Really The Blues is the story of a white kid who fell in love with black culture, learning to blow clarinet in the reform schools, brothels and honky-tonks of his youth. Drawn by the revelation of the blues, he followed the music along the jazz avenues of Chicago, New Orleans, and New York, and into the heart of America's soul. Told in the jive lingo of the underground's inner circle, this classic is an unforgettable chronicle of street life, smoky clubs, roadhouse dances, and reefer culture. First published in 1946, Really the Blues was a rousing wake-up call to alienated young whites to explore black culture and the world of jazz, the first music America could call its own. Their spiritual godfather was Mezzrow, jazz cat, bootlegger, and peddler of the finest gauge in Harlem. Above all, Mezz championed the abandon available to those willing to lose their blues. 2009 Edition

Mayim Bialik puts her Ph.D. to work to talk to teen boys about the science and pressures of growing up male in today's world. A must-have book for all teenage boys!

"Never Again: Unmasking the Shadows of Power and Deceit" From the mind of a USA Today bestselling author comes a gripping thriller that will keep you on the edge of your seat. Meet Levi, a fixer entrenched in the underbelly of the New York Mafia, where power and corruption reign supreme. Life takes an unexpected twist when Rivka Cohen, a determined widow, storms into Levi's world. She believes her husband's death was murder, but the police dismiss it as suicide. Armed with evidence of foul play, she forces Levi to confront a dangerous truth. In "Never Again," Levi is thrust into a world where old grudges, bigotry, international politics, and treason collide. Deep-rooted secrets trace back to Nazi Germany, and Levi realizes this is a battle he can't ignore. But the forces at play are not just criminal; they extend to the very heart of the justice system itself, and those who dare to pursue the truth are marked for destruction. As Levi navigates this treacherous terrain, he discovers that even his well-honed skills may not be enough. Will he uncover the sinister plot buried beneath layers of deception, or will he become its next victim? Prepare for a pulse-pounding journey into the darkest corridors of power, where justice is a scarce commodity, and survival is far from guaranteed.

The history of a small, semicivilized tribe who rose from obscurity and in 500 years created the greatest and most peaceful empire in the Western world

Harold Brodkey's masterful first volume of short fiction, with two never-before anthologized stories. When originally published in 1958, First Love and Other Sorrows won Harold Brodkey widespread acclaim and announced a brilliant new arrival on the literary scene. Brodkey was hailed as an "unusually gifted writer" (The Atlantic) and a "rich talent" (San Francisco Chronicle), whose stories read like "murmured confidences, highly personal yet carefully contrived" (Chicago Tribune). In First Love and Other Sorrows, the young Brodkey chronicles the world of the educated and affluent middle class of the 1950s, at leisure and in love. He establishes the themes that would appear throughout his career--the painful uncertainties of childhood, the halting intimacies of social life--with rare terness, humor, and haunting insight. Two new stories, never before collected, from Brodkey's early writings join the original volume to complete a much-loved classic.

Already considered a classic of Holocaust literature, The Seventh Well is a novel of total absorption, a heroic achievement, and one destined for literary transcendence. Fred Wander demonstrates that the survival of a single man is a collaborative enterprise, and The Seventh Well, named after the well of truth, recalls Dante's Inferno with its mesmerizing descent into evil. Its existence is a miracle.

Tendencies brings together for the first time the essays that have made Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick "the soft-spoken queen of gay studies" ( Rolling Stone ). Combining poetry, wit, polemic, and dazzling scholarship with memorial and autobiography, these essays have set new standards of passion and truthfulness for current theoretical writing. The essays range from Diderot, Oscar Wilde, and Henry James to queer kids and twelve-step programs; from "Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl" to a performance piece on Divine written with Michael Moon; from political correctness and the poetics of spanking to the experience of breast cancer in a world ravaged and reshaped by AIDS. What unites Tendencies is a vision of a new queer politics and thought that, however demanding and dangerous, can also be intent, inclusive, writerly, physical, and sometimes giddily fun.

