Howard Katz is a new play by Patrick Marber, who has been called "the greatest British playwright to have emerged in the 1990s." (The Financial Times) Following on the success of his play Closer, Patrick Marber's Howard Katz has been hailed as "a gripping piece of work" (Sunday Telegraph). This haunting play is centered on its title character, a hard-as-nails talent agent now down on his luck. Marber traces the story of the mighty Katz through almost dream- like flashbacks, capturing a man in freefall, while he determinedly clings to life. Marber's tale is a universal one about the search for faith and the power of love to touch even the most hardened soul. "Howard Katz is one of the most fascinating, relevant, and thoughtful plays to hit London in recent years." -- Time "A dream-play, a nightmare-play, a sad-funny life and death play. A must." -- Sunday Times (London)

'Daring, learned and humane... A revelatory restoration of wonder' Stephen Greenblatt. We no longer think, like the ancient Chinese did, that the world was hatched from an egg, or, like the Maori, that it came from the tearing-apart of a love embrace. The Greeks told of a tempestuous Hera and a cunning Zeus, but we now use genes and natural selection to explain fear and desire, and physics to demystify the workings of the universe. Science is an astounding achievement, but are we really any wiser than the ancients? Has science revealed the secrets of fate and immortality? Has it provided protection from jealousy or love? There are those who believe that science has replaced faith, but must it also be a death knell for mythology? Evolutions brings to life the latest scientific thinking on the birth of the universe and the solar system, the journey from a single cell all the way to our human minds. Reawakening our sense of wonder and terror at the world around us and within us, Oren Harman uses modern science to create new and original mythologies. Here are the Earth and the Moon presenting a cosmological view of motherhood, a panicking Mitochondrion introducing sex and death to the world, the loneliness of consciousness emerging from the memory of an octopus, and the birth of language in evolution summoning humankind's struggle with truth. Science may not solve our existential puzzles, but like the age-old legends, its magical discoveries can help us continue the never-ending search.

In his critically acclaimed Rewrites, Neil Simon talked about his beginnings - his early years of working in television, his first real love, his first play, his first brush with failure, and, most moving of all, his first great loss. Simon's same willingness to open his heart of the reader permeates The Play Goes On. This second act takes the reader from the mid-1970s to the present, a period in which Simon wrote some of his most popular and critically acclaimed plays, including the Brighton Beach trilogy and Lost in Yonkers, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. Simon experienced enormous professional success during this time, but in his personal life he struggled to find that same sense of happiness and satisfaction. After the death of his first wife, he and his two young daughters left New York for Hollywood. There he remarried, and when that foundered he remarried again. Told with his characteristic humor and unflinching sense of irony, The Play Goes On is rich with stories of how Simon's art came to imitate his life. Simon's forty-plus plays make up a body of work that is a long-running memoir in its own right, yet here, in a deeper and more personal book than his first volume, Simon offers a revealing look at an artist in crisis but still able and willing to laugh at himself. -- from back cover.-- Provided by publisher.

Based closely on his own life, Neil Simon's most recent Broadway play centers around a recently widowed writer who falls in love and marries a much younger woman whom he hardly knows

All cities have their secrets, but none are so dark as San Francisco's, the city that Ambrose Bierce famously described as "a point upon a map of fog." With its reputation as a shadowy land of easy vice and hard virtue, San Francisco provided the ideal setting for many of the greatest films noir, from classics like The Maltese Falcon and Dark Passage to obscure treasures like Woman on the Run and D.O.A. , and neo-noirs like Point Blank and The Conversation . Readers visit the Mission Dolores cemetery where James Stewart spied Kim Novak visiting Carlotta's grave in Vertigo ; the Steinhart Aquarium, where a steamy love scene unfolded between Orson Welles and Rita Hayworth in The Lady from Shanghai ; and the Kezar Stadium, where Clint Eastwood captures the serial killer, Scorpio, in a blaze of ghastly white light in Dirty Harry . In this guide to the great films noir and the locations where they were shot, the mythic noir city meets San Francisco's own dark past. With period film stills.

Triangulating love, old but not yet forgotten murders, and international spy craft mark this story. Robert wants nothing more than to become a serious art historian. But his hopes for a staid academic life are put on hold when he's driven from London to Venice to escape one lover and seek out another: the enigmatic Bulgarian refugee Lina Pancev. In Venice, Robert encounters a grand carnival of lust, lies, blackmail, cocktail parties, and regicide. As he chases Lina, his heart's desire, the city itself provides a priceless education in love, art, and beauty. Witty yet elegant, Territorial Rights is a celebration of human imperfection and complexity, with as many shifting identities, wardrobe changes, and sumptuous settings as a comic opera.

