and described as "a cross between Tinkerbell and a honky Malcolm X with a queer agenda" by The Austin Chronicle , Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore is undoubtedly one of America's most outspoken queer critics. She is the author of two novels, including, most recently, So Many Ways to Sleep Badly , and is the editor of four nonfiction anthologies, including Nobody Passes: Rejecting the Rules of Gender and Conformity and That's Revolting! Queer Strategies for Resisting Assimilation . In Oakland, California on March 24, 2015 a fire destroyed the AK Press warehouse along with several other businesses. Please consider visiting the AK Press website to learn more about the fundraiser to help them and their neighbors.

For connoisseurs of imaginative fiction, the novels of Jonathan Carroll are a special treat that occupy a space all their own. His surreal fictions, which deftly mix the everyday with the extraordinary, have won him a devoted following. Now, in Glass Soup , Carroll continues to astound . . . . The realm of the dead is built from the dreams--and nightmares--of the living. Octopuses drive buses. God is a polar bear. And a crowded highway literally leads to hell. Once before, Vincent Ettrich and his lover, Isabelle Neukor, crossed over from life to death and back again. Now Isabelle bears a very special child, who may someday restore the ever-changing mosaic that is reality. Unless the agents of Chaos can lure her back to the land of the dead--and trap her there forever. Glass Soup is another exquisite and singular creation from the author January magazine described as "incapable of writing a bad book much less an uninteresting one."

From the creator of the HBO series Bored to Death , the story of a young alcoholic writer and his personal valet, a hilarious homage to the Bertie and Jeeves novels of P.G. Wodehouse. Alan Blair, the hero of Wake Up, Sir! , is a young, loony writer with numerous problems of the mental, emotional, sexual, spiritual, and physical variety. He's very good at problems. But luckily for Alan, he has a personal valet named Jeeves, who does his best to sort things out for his troubled master. And Alan does find trouble wherever he goes. He embarks on a perilous and bizarre road journey, his destination being an artists colony in Saratoga Springs. There Alan encounters a gorgeous femme fatale who is in possession of the most spectacular nose in the history of noses. Such a nose can only lead to a wild disaster for someone like Alan, and Jeeves tries to help him, but...well, read the book and find out!

In this collection of criticisms, Edith Wharton's unique gifts as a story-teller and her superb talents as a craftsman are carefully evaluated. Her indebtedness to Henry James is re-examined. Her more notable novels, such as The Age of Innocence, which won a Pulitzer prize, The House of Mirth, her masterful social portrait, and Ethan Frome, her tale of New England poverty and frustration, are among the works reappraised. Society in Edith Wharton's old New York, at once sophisticated and provincial, dreaded scandal more than disease. Its refinement was a veneer, its conversation mere gossip, its standards double. Society performed conventional rites; intellectual winds seldom stirred the sands of this wasteland. Edith Wharton, placed in this milieu by birth and marriage, turned it into a subject for subtle satire. Though she was no rebel, Edith Wharton was fascinated by rebellion. She regarded pessimistically those who challenged social mores, pointing always to the exorbitant price exacted for the assertion of individual thought. She distrusted human nature and saw the human condition as a struggle between the generous and the mean. She believed that self-sacrifice is almost invariably useless. In this study of the woman and the artist, Irving Howe has included articles by Diana Trilling, E.K. Brown, Alfred Kazin, and Percy Lubbock. Here is Edith Wharton, the literary pioneer who pointed the road to realism, the social historian with enormous powers of recreation, the fine observer of emotions. This anthology should serve to enlarge Edith Wharton's appreciative audience and to reassert her influential place in American writing. Among the essays are: Justice to Edith Wharton (Edmund Wilson) Henry James's Heiress: The Importance of Edith Wharton (Q.D. Leavis) The Morality of Inertia (Lionel Trilling) Our Literary Aristocrat (Vernon L. Parrington) Edith Wharton and Her New Yorks (Louis Auchincloss)

