The Polish-born, British-based pianist André Tchaikowsky (1935-82) saw himself principally as a composer- one of several conflicting elements in his personality, charted by the diaries he kept between 1974 and 1982. André Tchaikowsky was only 46 when he died, internationally renowned as a pianist - and he made the headlines after his death when he left his skull to the Royal Shakespeare Company for use in performances of Hamlet. Yet for all his facility at the keyboard Tchaikowsky's real passion was composition. The internal conflict between pianist and composer compounded an already complex character. A Polish Jew and Holocaust survivor, Tchaikowsky was also a homosexual. The diaries he kept between 1974 and his death chronicle the struggles that ran through his life. Debt kept driving him back to the concert platform when his true wish was to find the time to compose. His spirited writing details the joys and vicissitudes of his life with striking candour. The diaries are introduced and annotated by Anastasia Belina-Johnson, who also provides a chronology of Tchaikowsky's life and a survey of his music. Includes a CDof the pianist in recital. Anastasia Belina-Johnson is Head of Classical Music at the Leeds College of Music.

Text: English, French (translation)

In 1892, unrepentant anarchists Alexander Berkman, Henry Bauer, and Carl Nold were sent to the Western Pennsylvania State Penitentiary for the attempted assassination of steel tycoon Henry Clay Frick. Searching for a way to continue their radical politics and to proselytize among their fellow inmates, these men circulated messages of hope and engagement via primitive means and sympathetic prisoners. On odd bits of paper, in German and in English, they shared their thoughts and feelings in a handwritten clandestine magazine called "Prison Blossoms." This extraordinary series of essays on anarchism and revolutionary deeds, of prison portraits and narratives of homosexuality among inmates, and utopian poems and fables of a new world to come not only exposed the brutal conditions in American prisons, where punishment cells and starvation diets reigned, but expressed a continuing faith in the "beautiful ideal" of communal anarchism

Hang on for a Wild Journey through the Political and Spiritual Adventures of the Baby-Boom Generation Join Wes "Scoop" Nisker as he takes us on a hilarious, wild ride through the heyday of the Beats and the Hippies and the birth of the modern environmental movement, and the surge of Buddhism in the West.

In her long career as a psychotherapist, acclaimed author Lillian Rubin occasionally encountered patients who demanded a very special, even unorthodox, therapeutic approach. For the first time, Dr. Rubin tells the stories of her most fascinating, most challenging cases from the other side of the couch, focusing not just on the patient, but on her own inner process as she confronts the issues each case raises.

A love story, a mystery, and a memory guide, Past Forgetting shows a writer's determination to re-create her life.Jill Robinson, novelist and author of Bed/Time/Story, wakes from a coma to discover she's lost her memory and just about any sense of who she was.And is. She likes the look of the man standing next to her bed, but doesn't recognize that he's her husband, Stuart. What matters is that she feels safe around him. As she searches the house for her children, she is reminded that her son and daughter are both grown with families of their own--how well did she ever know them? Can You make up for a past you don't really remember? It is Stuart who begins to fill in the details for Jill, including the fact that she's a well-known writer, although when she meets with her doctors, they say she may never write again. Against all odds, Jill Robinson retrieved her unique writing voice, and in this engaging memoir shows how she does it. She takes us with her on her exploration of'tlie connections between memory and creativity, celebrity and anonymity, and loss and discovery. From her first tentative steps outside her house on Wimpole Street to London's sleek West End. From a trip to Oxford to discuss memory with a professor to her amazing voyage to Los Angeles on an assignment for Vanity fair which takes her back to the sixties world of Hockney, Polanski, and Hopper, Jill forges new paths to memory. In Past Forgetting, Jill Robinson rediscovers friendships she doesn't know she had: Robert Redford tells her stories about her childhood; at John Lahr's London literary teas, she's reintroduced to the writer's world, and Cary Grant offers her memories of her father, Dore Schary. And being with Barbra Streisand reminds her of a time she doesn't quite remember: when her father was running MGM. In her urgent voyage to redefine herself, Jill asks all the questions you've ever asked on the nature of memory. Is recollection shadowed by emotion? Is memory an act of reinvention? Do people reinvent rather than recollect? In Past Forgetting you'll find the answers and you'll meet a writer you won't want to forget.

