4101 results for "Novel"

Nirvana is here: a novel

Hamburger, Aaron
"For Ari Silverman, the past has never really passed. After 20 years, the trauma from a childhood assault resurfaces as he grapples with the fate of his ex-husband, a colleague accused of sexually harassing a student. To gain perspective, Ari arranges to reconnect with his high school crush, Justin Jackson, a bold step which forces him to reflect on their relationship in the segregated suburbs of Detroit during the 1990s and the secrets they still share."--Amazon.
Three Rooms Press 2019 372 pages

The Christ of fish

Hoffmann, Yoel
Yoel Hoffmann's novel The Christ of Fish, revolving around its heroine Aunt Magda, offers a heart-stopping view into the soul of things. Hoffmann makes a beautiful, epiphanic mosaic out of 233 pieces of Aunt Magda's life in Tel Aviv. Originally from Vienna, still speaking German after decades in Israel, and a widow, Aunt Magda has "divided her life into two periods: 'When my husband was alive' and 'now.'" "Now," ever elusive and ever inclusive in Hoffmann's work, contains her childhood, her marriage, her nephew, her best friend Frau Stier, Wildegans' poetry, apple strudel, two stolen handbags, Bing Crosby, a favorite cafe, and a gentleman admirer. Spontaneous and dreamlike, Hoffmann's images of reality shift in currents of "realness,"creating moments of absolute clarity -- life, seized as it is and of itself-- from the "cotton reels of memory." One reel concerns the title fish: "At the beginning of the fifties (Food was scarce in those days. Once a month, in exchange for government stamps, we ate a yellow chicken.) on Passover Eve, Aunt Magda's friend Berthe came to visit her and brought her from the Jordan Valley a large carp in a metal bucket....Aunt Magda filled the bath with water and put the carp in it. Two whole days the carp swam up and down the length of the bath. On the third day, Aunt Magda declared that the carp 'thinks just like we do, ' and sent Uncle Herbert (an expert in Sanskrit) 'to put the fish back in the sea.'"
New Directions Pub. Corp 1999 150 pages

For Rulers Priming Political Leaders for Saving Humanity from Itself

Yehezkel Dror
In this striking book, Yehezkel Dror bravely goes where few authors dare, offering a big-picture view of the fateful choices facing the human species. He urges humankind to adopt unconventional survival and thriving strategies, including elevating the future of humanity above state interests, limiting the production and spread of dangerous knowledge and tools, and strengthening humanity's collective deliberative capacity. The author confronts the evolutionary trap of science and technology ensnaring unprepared humankind by providing it with awesome future-shaping power, which contemporary values and institutions are unable to handle. Dror warns that tribal and nationalist values, the inability to learn from history, and mediocre leadership will catastrophically endanger the future of human life, making radical, even painful, innovations essential. According to Dror, the prevailing form of politics is obsolete. Instead, he argues urgently for a new type of political leader - "Homo Sapiens Governors" - willing and able to fulfill the daunting mission to save humanity from itself. Recognizing that the tyrannical status quo will try to prevent essential transformations, Dror predicts new crises making what is still unthinkable clearly compelling - and that humankind will have to choose: learn rapidly to survive and thrive, or perish. YEHEZKEL DROR is professor emeritus at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. Recognized as a founder of modern policy studies, he integrates multi-disciplinary scholarship with extensive personal experience as a global advisor into a novel paradigm on alternative evolutionary futures of humanity - as shaped by fateful choices humanity has never before faced.
Amazon Digital Services LLC - Kdp 2017-08-18 116 pages

Love and death in Bali

Baum, Vicki
Set against the backdrop of the Dutch invasion of Bali just over a century ago, and the resulting "mass suicides" of the Balinese royalty, the moving story unfolds of the peasant Pak and his family and friends, and the tragedy that is their shared fate. Written within living memory of the bloody events called the puputan (the "ending"), Love and Death in Bali is the story of a passionate yet peaceful and deeply spiritual people who defy the Dutch imperial forces through an act that would bring them certain death—and certain rebirth. The looting of a Chinese trading ship gives the Dutch colonial forces the perfect excuse to intervene in island affairs, but they encounter astonishing resistance. In the battle of Badung, wave upon wave of Balinese clothed in white ceremonial garb charged into the blazing Dutch guns, kris daggers in hand, prepared to die. Who among them will survive, and how will their lives be forever changed? Love and Death in Bali , first published in German in 1937, is considered by many to be the finest novel ever written about this island paradise where everyone, regardless of caste or position, is woven into the fabric of an ancient culture, connected by customs and, above all, by strong religious beliefs. now reissued in a completely re-edited edition under its original title, with an introduction by anthropologist and award-winning author Nigel Barkley.
Tuttle Pub 2011-09-10 382 pages