In this book, the world's foremost scholar of Kabbalah explores the understanding of erotic love in Jewish mystical thought. Encompassing Jewish mystical literatures from those of late antiquity to works of Polish Hasidism, Moshe Idel highlights the diversity of Kabbalistic views on eros and distinguishes between the major forms of eroticism. The author traces the main developments of a religious formula that reflects the union between a masculine divine attribute and a feminine divine attribute, and he asks why such an "erotic formula" was incorporated into the Jewish prayer book. Idel shows how Kabbalistic literature was influenced not only by rabbinic literature but also by Greek thought that helped introduce a wider understanding of eros. Addressing topics ranging from cosmic eros and androgyneity to the affinity between C. J. Jung and Kabbalah to feminist thought, Idel's deeply learned study will be of consuming interest to scholars of religion, Judaism, and feminism.

Marjorie Perloff writes: “Among the great modernist poets, Mina Loy was surely the greatest wit, the most sophisti- cated commentator on the vagaries of love, the one whose brittle and sardonic laughter continues . . . to pursue us.” Stories and Essays of Mina Loy is the first book-length volume of Mina Loy’s narrative writings and critical work ever published. This volume brings together her short fiction, as well as hybrid works that include modernized fairy tales, a Socratic dialogue, and a ballet. Loy’s narratives address issues such as abortion and poverty, and what she called “the sex war” is an abiding theme throughout. Stories and Essays of Mina Loy also contains dramatic works that parody the bravado and misogyny of Futurism and demonstrate Loy’s early, effective use of absurdist technique. Essays and commentaries on aesthetics, historical events, and religion complete this beguiling collection, cementing Mina Loy’s place as one of the great writers of the twentieth century.

In a small town among the citrus groves in the Santa Bernita Valley, so the locals claim, nothing ever goes according to plan. "It's a great place to live, they say, if you like surprises: it's just like life, only different." Certainly a number of Rito's inhabitants--fewer than a hundred in all--are surprised to be living here. Red Ray, for instance, a wildly alcoholic lawyer who bought a dilapidated Victorian mansion in an attempt to rehabilitate his marriage and regain the affections of his wife and young son. After destroying those hopes with a spectacular final binge, Red established a drunk farm, Round Rock, on the ruins. There, one day at a time, he follows his new, unexpected calling. Many months after her husband decamped (almost immediately) for Los Angeles, Libby Daw still lives alone in their trailer, and finds herself even more rooted to the valley she dreams of escaping. And there's Lewis Fletcher, a sometime graduate student whose keen intelligence is sorely tested by his erratic behavior and current predicament. Without exactly knowing why, and entirely against his wishes--or by default and sheer good luck--he finds himself placed in Ray's care at Round Rock. As these people seek out or maintain their various niches in the valley, the peculiar history of the place asserts itself. An heiress descended from the original settlers, Billie Fitzgerald still acts as though she owns it all; devoted to her father and son, she obscures her mercurial emotions from even her closest friends. The past also returns with David Ibañez, whose family had harvested the groves for generations--and whose talents and secrets (and thus, he discovers, his future) are inextricably bound to the complex, close-knit town he thought he had left behind. With insight matched with artistry, Michelle Huneven traces the emerging destinies of these characters as each of them struggles for peace and equilibrium, even happiness and love, against hapless, all-too-human frailty and circumstance. A vivid evocation of landscape and community, Round Rock derives great power from psychological subtlety, and from affection for and profound understanding of lives strained or broken but on the mend. Fresh, remarkably mature, and constantly surprising, this astonishing debut wins both your trust and your heart.

This selection of Michael Kinsley's trenchant editorial writing in Slate (and elsewhere) since 1995 covers the end of the Clinton era (Monica, impeachment, etc.) and two terms of George W. Bush (9/11, the War on Terror, Iraq, etc.). During this time Kinsley left Washington for Seattle and founded Slate, was opinion editor of the Los Angeles Times, underwent brain surgery for Parkinson's disease, and had other adventures that are reflected here. Although mostly about politics, there are articles and essays about other things, such as the future of newspapers, the existence of God, and why power women love Law and Order. This is the work of a writer at the top of his form. Kinsley's wit is a weapon that any talk-show host or elected blowhard should envy and fear, and the reader will cherish his sense of humor, which enlivens even the toughest subject matter.