"No mortal can write this well." - Harlan Ellison "Kersh has a strange, perverted sense of genius. And how he can write." - Virginia Kirkus "Gerald Kersh had a wild imagination matched by a vivid, near-hallucinatory style. Many of his concepts are so original that they blur the distinction between fantasy, science fiction, mystery, and horror, but the cumulative impact of his short stories is horrific in the extreme." - Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural An expedition in South America uncovers a terrifying race of men without bones who literally suck the life out of their prey. A man in 20th century London makes a horrifying discovery about a monster found off the coast of Brighton in 1745. A sea captain goes ashore on a deserted island and finds what seem to be the bones of a previously unknown species of monster, only to learn that the bones tell a much more tragic tale than he could ever have imagined. A war correspondent, none other than Kersh himself, is sailing to America when he meets a strange man who claims to be 438 years old. These are the plots of just a few of the weird tales you will find in this book. Gerald Kersh (1911-1968) was a brilliant and inventive writer acclaimed in his time for his gritty novels of London life and his often bizarre short fiction, but he has unfortunately become neglected since his death. This volume includes an introduction by award-winning science fiction author Harlan Ellison, who also selected the eleven stories that appear in this collection and which represent the very best of Kersh's short fiction. Includes: "The Queen of Pig Island," "Frozen Beauty," "The Brighton Monster," "Men Without Bones," "Busto Is a Ghost, Too Mean to Give Us a Fright ," "The Ape and the Mystery," "The King Who Collected Clocks," "Bone for Debunkers," "A Lucky Day for the Boar," "Voices in the Dust of Annan," "Whatever Happened to Corporal Cuckoo?"

A fabulously entertaining and touching novella from David Baddiel, author of the bestselling THE PARENT AGENCY and THE PERSON CONTROLLER. Illustrated by the hugely talented Jim Field, winner of the Roald Dahl Funny Prize. Billy has a routine. To be honest, he has a lot of routines. There's the waking-up routine, the getting-dressed routine, the cleaning-his-teeth-in-the-morning routine, the getting-his-school-bag-ready-routine ... and that's all before 8:30am. But then one day Billy's usual babysitter is unavailable, and Billy's parents get Mrs Stokes instead. Mrs Stokes doesn't do routines. Instead, she just tells Billy to do what he likes. Over and over again. Eventually, Billy decides to take her at her word. And that's when things start to go weird. Does everything get out of control and Billy learns his lesson and realises that routines are really quite important to stick to after all? Nah. This isn't that kind of story ...

"REMARKABLE . . . A WONDERFUL STORY." --The Boston Globe The father is a high-ranking Communist officer, a Jew who survived Stalin's purges. The son is a "refusenik," who risked his life and happiness to protest everything his father held dear. Now, Chaim Potok, beloved author of the award-winning novels The Chosen and My Name is Asher Lev, unfolds the gripping true story of a father, a son, and a conflict that spans Soviet history. Drawing on taped interviews and his harrowing visits to Russia, Potok traces the public and privates lives of the Slepak family: Their passions and ideologies, their struggles to reconcile their identities as Russians and as Jews, their willingness to fight--and die--for diametrically opposed political beliefs. "[A] vivid account . . . [Potok] brings a novelist's passion and eye for detail to a gripping story that possesses many of the elements of fiction--except that it's all too true." --San Francisco Chronicle

The award-winning novelist recounts his miraculous survival of the Holocaust, from a forced march across the Ukraine to a labor camp at the age of seven, his escape from the camp, his life in hiding in the Ukranian forests, his negotiation of several displaced persons' camps, his 1946 arrival in Palestine and his struggle to build a new life on the fragments of his past.

Literary, lyrical, and cuttingly satiric, Mother India is a brilliantly original novel about Jews who go to India to find transformation and eternal release from the sufferings of life. Narrated in luminous prose by Meena, a Jewish American lesbian who has claimed India as her home, the novel is vividly populated by the darkly comic universe of three generations of women along with other family members, as well as by the Indians whose world they seek to penetrate. There is Meena’s religiously observant mother, Ma, whose desire to remove herself from the wheel of life plays out in a Faulknerian funeral procession and cremation on the banks of the holy river Ganges; Meena’s daughter, Maya, a misunderstood child coming of age in an emotionally treacherous household; her ex-wife, Geeta, a privileged and hedonistic Indian woman who enters their world with devastating consequences; Meena's twin brother, Shmelke, a charismatic rabbi turned guru and international fugitive; and the Indian servant, Manika, whose loyalty to the family both sustains and shackles them. Identifying with the humanity of its characters, the reader is drawn into a vast, tragicomic, and fascinating epic, Homeric in scope, drama, discovery, and surprise. Universal yet intimate, brutal yet tender, satiric yet sympathetic, Mother India evokes reactions—intellectual, emotional, visceral—that are complex, even contradictory, containing the might and bite that our current cultural hubris and self-involvement deserve. In Mother India, Reich offers us her most poignant and astonishing novel to date.