Relative justice: cultural diversity, free will, and moral responsibility

Sommers, Tamler
When can we be morally responsible for our behavior? Is it fair to blame people for actions that are determined by heredity and environment? Can we be responsible for the actions of relatives or members of our community? In this provocative book, Tamler Sommers concludes that there are no objectively correct answers to these questions. Drawing on research in anthropology, psychology, and a host of other disciplines, Sommers argues that cross-cultural variation raises serious problems for theories that propose universally applicable conditions for moral responsibility. He then develops a new way of thinking about responsibility that takes cultural diversity into account. Relative Justice is a novel and accessible contribution to the ancient debate over free will and moral responsibility. Sommers provides a thorough examination of the methodology employed by contemporary philosophers in the debate and a challenge to Western assumptions about individual autonomy and its connection to moral desert.
Princeton University Press 2012-01-08 230 pages

A guest for the night

Agnon, Shmuel Yosef
A Guest for the Night (first published in 1939 as Germany invaded Poland) is Agnon's depiction of how all modern movements aside from Zionism secularism, Haskalah, socialism, communism failed to provide a viable alternative to traditional life. But, he is clear, even traditional life was untenable, because it all fell apart from within before the first furnaces were ignited in Auschwitz. Even the Guest's well-intentioned attempt to revivify and to re-engage the lost world of piety is also doomed. The Alte Heim, the old home, can no longer exist it is a place where we can only be passing guests for the night. Therefore you can't go home again, but not for the reasons that Thomas Wolfe suggests; rather, because home no longer exists. It has to be rebuilt, but it can only be rebuilt in the Bayit Hadash, in the new home in the Land of Israel. This is Agnon's greatest theme in the novel and, in differing ways, throughout his body of writing: The idea that modern man, modern Jews, are alienated from their spiritual home. While we can't go home again, that doesn't mean we can't move forward through conceiving of a new home although doing so comes with the great danger of being caught in the disconnect between the old and the new, between what was and what might be. Translated by Misha Louvish, with a new Foreword by Jeffrey Saks.
Schocken 1968 492 pages

Blues in the Night

Rochelle Majer Krich
Sunday, July 13. 1:46 A.M. Near Lookout Mountain and Laurel Canyon. An unidentified woman in her twenties, wearing a nightgown, was the victim of a hit-and-run accident that left her unconscious and seriously injured. There were no witnesses. So reads the report on the accident off Mulholland Drive in Molly Blume's Crime Sheet column for a weekly Los Angeles tabloid. Just another small L.A. tragedy, soon forgotten. But the image of the young woman in her nightgown stumbling along a dark, winding road is one Molly, a freelance true-crime writer, cannot shake. In fact, it draws her to a bedside in intensive care, where the victim whispers to her three names: Robbie, Max, and Nina. It's not a smoking gun, but is sufficient to reinforce Molly's gut instinct that there are sinister circumstances behind the assault on Lenore Saunders. With fearless conviction, Molly asks questions that nobody--including Lenore's mom, her ex-husband, her shrink, or even Molly's L.A.P.D. buddy, Detective Connors--wants to answer. Nevertheless, the astute Molly discovers Lenore lived a fractured life, so different from Molly's own secure and loving Orthodox Jewish background. And as a chilling picture of the unfortunate woman begins to take shape, the menace of murders past and present stirs and quickens. In her first Molly Blume novel, award-winning novelist Rochelle Krich tells a story in the tradition of the great L.A. mysteries of the past--and introduces an investigator who is pure gold. Twentysomething divorcee Molly Blume, with her deep faith, short skirts, and nose for the truth, is a heroine to cherish. From the Hardcover edition.
Thorndike Press 2003-03 488 pages

