Modern Japanese Short Stories is a remarkable collection of Japanese stories from the pioneers of contemporary Japanese literature. This volume's twenty-five stories by as many authors display a wide range of style and subject matter--offering a revealing picture of modern Japanese culture and society. The stories in this anthology include: "Tattoo" by Junichiro Tanizaki--a large spider tattooed on the back of a young woman results in unexpected changes "Autumn Mountain" by Ryunosuke Akutagawa--vivid memories of a beautiful painting leads a man to wonder if the it ever actually existed "The Priest and His Love" by Yukio Mishima--a Buddhist priest finds his path to enlightenment challenged after falling in love "The Moon on the Water" by Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata--a young woman who cared for her ailing first husband through most of their marriage regrets remarrying after his death Featuring a new foreword by Japanese literary scholar Seiji Lippit and striking woodcut illustrations by Masakazu Kuwata, the stories are translated by the editor, Ivan Morris, and Edward Seidensticker, George Saito, and Geoffery Sargent. This collection of short stories shows why Japanese literature is so highly valued today--it teaches not only about Japan, but about the human condition and the possibilities of art.

The dread shadow of Nazism falls upon the Carnovsky family, three generations of Jews who believe themselves totally assimilated into German society. David, who has prospered in "enlightened, civilized" Berlin and considers himself "more German than the Germans”, cannot rationalize the momentous events engulfing him. His son Georg, a famous doctor, taught by his father to be "Jewish at home, a German in the street", is stripped of his practice, his possessions, and ultimately his illusions. And his young son Jegor is pulled between his love for the fatherland and the Jewishness he scorns. A tragedy of torn loyalties, this powerful and panoramic novel has become one of the classics of our time.

For sixty-four years, Isaac Stern has been a great--and greatly loved--performing artist, famous for his profound music-making, his gusto for life, his passionate dedication to sharing his knowledge and wisdom with younger musicians, and his determination in a good cause (Stern is, after all, The Man Who Saved Carnegie Hall). Indeed, there is no more revered musician in the world than Isaac Stern, revered not only as a great violinist but as a warm and generous personality and as a crucial figure and spokesperson in the world of the arts. Brought to America from Russia when he was ten months old, Stern grew up in San Francisco and was quickly recognized as an extraordinary talent. He began performing publicly while still very young, and was soon touring across the country and around the world. His fame escalated when he led the fight to save Carnegie Hall, and again when he was the subject of the Academy Award-winning documentary film From Mao to Mozart. In this book he shares with us both his personal and his artistic experiences: the story of his rise to eminence; his feelings about music and the violin; his rich emotional life; his great friendships and collaborations with colleagues such as Leonard Bernstein and Pablo Casals; his background as an ardent supporter of Israel; his ideas and beliefs about art, life, love, and the world we live in. At seventy-nine, Stern's mind, his wit, and his spirit are as strong as ever, and they are conveyed to us in the most sympathetic and articulate way by Chaim Potok. The two men spent a year talking and sharing their perceptions, and the result is a book in which Stern's voice comes through with complete conviction and persuasiveness. The man on the page is the musician and humanitarian we have loved and admired for so long. Here is the most readable and revealing musical autobiography of the decade.

Most of us could only imagine the life that Irene Pollin has lived. In Irene and Abe: An Unexpected Life, Irene Pollin details the life journey that she and her husband Abe experienced together. From the time they fell in love as teenagers, through their careers (including bringing NBA basketball and NHL hockey to the Nation's Capital) and ultimately to Mr. Pollin's passing, Irene Pollin writes about the thrills of owning professional sports teams and building two highly successful sports and entertainment arenas....as well as the joy of raising children and the heartbreak of losing children to heart disease. She also chronicles the challenges she faced through her multifaceted career, from psychotherapist and published author, to founder of a successful, groundbreaking nonprofit organization established to raise awareness of heart disease in women. Irene and Abe: An Unexpected Life is an intimate, first person journey through the lives of two fascinating people, told by a remarkable woman.