Bestselling and prize-winning Israeli author Shalev describes the many "firsts" of the Bible--from the first love and the first death to the first laugh and the first dream--providing readers with a fresh, secular, and surprising look at the stories they think they know.

"Are we tired of hearing that fall is a season, sick of being offered fries and told about the latest movie? Yeah. Have we noticed the sly interpolation of Americanisms into our everyday speech? You betcha. And are we outraged? Hell, yes. But do we do anything? Too much hassle. Until now. In That's The Way It Crumbles Matthew Engel presents a call to arms against the linguistic impoverishment that happens when one language dominates another. With dismay and wry amusement, he traces the American invasion of our language from the early days of the New World, via the influence of Edison, the dance hall and the talkies, right up to the Apple and Microsoft-dominated present day, and explores the fate of other languages trying to fend off linguistic takeover bids. It is not the Americans' fault, more the result of their talent for innovation and our own indifference. He explains how America's cultural supremacy affects British gestures, celebrations and way of life, and how every paragraph and conversation includes words the British no longer even think of as Americanisms. Part battle cry, part love song, part elegy, this book celebrates the strange, the banal, the precious and the endangered parts of our uncommon common language"--Amazon.com

New York City in the 1970s was the setting for Taxi Driver , Annie Hall , and Saturday Night Fever , the nightmare playground for Son of Sam and The Warriors , the proving grounds for graffiti, punk, hip-hop, and all manner of other public spectacle. Musicians, artists, and writers could subsist even in Manhattan, while immigrants from the world over were reinventing the city in their own image. Others, fed up with crime, filth and frustration, simply split. Fast-forward three decades and today New York can appear a glamorous metropolis, with real estate prices soaring higher than its skyscrapers. But is this fresh-scrubbed, affluent city really an improvement on its grittier--and more affordable--predecessor? Taking us back to the streets where eccentricity and anomie were pervasive, New York Calling unlocks life in the unpolished Apple, where, it seemed, anything could happen. All five boroughs­­--the Bronx, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Queens, and Staten Island--comprising hundreds of neighborhoods and the interlaced worlds of politics, crime, drugs, sex, and mischief, are explored with a love of the city unclouded by romance yet undimmed by cynicism. Acclaimed historian Marshall Berman and journalist Brian Berger gather here a stellar group of writers and photographers who combine their energies to weave a rich tale of struggle, excitement, and wonder. John Strausbaugh explains how Uptown has taken over Downtown, as Tom Robbins examines the mayors and would-be mayors who have presided over the transformation. Margaret Morton chronicles the homeless, while Robert Atkins offers a personal view of the city's gay culture and the devastating impact of aids. Anthony Haden-Guest and John Yau offer insiders' views of the New York art world, while Brandon Stosuy and Allen Lowe recount their discoveries of the local rock and jazz scenes. Armond White and Leonard Greene approach African-American culture and civil rights from perspectives often marginalized in so-called polite conversation. Daily life in New York has its dramatic moments too. Luc Sante gives us glimpses of a city perpetually on the grift, Jean Thilmany and Philip Dray share secrets of Gotham's ethnic enclaves, Richard Meltzer walks, Jim Knipfel rides the subways, and Robert Sietsema criss-crosses the city, indefatigably tasting everything from giant Nigerian tree snails to Fujianese turtles. It's a long way from old Brooklyn to the new Times Square. But New York Calling reminds us of what has changed--and what's been lost --along the way.

Rural Central Texas, 1909. A young Russian-Jewish immigrant, newly arrived in America through the port of Galveston, pulls his banana cart into the hamlet of Hamilton. Fleeing the vicious pogroms of his homeland, he has sought refuge in the land of the free. Able to speak only Yiddish, alone in the midst of a staunchly Christian community, he begs for shelter. Over the next thirty years, he makes a home and raises a family in this tiny town. THE IMMIGRANT is the story of a young Russian-Jewish couple and the local couple that take them in, as religion meets religion, culture meets culture, fear meets fear, and love meets love. This is the true story of Haskell Harelik, "the Immigrant". "THE IMMIGRANT received a well-deserved standing ovation on opening night at the Mark Taper Forum...superb." Pros, Variety "A lovely and loving evening of theater. Harelik's story is tender and touching" Ed Kaufman, Hollywood Reporter "A funny new play... The scenes evoke the rural era with the firm-handed clarity of a Jewish Horton Foote...they glow." Linda Winer, U S A Today