The visiting professor

Littell, Robert
"An ex-Soviet professor plays amateur detective in this post Cold War romp by New York Times bestselling spy master Robert Littell. Lemuel Falk, a theoretical "chaoticist," has been denied permission to leave Russia for the last twenty-three years, likely because he knows a few state secrets. Even he is surprised-and wary-when his twenty-fourth request is approved, and he is offered a position as visiting professor at the Institute for Advanced Interdisciplinary Chaos-Related Studies in upstate New York. But as soon as Professor Falk arrives in America, he is plunged into a new kind of chaos-including a high-stakes academic catfight, an affair with a much-younger hairdresser, and cascading offers from domestic spies looking to capitalize on his knowledge-and soon finds himself playing amateur detective at the behest of local police. While he helps hunt for a dangerous serial killer, he grapples with ghosts from his own past in Russia. In this wholly original novel, Littell explores chaos theory, questions of faith, ad the ironies of contemporary America"-- Provided by publisher.
Soho Crime 2026-04-21 352 pages

Leavetaking

Weiss, Peter
""I was on my way to look for a life of my own." A brilliant, brutally honest autobiographical novel, long out of print, from one of the great artistic polymaths of the 20th century. This is a Sebaldian account of the narrator's attempt to break free of a repressive upper-middle-class upbringing and make his way as an artist and individual, written in a single incantatory paragraph. Leavetaking is the story of an upper-middle-class childhood and adolescence in Berlin between the wars. In the course of the book, Weiss plumbs the depths of family life: there is the early death of his beloved sister Margit, the difficult relationship with his parents, the fantasies of adolescence and youth, all set in the midst of an increasing anti-Semitism, which forces the Weiss family to move again and again, a peripatetic existence that only intensifies the narrator's growing restlessness. The young narrator is largely oblivious to world events and focused instead on becoming an artist, an ambition frustrated generally by his milieu and specifically by his mother, who, herself a former actress, destroys his paintings during one of the family's moves. In the end, he turns to an older mentor, Harry Haller, a fictionalized portrait of Hermann Hesse, who encouraged and supported Weiss, and with Haller's example before him, the narrator takes his first steps towards a truly independent life. Intensely lyrical, written with great imaginative power, Leavetaking is a vivid evocation of a world that has disappeared and of the narrator's developing consciousness. THE NEVERSINK LIBRARY champions books from around the world that have been overlooked, underappreciated, looked askance at, or foolishly ignored. They are issued in handsome, well-designed editions at reasonable prices in hopes of their passing from one reader to another--and further enriching our culture"--
Melville House Publishing 2014-07-08 125 pages

The Paul Goodman reader

Goodman, Paul
A one-man think-tank for the New Left, Paul Goodman wrote over thirty books, most of them before his decade of fame as a social critic in the Sixties. A Paul Goodman Reader that does him justice must be a compendious volume, with excerpts not only from best-sellers like Growing Up Absurd, but also from his landmark books on education, community planning, anarchism, psychotherapy, language theory, and poetics. Samples as well from The Empire City, a comic novel reviewers compared to Don Quixote, prize-winning short stories, and scores of poems that led America's most respected poetry reviewer, Hayden Carruth, to exclaim, "Not one dull page. It's almost unbelievable." Goodman called himself as an old-fashioned man of letters, which meant that all these various disciplines and occasions added up to a single abiding concern for the human plight in perilous times, and for human promise and achieved grandeur, love and hope.
PM 2010 479 pages

Paris nocturne

Modiano, Patrick
"This uneasy, compelling novel begins with a nighttime accident on the streets of Paris. The unnamed narrator, a teenage boy, is hit by a car whose driver he vaguely recalls having met before. The mysterious ensuing events, involving a police van, a dose of ether, awakening in a strange hospital, and the disappearance of the woman driver, culminate in a packet being pressed into the boy's hand. It is an envelope stuffed full of bank notes. The confusion only deepens as the characters grow increasingly apprehensive; meanwhile, readers are held spellbound." -- Provided by publisher
Yale University Press 2015-01-01 148 pages