For more than fifty years, Geoffrey Hartman has been a pivotal figure in the humanities. In his first book, in 1954, he helped establish the study of Romanticism as key to the problems of modernity. Later, his writings were crucial to the explosive developments in literary theory in the late seventies, and he was a pioneer in Jewish studies, trauma studies, and studies of the Holocaust. At Yale, he was a founder of its Judaic Studies program, as well as of the first major video archive for Holocaust testimonies. Generations of students have benefited from Hartman's generosity, his penetrating and incisive questioning, the wizardry of his close reading, and his sense that the work of a literary scholar, no less than that of an artist, is a creative act. All these qualities shine forth in this intellectual memoir, which will stand as his autobiography. Hartman describes his early education, uncanny sense of vocation, and development as a literary scholar and cultural critic. He looks back at how his career was influenced by his experience, at the age of nine, of being a refugee from Nazi Germany in the Kindertransport. He spent the next six years at school in England, where he developed his love of English literature and the English countryside, before leaving to join his mother in America. Hartman treats us to a "biobibliography" of his engagements with the major trends in literary criticism. He covers the exciting period at Yale handled so controversially by the media and gives us vivid portraits, in particular, of Harold Bloom, Paul de Man, and Jacques Derrida. All this is set in the context of his gradual self-awareness of what scholarship implies and how his personal displacements strengthened his calling to mediate between European and American literary cultures. Anyone looking for a rich, intelligible account of the last half-century of combative literary studies will want to read Geoffrey Hartman's unapologetic scholar's tale.

"Soon after he started filming "The Last of England" (which had much autobiographical content) in 1986, Derek Jarman started work on this book, which contains diary entries, interviews and notes from the script. He writes of his childhood and his kleptomaniac father, the process through which he came to terms with his homosexuality, his early work as a painter and designer, and his debut as a film director. Serious themes are followed thoughout, as Jarman writes of what he regards as the corruption of the cinema industry, the moral and personal consequences of the AIDS virus, and the down side of Thatcher's Britain.

The rabbi came from the Slobodka Yeshiva; his congregation came from Broadway. The synagogue was a modest brick building a block from Broadway in the middle of that colorful New York neighborhood known fifty years ago as Hell's Kitchen. Between prayers on Yom Kippur you could hear a chorus of would-be Ruby Keelers tap-dancing in the rehearsal hall next door. This is the exuberant story of Bernard Birstein—his immigrant travels and travails in America, his ever-increasing family of five children and countless poor relations, and his adventurous rabbinical life. The narrator is his youngest daughter, Ann, the blond-haired enfant terrible who grew up to write six novels and now this captivating book.

FREDERICK THE SECOND is the story of the remarkable man whose power and sphere of influence straddled the worlds of Christendom and of Islam. The last of the Hohenstaufens, HolyRoman Emperor and King of Sicily and Jerusalem, Frederick II was an energetic and versatile ruler, a man of great ambition in whose lifetime the conflict between Emperor and Pope reached a newintensity. Excommunicated three times by the Church, he was an absolute monarch whose power, defended in almost continuous struggle, extended over much of Germany and Italy as well as the Holy Land. Frederick was a complex man of cultured tastes and licentious manners who had unusually wide intellectual interests. At his Sicilian court scholars of all religions were welcomed--Christian, Jewish, Mohammedan. He founded the University of Naples in 1224 and was a patron of the arts and sciences. The life of this dynamic man is fully explored in Ernst Kantorowicz's notable biography, filled with dramatic incident and absorbing detail, and written with style and scholarship.

Here is the story of Dona Gracia, one of the most remarkable women in Jewish history. The pride of sixteenth century Jewry, she is acknowledged today for her courageous defense of her people and the promotion of their culture. This JPS classic presents the first full-length biography of Dona Gracia in English. It is an epic drama featuring extraordinary characters who risked their lives for freedom of conscience, playing for high stakes among the palaces and political courts of Renaissance Europe.

This is the first comprehensive biography of Fulk Nerra, an important medieval ruler, who came to power in his teens and rose to be master in the west of the French Kingdom. Descendant of warriors and administrators who served the French kings, Fulk in turn built the state that provided a foundation for the vast Angevin empire later constructed by his descendants. Bernard Bachrach finds the terms "constructed" and "built" more than metaphorical in relation to Fulk's career. He shows how Fulk and the Angevin counts who followed him based their long-term state building policy on Roman strategies and fortifications described by Vegetius. This creative adaptation of Roman ideas and tactics, according to Bachrach, was the key to Fulk's successful consolidation of political power. Students of medieval and military history will find here a colorful, impressively researched biography. This is the first comprehensive biography of Fulk Nerra, an important medieval ruler, who came to power in his teens and rose to be master in the west of the French Kingdom. Descendant of warriors and administrators who served the French kings, Fulk in turn built the state that provided a foundation for the vast Angevin empire later constructed by his descendants. Bernard Bachrach finds the terms "constructed" and "built" more than metaphorical in relation to Fulk's career. He shows how Fulk and the Angevin counts who followed him based their long-term state building policy on Roman strategies and fortifications described by Vegetius. This creative adaptation of Roman ideas and tactics, according to Bachrach, was the key to Fulk's successful consolidation of political power. Students of medieval and military history will find here a colorful, impressively researched biography.