"Voltaire's Coconuts is a wonderfully engaging and witty combination of history and biography which looks at how Europeans have been fascinated by all that it means to be English. Dutch by birth, Buruma came to live in England in 1990 for the third time in his life and noticed a new mood of introspection. Englishness was a subject of endless discussion. Fox hunting was debated, loyalty to English cricket a hot issue, and the future of the monarchy rarely out of the news. This worrying over Englishness resulted, in Buruma's words, 'in great balls of intellectual wool', obscuring the more practical reasons why Europeans have admired (or hated) Britain in the past: its liberal institutions, its civil liberties, its delicate balance between social order and the free pursuit of self-interest. In this brilliant and elegantly written book Buruma examines these ideas about Englishness and what Europeans admired or loathed about Britain. Voltaire wondered why British laws could not be planted in France, or even Serbia, like the precious seeds of coconut trees. Karl Marx thought the English were too stupid to start a revolution; Goethe worshipped Shakespeare; Baron de Coubertin's idea of the modern Olympic Games was inspired by Tom Brown's Schooldays; Theodor Herzl's dream of the Jewish state was fuelled by his love of British aristocracy; and the German Kaiser was convinced that Britain was run by Jews. Combining biographical stories of these European Anglophiles and Anglophobes with memories of his own Anglo-Dutch-German-Jewish family, Ian Buruma has found a wholly original way of describing the relationship between Britain and Europe. This is a dazzlingly clever book which through its exploration of anglomania shows how much Englishness and people's view of it has shaped modern Europe." --Descripción del editor.

More than seventy years after D. H. Lawrence made his "savage pilgrimage" to New Mexico, British twenty-something Henry Shukman set off on his own journey there, in search of the spirit of Lawrence, the rugged and enigmatic beauty of the American Southwest, and answers to questions of love and life. His New Mexico quest takes him to dusty roadside gas stations, cheap Mexican restaurants, and ancient Indian pueblos, and he crosses paths with amiable cowboys and lonesome cowgirls, a plane-flying priest, more than one romantically inclined stranger, and a barroom philosopher at every stop. He's not afraid to strip naked to join strange men in an open-air hot tub, nor is he intimidated by salsa dancing at the Red Dog Saloon. As he finds himself in towns called Truth or Consequence, or just driving along the magical New Mexico roads, his journey becomes one of self-discovery - in the end, he finds exactly what he is searching for in the dusty town of Las Vegas, New Mexico.

The dispatcher has a great job lined up and the only mini-cab available is 274. Problem is, 274, who says he has fallen in love with the passenger who is asleep (or is she dead?) on his back seat, doesn't seem to know his own location, much less that of Victoria Station.

This is a television adaptation of Elizabeth Bowen's novel and is set in London during the Second World War. It is a story of love and espionage. Harold Pinter's most recent play is "Mountain Language".

"In the mid-1980s, the Canadian art group General Idea (AA Bronson, Felix Partz, and Jorge Zontal) created a symbol using the acronym AIDS, arranging the letters in a manner that resembled Robert Indiana's famous LOVE logo. This launched Imagevirus, a project of paintings, sculptures, videos, posters, and exhibitions that investigated the term AIDS as both word and image, using the mechanism of viral transmission. The Imagevirus spread like a virus, producing an image epidemic in urban spaces from Manhattan to Sydney. It was displayed as, among other things, a Spectacolor sign in Times Square, a sculpture on a street in Hamburg, and a poster in the New York subway system. In this detailed study of the Imagevirus project, artist and writer Gregg Bordowitz analyzes the work from the perspective of his own involvement with activist art initiatives in New York during the 1980s and 1990s ; Bordowitz explores the virus as idea, as tactic, and as identity. General Idea felt compelled to make Imagevirus at a time when AIDS was emerging as a global epidemic affecting gay men disproportionately; when homophobia seemed to drive U.S. AIDS policy; and when the exigencies of AIDS activism created a demand for agit-prop and direct action. General Idea adapted their methods to the new situation, using the threat of viral infection and a poetic understanding of language as their model for artistic production and ideological struggle."--Pub. desc

During the Great Depression, society matron Millicent Jordan has bigger problems: she is planning a dinner and Lord and Lady Ferncliff have just accepted. As her daughter Paula's romantic complications mount and her search for an "extra man" to complement former stage star Carlotta Vance proves fruitless, the lady and all her guests are caught in a roundelay of wealth, loss, love, betrayal and the disintegration of the accepted social order. This stage hit originally opened on Broadway in 1932, became a classic MGM film and was later revived at New York's Lincoln Center in 2003 to great acclaim.