How much pressure can a marriage take? Elise Sorenson has been striving for the Olympics as long as she can remember. The months of intense training and competition in the horse show world take her away, far too often, from her husband, Matt, and their eight-year-old daughter, Gracie. Matt, a lawyer still vying to make partner at fifty, has made huge sacrifices in his career to be Gracie’s primary caregiver. This was the deal Elise and Matt struck, but it’s no longer working. Their finances and their relationship are strained to the point of snapping, and they’re forced to sell the lakeside cabin that has been in Matt’s family for generations to pay for yet another year of dressage and school fees and the physiotherapy Gracie needs for her disability. When the Sorensons arrive in Lake Placid to prepare the cabin for sale, Matt is taken aback by the frosty reception from locals who’ve always revered his family. What could have possibly changed? But all their worldly problems fade when the unthinkable happens to their daughter. In the panic and confusion that follow, the fault lines in Elise and Matt’s marriage crack wide open, allowing long-held resentments and blame to come bursting to the surface . . . In Tish Cohen’s riveting new novel, she explores how our truest selves are revealed in our very darkest moments.

Stark is an endangered species. He's the last Jewish private detective in the south Bronx and his days may be numbered. It's the summer of 1965: the Yankees are making another pennant run, the war in Vietnam is heating up, hemlines are rising and the old neighborhood is changing. These days it's easier to stumble on a mugging than to find a good bagel. Stark is not a tough guy. In the trade, he's what's known as a peeper. His business is adultery and his weapon is a camera with a long lens not a snub-nose revolver. But Stark's life is beginning to unravel. His wife left him, his secretary hates him, his mother wants to mother him, he can't shake his shrink's voice from his head and he's got a strange pain in his chest. Then things go from bad to worse. He witnesses a shocking murder and suddenly Stark goes from being the hunter to the hunted, as he races through a decaying world of bookies, transvestites, loan sharks, slum lords and thugs for hire. "Stark in the Bronx" is the dazzling first novel by acclaimed historian Saul Landau. A kind of comic noir, Landau's atmospheric novel is both thrilling and hilarious: imagine the "Maltese Falcon" narrated by Woody Allen.Praise for Saul Landau and Stark: "Saul Landau, like the narrator of 'The Great Gatsby, marvels at how the rich so joyously make messes secure in the knowledge that others will clean up. But what if, one day, they don't?" -- Gore Vidal"You'll believe him, laugh with him, weep and get off your ass." -- John Berger, author "Ways of Seeing"

NATIONAL BESTSELLER From #1 internationally bestselling author Santa Montefiore comes a gripping new novel of enduring love and devastating secrets, sweeping across England during WWII to Australia five decades later, based on a true story. Rupert promised he was going to come back. All Florence had to do was wait. Cornwall, 1944 When Rupert Dash is declared missing, presumed dead during the Battle of Arnhem, his wife, Florence, is devastated. She can’t accept that he has gone from her life forever, and so when she finds a poem called ‘Wait for Me’ hidden in an old book, she believes it’s a sign from her husband. A promise that he will return to her. London, 1988 Since childhood Max has suffered from a recurring nightmare. Surrounded by the horrific chaos of war, he has an urgent mission he knows he must complete. But time after time, the dream ends with him awaking in terror, his heart pounding from the horror of the battlefield. Desperate to understand why he is haunted by such terrible visions, Max embarks on a journey that leads him to Cornwall and a man named Rupert Dash. Melbourne, 1995 Florence receives a letter from someone she has never met, who lives on the other side of the world. This stranger says he remembers a life that belonged to another before him. Could this be the one person Florence has waited fifty-one years to meet again?