In 1818, with a single essay of vast scope and stunning detail, Leopold Zunz launched the turn to history in modern Judaism. Despite unending setbacks, he persevered for more than five decades to produce a body of enduring scholarship that would inspire young Jews streaming into German universities and alter forever the understanding of Judaism. By the time of his death in 1886, his vision and labor had given rise to a historical discourse and intellectual movement that devolved into vibrant sub-fields as it expanded to other geographic centers of Jewish life. Yet Zunz was a part-time scholar, at best, in search of employment that would leave him time to study. In addition to his pioneering scholarship, he was as deeply engaged in ending the political tutelage of German Christians as the civil disabilities of German Jews. And to his credit, these commitments did not come at the expense of his loyalty to the Jewish community, which he was ever ready to serve. Zunz once quipped that "those who have read my books are far from knowing me." To complement his books, Zunz left behind a treasure trove of notes, letters and papers, documents that the distinguished scholar of German Jewish culture, Ismar Schorsch, has zealously utilized to write this, the first full-fledged biography of a remarkable man

This long awaited biography provides a fascinating and comprehensive picture of Garcia Marquez's life up to the publication of his classic 100 Years of Solitude. Based on nearly a decade of research, this biographical study sheds new light on the life and works of the Nobel Laureate, father of magical realism, and bestselling author in the history of the Spanish language. As Garcia Marquez's impact endures on well into his ninth decade, the biographer's keen insights constitute the definitive re-appraisal of the literary giant's life and corpus. The later part of his life will be covered in a second book

In this memoir, dancer, choreographer, and filmmaker Yvonne Rainer traces her personal and artistic coming of age. Feelings Are Facts (the title comes from a dictum by Rainer's one-time psychotherapist) uses diary entries, letters, program notes, excerpts from film scripts, snapshots, and film frame enlargements to present a vivid portrait of an extraordinary artist and woman in postwar America. Rainer tells of a California childhood in which she was farmed out by her parents to foster families and orphanages, of sexual and intellectual initiations in San Francisco and Berkeley, and of artistic discoveries and accomplishments in the New York City dance world. Rainer studied with Martha Graham (and heard Graham declare, "when you accept yourself as a woman, you will have turn-out"--that is, achieve proper ballet position) and Merce Cunningham in the late 1950s and early 1960s, cofounded the Judson Dance Theater in 1962 (dancing with Trisha Brown, Steve Paxton, David Gordon, and Lucinda Childs), hobnobbed with New York artists including Robert Rauschenberg, Robert Morris (her lover and partner for several years), and Yoko Ono, and became involved with feminist and anti-war causes in the 1970s and 1980s. Rainer writes about how she constructed her dances--including The Mind Is a Muscle and its famous section, Trio A, as well as the recent After Many a Summer Dies the Swan--and about turning from dance to film and back to dance. And she writes about meeting her longtime partner Martha Gever and discovering the pleasures of domestic life. The mosaic-like construction of Feelings Are Facts recalls the composition-by-juxtaposition of Rainer's work in film and dance, displaying prismatic variations from what she calls her "reckless past" for our amazement and appreciation.

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The life story of a Holocaust survivor: his prewar childhood in Czechoslovakia, his experiences in 8 Nazi concentration camps, his liberation and emigration to the USA, and his career as a General Motors engineer, a Christian minister, and a consummate teacher. For Walter Ziffer, who today considers himself a Jewish secular humanist, life has always been a search for meaning. His compelling and insightful memoir distills the experiences of a remarkable man.

With Vladimir Kagan’s death in 2016, the world of design lost one of its most celebrated practitioners. Pointed Leaf Press is honored to be reissuing, in its third edition: Vladimir Kagan: A Lifetime of Avant-Garde Design . In addition to showcasing Kagan’s unique impact on post-war American design, this book recounts the amazing story of his life, and retains a moving preface by Tom Ford and poignant foreword by the late architect Zaha Hadid. It also features a new afterword by Chris Eitel, who began as an intern at Kagan’s design studio in 2013 and quickly became his protégé, offering an intimate look at the designer and the man. With this first-hand account, Kagan’s life and work is more fully contextualized and his legacy more clearly illuminated.