From Ragtime and Billy Bathgate to The Book of Daniel, World’s Fair, and The March, the novels of E. L. Doctorow comprise one of the most substantive achievements of modern American fiction. Now, with Homer & Langley, this master novelist has once again created an unforgettable work. Homer and Langley Collyer are brothers–the one blind and deeply intuitive, the other damaged into madness, or perhaps greatness, by mustard gas in the Great War. They live as recluses in their once grand Fifth Avenue mansion, scavenging the city streets for things they think they can use, hoarding the daily newspapers as research for Langley’s proposed dateless newspaper whose reportage will be as prophecy. Yet the epic events of the century play out in the lives of the two brothers–wars, political movements, technological advances–and even though they want nothing more than to shut out the world, history seems to pass through their cluttered house in the persons of immigrants, prostitutes, society women, government agents, gangsters, jazz musicians...and their housebound lives are fraught with odyssean peril as they struggle to survive and create meaning for themselves. Brilliantly conceived, gorgeously written, this mesmerizing narrative, a free imaginative rendering of the lives of New York’s fabled Collyer brothers, is a family story with the resonance of myth, an astonishing masterwork unlike any that have come before from this great writer.

Eight stories portray the world of the New York intellectual during the 1930s and 40s, probing the conflict between ambitious, educated youths and their immigrant parents.

Discover the Heartbreaking Confession Franz Kafka Never Meant for the World to See Franz Kafka, the literary genius behind The Metamorphosis and The Trial, opens the door to his most personal struggle in Letter to His Father. This raw and emotional text, written in 1919 but never sent, is both a plea for understanding and a scathing account of the turbulent relationship between a son and his overbearing father. Letter to His Father is now presented in a fresh, modern translation designed to make Kafka’s poignant and powerful words accessible to contemporary readers. This updated version brings clarity and immediacy to Kafka’s timeless exploration of the complex and fraught relationship between a son and his overbearing father. In this searing letter, Kafka grapples with feelings of fear, guilt, and inadequacy, offering readers a unique window into the forces that shaped his identity and his work. With his signature introspection and masterful prose, he examines the weight of familial expectations, the wounds inflicted by power imbalances, and the desperate longing for reconciliation. Published posthumously in 1952, Letter to His Father is more than a personal document—it is a universal exploration of the human condition, relatable to anyone who has felt misunderstood or struggled to find their place in the shadow of someone else. This is Kafka at his most vulnerable, unguarded, and unforgettable. Whether you are a longtime admirer or discovering his work for the first time, Letter to His Father is a powerful testament to the man behind the masterpieces. Step into Kafka’s world and uncover the story behind the stories. Order your copy today!

It's 1922 and David Bendiger, an aspiring eighteen-and-a-half-year-old writer, arrives in Warsaw, penniless and homeless. His only contacts are Sonya, a young woman with whom he has had amorous dealings in the village they have left, and a Zionist functionary who informs him he has qualified for a certificate permitting him to emigrate to Palestine. But in order to make the journey David must enter into a fictitious marriage with a woman so eager to get to Palestine that she will pay all the expenses. While David waits for his certificate, he becomes involved not only with Sonya but with Edusha, the sexually avant-garde Communist Party member in whose apartment he finds a temporary haven; and with Minna, the well-to-do young woman who wants to join her fiance in Palestine and agrees to "marry" David. Grappling with romantic, political, and youthful turmoil, David also confronts his literary future and religious past when his older brother - a writer disillusioned by a recent sojourn in Russia - and his father, an Orthodox rabbi, both turn up in Warsaw. The Certificate was serialized in Yiddish in 1967, but may have been written much earlier. The translator, Leonard Wolf, in a postscript calls it "a very young man's book" and "certainly the most playful of Singer's long fictions", with its alternately comic and poignant shifts in plot. Young David's passions for women, philosophizing, Jewish religious speculation, and Walter Mitty-like fantasies make The Certificate a captivating novel in the great tradition of a master storyteller.

The very first collaboration between visionary director and author Alejandro Jodorowsky and legendary french artist Moebius. In a desolate dreamscape world, a man, a bird, and a cat interact in a unique apocalyptic yet poetic fashion… Alejandro Jodorowsky and Moebius, creators of the Sci-Fi classic "The Incal," weave a tale where words and images alternate in mesmerizing fashion. This epic story is a must have for any comic book afficionado and is now available in softcover for the first time!

90 classic titles celebrating 90 years of Penguin Books 'Why should I bother to invent things? My life has been far more exciting and wonderful than any fairy-tale' In the heart of the English countryside, surrounded by irritatingly polite relatives and hopeless sycophants, Lady L. is celebrating her eightieth birthday. But as the guests disperse, she feels the undeniable pull of a mysterious pavilion in the lush grounds, and the terrible secret she buried there many years ago . . .