"A novel about the life-changing journey of a young man who travels from New Jersey to Khrushchev's Russia and the beaches of Southern France as he finds love and discovers the long-hidden secrets about his heritage." --

A haunting novel that probes the enigmas of time and memory, by Nobel Prize-winning author Patrick Modiano "Polizzotti's crisp and evocative translation keeps the reader hooked."-- Publishers Weekly In his acclaimed semi-autobiographical novella Suspended Sentences , Patrick Modiano recounted a dramatic season in his childhood, of the home he shared with sinister surrogate parents, the mysterious events that took place there, and an infamous heist that was never solved. In Scene of the Crime , Modiano conjures the aftermath of those years. A decade has passed, and Jean Bosmans, now in his early twenties, becomes aware of a set of disturbing coincidences involving an elusive woman, his childhood home, and a host of disquieting characters who seem inordinately interested in his past, for reasons he can't fathom. As he journeys into the echoes of memory, past and present become increasingly intertwined, forming a web spanning half a century. With the taut suspense of a detective novel, this book slowly peels away layers of time and forgetfulness to reveal the haunting, threatening, ultimately tragic legacies of what we think we know about our lives.

"a horrifyingly vivid account of an American artillery battalion's advance through northern Italy in World War II" Robert Mcg. Thomas Jr., The New York Times Gil Freeman was a normal, young, American man before the events of Pearl Harbor. His life was forever changed when the United States was thrust into the most bloody conflict of the twentieth century. Posted with the American Fifth Army to fight against the forces of Fascist Europe in Italy he quickly grows disillusioned with the realities of modern warfare. When he and his fellow soldiers land in Italy they view the inhabitants of this land as little more than enemies, but in time they "began to speak of the villagers not as guineas or wops but as these people." He entered the war with hope of experiencing brotherhood and excitement, but instead it loss, tragedy and heartbreak that are the emotions that fill Freeman as he moves through Italy. Will Freeman overcome these feelings? Or will the toll of the war prove too much for the young man? And how will he ever be able to return to normality after everything that he has seen? Mitchell Goodman's novel The End of It is an arresting depiction of one man's battle through the course of the Second World War. The End of It received widespread praise including from prominent literary figures, such as William Carlos Williams and Norman Mailer. "Goodman's style is powerful, sensitive, and incisive. This is an exciting and provocative addition to contemporary, avant garde American literature" Kirkus Reviews "an effective and poetic antiwar treatise" Professor Sandy Cohen Mitchell Goodman was an American writer, teacher, and activist. He was at college when the U.S.A. entered the Second World War. He was trained as a Second Lieutenant forward observer in an artillery battalion, but was not deployed overseas. He traveled to Europe following the war and used many of these experiences to shape his novel. The End of It was first published in 1961. Later in his life he became famous for his role in the Vietnam draft resistance movement, which drew the high-profile 1968 federal prosecution of the "Boston Five." He passed away in 1997.

"Perfect for your summer trip to the beach" (O, The Oprah Magazine), Kathi Kamen Goldmark's hilarious novel of musicians, love, family, sex, and success is now in paperback. Follow Sarah Jean Pixlie as she catapults from struggling back-up singer to blazing star on the country music scene. Along the way, she pours out her savvy soul in the humorous lyrics from more than two dozen original songs, including "Put Me on the Guest List (To Your Heart)," "Hell on Heels," and "My Baby Used to Hold Me (Now He's Putting Me on Hold)." "Funny, authentic, and moving," raves Dave Barry about this first novel, which Scott Turow says is "the best thing to happen to country music since the broken heart."

Drawing on her experience as an adult literacy tutor, Judith Frank's first novel traces the difficult and sometimes hilarious connection between two butches of different generations - a middle-class, thirty-something adult literacy teacher and her older, working-class student. With a disparate group of adult learners as the backdrop, Frank examines, with warmth and wit, the relationship between education and gender, class, and racial identity. With Crybaby Butch, Judith Frank creates a deeply human, bravely unsentimental story while at the same time investigating the meaning of butch identity as it reinvents itself from one generation to the next. ~ Carol Anshaw

Featuring interviews with Chris Hardwick on The Nerdist Podcast and Marc Maron on WTF with Marc Maron Bad Sex On Speed is a savage, careening, hyper-real nightmare of a novel, taking us to the depths of Amphetamine America. Told with no concession to traditional narrative, in the voices of those in the grips and on the fringes, the stories that emerge are at once devastating, hysterical, and--perhaps most terrifying of all--going on all around you, all the time. Stahl digs deep into the psyche of the most demented and dispossessed among us, returning with a vision so unsparing that those not prepared to experience the screaming depths of speed psychosis up close and on the page should back slowly away and return to their lives unscathed.