Marjorie Agosín writes of a beloved childhood nanny: "Since I was Jewish she baptized me with holy water brought forth from the fonts of nearby churches. She told me to stay very still so I wouldn't sprout horns. . . . I was somewhere between taciturn and happy gazing into the mirror as if approaching the edge of a cliff . . . and I watched myself in the deep, transparent veil of this night of all nights." Many of the themes expressed in this vignette--cultural dissonance, family, and community--are poetically intertwined throughout The Alphabet in My Hands . Agosín takes us on a personal journey of discovery that is as much internal reflection as it is an exodus across continents and decades. Agosín's childhood and early adolescence were spent with her Jewish family in Chile. While her family raised her to regard her Jewish heritage with loving awareness, they also participated in the dominant Catholic culture--an aunt organized Easter egg hunts and her mother admired the beauty of Chile's Catholic churches. The young Agosín became keenly aware of her dual identity in her country, both as a participant and an outsider. The second half of The Alphabet in My Hands recounts the events that forced her family to emigrate to America: the overthrow of Salvador Allende by General Augusto Pinochet. Agosín writes of her new life in Athens, Georgia, of the sudden loss of all that was familiar. Ostracized as an emigrant--a "non-white" with a strange foreign accent--her high school years were made even more painful by the news from Chile: prisoners taken and classmates disappearing or shot. Years later, Agosín goes back to Chile and she travels there with her own children. As she stares down at her old homeland from the plane, she writes: "Why do I love this place that forced us into exile, that punished my father for being a Jew?" And in the final chapter of The Alphabet in My Hands , this award-winning poet addresses two important topics: her current residence in New England and the central role of writing and literature in her life.

Following her acclaimed, Los Angeles Times Book Prize–nominated novel, The God of War , Marisa Silver’s extraordinary book, Alone With You , is a starkly elegant and superbly rendered collection of short stories. Marisa Silver dazzled and inspired readers with her critically acclaimed The God of War (a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist), praised by Richard Russo as “a novel of great metaphorical depth and beauty.” In this elegant, finely wrought new collection, Alone With You, Silver has created eight indelible stories that mine the complexities of modern relationships and the unexpected ways love manifests itself. Her brilliantly etched characters confront life’s abrupt and unsettling changes with fear, courage, humor, and overwhelming grace. In the O. Henry Prize–winning story “The Visitor,” a VA hospital nurse’s aide contends with a family ghost and discovers the ways in which her own past haunts her. The reticent father in “Pond” is confronted with a Solomonic choice that pits his love for his daughter against his feelings for her young son. In “Night Train to Frankfurt,” first published in The New Yorker, a daughter travels to an alternative-medicine clinic in Germany in a gambit to save her mother’s life. And in the title story, a woman vacations in Morocco with her family while contemplating a decision that will both ruin and liberate them all. From “Temporary,” where a young woman confronts the ephemeral nature of companionship, to “Three Girls,” in which sisters trapped in a snowstorm recognize the boundaries of childhood, the nuanced voices of Alone With You bear the hallmarks of an instant classic from a writer with unerring talent and imaginative resource. Silver has the extraordinary ability to render her fictional inhabitants instantly relatable, in all their imperfections. Her stories have the singular quality of looking in a mirror. We see at once what is familiar and what is strange. In these stirring narratives, we meet ourselves anew.

The internationally renowned novelist and poet creates a very contemporary version of the story of Romeo and Juliet set in the twin realms of college and national politics. In the prominent political family of the Dickensons, ambition comes first, and Melissa, the third child, has always felt she came last. Going away to college offers a chance at love and a life free from her brilliant mother's constant scrutiny. Blake, a child of mixed race and apparently unknown parentage, has been raised by lawyers whose defence of death row cases has brought them into fierce dispute with Melissa's father, now a senator, then governor of Pennsylvania. When Melissa meets Blake at College, their passion is immediate. Yet Blake is keeping a dangerous secret from Melissa, one that could destroy both them and their families. Dealing with themes of love, honesty, identity and the consequences of ambition, this thoughtful beautifully written story is a page turner with an edge.