With its depictions of the downtrodden prostitutes, bootleggers, and hustlers of Perdido Street in the old French Quarter of 1930s New Orleans, Nelson Algren's A Walk in the Wild Side has found a place in the imaginations of all generations since it first appeared. As Algren admitted, the book "wasn't written until long after it had been walked . . . I found my way to the streets on the other side of the Southern Pacific station, where the big jukes were singing something called 'Walking the Wild Side of Life.' I've stayed pretty much on that side of the curb ever since." Perhaps the author's own words describe this classic work best: "The book asks why lost people sometimes develop into greater human beings than those who have never been lost in their whole lives. Why men who have suffered at the hands of other men are the natural believers in humanity, while those whose part has been simply to acquire, to take all and give nothing, are the most contemptuous of mankind."

"Gordimer brings the reader into the lives of Steven Reed and Jabulile Gumede, a 'mixed' couple, both of whom have been combatants in the struggle for freedom against apartheid. Once clandestine lovers under racist law forbidding sexual relations between white and black, they are now in the new South Africa. The place and time where freedom - the 'better life for all' that was fought for and promised - is being created but also challenged by political and racial tensions worldwide, while the hangover of moral ambiguities and the vast and growing gap between affluence and mass poverty continue to haunt the present"--Dust-jacket

In the streets of an ordinary Italian town, the people go about their everyday lives. In an old apartment block above them, a young man pores over photographs and plans, dedicated to his life's most important project. Day by day, in his imagination, he is rehearsing for his greatest performance. Yet when his moment comes, nothing could have prepared him for what happens...

Admirers and detractors of Vladimir Nabokov have viewed him as an ingenious contriver of literary games, teasing and even outsmarting his readers through his self-reflexive artifice and the many codes and puzzles he devises in his fiction. Nabokov himself spoke a number of times about reality as a term that always has to be put in scare quotes. Consequently, many critics and readers have thought of him as a writer uninterested in the world outside literature. Robert Alter shows how Nabokov was passionately concerned with the real world and its complexities, from love and loss to exile, freedom, and the impact of contemporary politics on our lives. In these essays, Alter spans the breadth of Nabokov's writings, from his memoir, lectures, and short stories to major novels such as Lolita. He demonstrates how the self-reflexivity of Nabokov's fiction becomes a vehicle for expressing very real concerns. What emerges is a portrait of a brilliant stylist who is at once serious and playful, who cared deeply about human relationships and the burden of loss, and who was acutely sensitive to the ways political ideologies can distort human values.

Isaac Asimov's death on April 6, 19892, was a great loss to the world of both science and literature. This collection of essays reflects Asimov's extraordinary skill in disseminating knowledge from across the spectrum of human thought. Included are thoughtful and touching tributes from colleagues and friends who discuss Asimov's work and his inspiration and impact on others. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

"What is Holocaust literature? When does it begin and how is it changing? Is there an essential core of diaries, eyewitness accounts of the concentration camps, tales of individual survival in hiding? Is it the same everywhere: in the West as in the East, in Australia as in the Americas, in poetry as in prose? Is this literature sacred and sui generis, or can it be studied in the light of other literatures? What of the perpetrators and bystanders, the hidden children, the children of Holocaust survivors: Do they speak with the same authority? What works of Holocaust literature will be read a hundred years from now--and why? Here, for the first time and told from beginning to end, is an historical survey of Holocaust literature in all genres, countries, and major languages. Beginning in wartime, it proceeds from the literature of mobilization and mourning in the Free World to the vast and varied literature produced in the Nazi-occupied ghettos, the bunkers and places of hiding, the transit and concentrations camps. Within weeks of the liberation, in displaced persons camps, a new memorial and testamentary literature begins to take shape. Moving from Europe to Israel, the U.S., and beyond, the authors situate the writings by real and proxy witnesses within three distinct postwar periods: a period of "communal memory," still internal and internecine; a period of "provisional memory" in the '60s and '70s that witnesses the birth of a self-conscious Holocaust genre; to the period of "authorized memory" in which we live today, following the collapse of the Soviet Union (1989-91), and the opening of the US Holocaust Museum (1993). Twenty book covers - first editions in their original languages - and an eminently readable guide to the "first hundred books" together show the multilingual scope, historical depth, the moral and artistic range of this extraordinary body of writing."--Publisher's website.

"Professor Jay Ladin made headlines around the world when, after years of teaching literature at Yeshiva University, he returned after a year of "involuntary research leave" to the Orthodox Jewish campus as a woman-Joy Ladin."--Dust jacket.