For investing movies with an image of style and glamour George Cukor (1899--1983) is considered one of the founding fathers of the Golden Age of Hollywood. The roll call of the great films he made and the stars he directed validates his rank as one of cinema's greatest moviemakers. "The only really important thing I have to say about George Cukor," Katharine Hepburn proclaimed, "is that all the other directors I have worked with starred themselves. But George 'starred' the actor. He didn't want people to say, 'this great director.' He wanted them to say 'this great actor.' " Along with introducing Hepburn and Greta Garbo to American audiences, he worked with many of the most acclaimed movie actresses of his day, including Vivien Leigh, Olivia de Havilland, Jean Harlow, Elizabeth Taylor, Joan Crawford, Ingrid Bergman, Ava Gardner, Claudette Colbert, Angela Lansbury, Judy Holliday, Audrey Hepburn, and Marilyn Monroe. These interviews are a pleasure to read because Cukor is so immersed in his subject and so forthright in his observations. He comes to life immediately with disarming candor and infectious enthusiasm for cinema and the people who make it. In addition to discussing his romantic comedies, Cukor talks about his famous screen adaptations of classic novels and plays, including Little Women (1933) and David Copperfield (1935). His experience of being fired by producer David O. Selznick partway through the shooting of Gone With the Wind (1939) surfaces in nearly every interview. Instead of having his career derailed by this dismissal, however, he continued his rise as one of America's premier directors. In his cornucopia of films are Holiday (1938), The Philadelphia Story (1940), Adam's Rib (1949), Born Yesterday (1950), A Star Is Born (1954), Let's Make Love (1960), and My Fair Lady (1964). Cukor was a man of myriad dimensions. In his last years he opened up about his private life and his previously undisclosed homosexuality. He was ardent in his friendships and single-minded in his devotion to making quality movies for a popular audience. Robert Emmet Long, a literature and film scholar and writer living in Fulton, New York, is the author or editor of more than forty books, including John Huston: Interviews (University Press of Mississippi).

With these interwoven autobiographical essays, Geoffrey Wolff, author of the acclaimed The Duke of Deception, recounts the moral (and immoral) education of a writer, friend, husband, and father, as he offers his spirited, elegant, and deeply felt observations on an extraordinary life: from wildly dysfunctional childhood Christmases to a concupiscent career teaching literature in Istanbul; from a victory over the chaos of drink to a life-affirming surrender to the majesty of the Matterhorn; and from a foundering friendship to the transcending love of family. He shares with us, then, the wisdom of an alert man learning through the unsettling collisions of time, place, and local custom, and through the force of hardship and hazard, to bring his many disparate selves together -- with astonishing high-stakes candor and dazzling literary agility. From the Trade Paperback edition.

In writing this book I have taken it as a commonplace that everyone- man, woman, and child-wants to be strong. Without strength-and by strength I mean health, vitality, and a general sense of physical well-being -life is but a gloomy business. Wealth, talent, ambition, the love and affection of friends, the pleasure derived from doing good to those about one, all these things may afford some consolation for being deprived of life's chief blessing, but they can never make up for it. "But," I am constantly being asked, "it is all very well for you to say this, and everyone of sense agrees with you; the point is, can we obtain this much-prized blessing?" In the vast majority of cases I can say unhesitatingly "Yes." You can all be strong, all enjoy the heritage which was intended for you. Not all to the same extent, perhaps. Those who are afflicted with some hereditary disease, who may have unsound organs handed down to them, cannot reasonably expect to get such results as their more fortunate brethren. Still, even they need not despair; even if their condition be such as to put out of the question any such thing as athletics, they can, at all events, attain to such a condition as will permit of their enjoying life, and render them fit to carry on their work without difficulty. And after all, those who wish to be strong for this reason are innumerable. It is only the young and vigorous who desire to excel in athletic pastimes, but the middle-aged and elderly, the delicate women and young children, who yearn for health are countless. I claim that by carefully following out my system, as set out in the following pages, and fully illustrated in the Anatomical Chart at the end of the volume, these results may be attained