This new gathering of Marge Piercy's poems--energetic, funny, political, full of vitality--brings us the heart of her mature work, the first selected since Circles on the Water in 1982. Here are poems that chart the milestone events and fierce passions of her middle years: the death of her mother, whom we meet first as a young woman, "awkwardly lovely, her face / pure as a single trill perfectly / prolonged on a violin," and again as an older woman musing on what the afterlife may hold for her. There is a new marriage which she celebrates not only for romantic beginnings but also for the more intimate details that emerge over time: "love cherishes too the backpockets, / the pencil ends of childhood fears." Some poems convey her long-held, never-wavering political convictions, which she declares in language unmistakably and colorfully her own, as when she encourages her feminist readers to go to the opera instead of the movies because at least there the heroine is real, "fifty and weighs as much as a '65 Chevy with fins." Living out to sea on Cape Cod settles her into the rhythm of seasons and provides poems of planting and harvests, odes to tomatoes and roses, tributes to the power and freedom of whales. And in these years she rediscovers her Jewish heritage, celebrating holidays and making of them something new and original

Product Description Set in the magnificent culture of the Middle East more than four thousand years ago, Lilah is a rich and emotionally resonant story of faith, love, and courage. Living in exile, Lilah is in love with Antinoes, a Persian warrior. They have known each other since they were children, and Antinoes dearly wants to make Lilah his wife. Yet Lilah does not feel she can marry without the blessing of her brother, Ezra. She and Ezra are close, and Lilah knows her brother well—he does not want his sister to have a husband outside their faith. Ezra is a scholar of the laws of Moses, and Lilah believes it is her brother’s destiny to lead the Jewish people back to the Promised Land. While Antinoes pressures her to accept his proposal, Lilah realizes that before she can consider her own happiness, it is her duty to help her brother accomplish the seemingly impossible task that is before him. Putting herself in grave danger, and with the help of Antinoes, Lilah wins Ezra an audience with Artaxerxes II, the King of Kings, who grants permission to lead the exiles on their journey back to the Promised Land. After a hazardous trip across the desert, Lilah, Ezra, and the thousands who join them arrive in Jerusalem. But the hardship of rebuilding the Temple takes its toll, and the religious enthusiasm of some turns to extremism. Ezra, listening to the zealots, orders all non-Jewish wives and their children banished from Jerusalem. Lilah, whose love for Antinoes has never wavered, is horrified by this command. She knows she must now choose between her brother and her conscience, which tells her that the time has come to defy him. Lilah is a timeless story of one woman’s stand against intolerance; it will linger in the reader’s mind long after the last page has been turned. From Publishers Weekly In his final installment of the Canaan Trilogy ( Sarah; Zipporah), Halter ambitiously tackles portions of the complicated biblical book of Ezra, which centers on the rebuilding of the Jerusalem temple and calls Israel to ethnic and religious purity. In the Persian town of Susa, the beautiful Lilah dreams of marrying her Persian lover and childhood sweetheart, Antinoes. However, her beloved brother Ezra, who has immersed himself in studying the laws of God, refuses to approve of their union since Antinoes is not a Jew. As the story unfolds, with scenes full of rich detail, Lilah becomes the unlikely instrument of gaining royal approval for the Jewish people to return to Jerusalem and rebuild the holy city. However, once there, Ezra orders all non-Jewish wives and children driven away in what is surely one of the most heart-wrenching episodes directly from scripture. A horrified Lilah repudiates her brother and leaves with them. As the cast-off women wander unprotected outside the city, rape, murder and mayhem ensue. (It's confusing that Lilah narrates one violent scene, but readers are unsure how she survives it.) As in Sarah and Zipporah, there is plenty of highly charged sexuality and some imaginative storytelling. Unfortunately, as with its predecessors, the story trails off, and the ending is unsatisfactory. (June) Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. From AudioFile Ellen Reilly brings the story of Lilah, sister of Ezra, the biblical prophet, to life. Perhaps not many are familiar with the story of Ezra, which takes place more than four thousand years ago during a sad time in Israel's history. Lilah is torn between her love for her brother, Ezra, and her love for a Persian warrior. She must choose, and her choice will bring far-reaching consequences. All the emotion and turmoil in the story are made real by the talented Ellen Reilly. One can easily feel the heartache, passion, and drama of this book. Fascinating and well worth a listen. N.L. © AudioFile 2006, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine About the Author Mar

An excellent self-titled debut album. Our album-matching folio includes a bio, color and black & white photos and eleven titles like: Ghost Train * Miles Away * Perfect Love * Silver Thunderbird * True Companion * Walk on Water * Walking in Memphis.