A captivating coming-of-age novel about love, sisterhood, secrets and betrayal[Bokinfo]

Product Description Career, baby and a gloriously liberated love life; suddenly single, uninhibited Isadora is besieged by more suitors than she can keep track of: an Orthodox rabbi, a poetic DJ, the son of a famous sex therapist and, finally, Bean, the demonic-Byronic lover she's searched for all her life. About the Author Erica Jong is the author of twenty books of poetry, fiction, and memoir. Her most recent essays have appeared in The New York Times Book Review.

Married (again) and divorced (again), Isadora Wing is a single parent with an adorable daughter, an irritating ex-husband, and a startling assortment of suitors: an unorthodox rabbi, a poetic disc jockey, the son of a famous sex therapist, and WASPily handsomest of all: Berkeley Sproul III. Isadora and Berkeley meet at a health club, and he's fourteen years her junior. Of course their affair is tortuous and sexy, but is it love? Or does the stud just want a free trip to Venice, compliments of a famous author? Either way, Erica Jong wrote this romance with "a mixture of eloquence and savage wit as good as anything she has ever written," said The Wall Street Journal.

First published in 1997, Inventing Memory is about four generations of remarkable women from a Jewish-American family-their triumphs, tragedies, scandals, and love affairs-as related by Sara Solomon, the youngest of these women. While trying to chronicle their history, the story becomes essentially hers, as she comes to understand the nature of memory, the way all of us both invent and assimilate our ancestors. In learning about the women in her family, Sara discovers how to create her own future.

From a small, bogside cabin in rural New England, 38-year-old Aimee Slater unravels the story of her life, attempting to make sense of the tangled thread that leads from her mother's house-a short, unbridgeable distance away-to the world she now inhabits. It is soon after the Civil War; Aimee lives alone, but is graced with visits from two friends, a crippled man and a troubled eleven-year-old girl. She is perpetually caught between the sensual world she so desires and the divine retribution passed down to her by her mother's scorn. How Aimee ultimately creates a life for herself and bridges that distance makes for a moving story of love and loss. Told in a voice of spare New England lyricism, Unravelling is a remarkably haunting account of the power of redemption.

The Ultra-Novel about "Sex in the Sixties"... A story of two liberated women looking for love...

We first meet Lucy Appelbaum, the heroine of Paradise, New York , n 1970, when she is a nine year old girl enjoying her family's Catskills hotel, the Garden of Eden. Ten years later, having found nothing else at which she can distinguish herself, she tries to save the Eden by capitalizing on a wave of nostalgia for the Borscht Belt, running the hotel as a sort of living museum of Yiddish culture. In the course of that season, Lucy comes to realize her love for the hotel's black handyman, Mr. Jefferson -- and the difficulties she faces in overcoming the barriers between them. She battles her grandmother's not-so-subtle attempts to sabotage her success, her parents' superstitious fear of anything that attracts attention to the Jews, and her brother's contention that what Lucy is doing is more a matter of ego than authentic religious feeling. On top of all this, Lucy must contend with the Hasid who buys the chicken farm next door, a cell of ancient Jewish Communist who foment a strike among Eden's overworked young staff, and a gay chef and a gay baker who want to prove to the world that kosher cuisine can satisfy the most sophisticated gourmet. Among the novel's characters are Shirley and Nat Feidel, who barely survived the Holocaust but refuse to allow bitterness to rule their lives; Mami Goshgarian, the Eden's tumeler ; and Jimmy Kilcoin, and Irish Catholic insurance adjustor who has earned a reputation as "the Don Juan of the Catskills" and is determined to seduce Lucy before summer's end.