Now in paperback and "brimming with wondrous surprises . . . There's magic in The Pinch " ( The Boston Globe ) Steve Stern's prodigious imagination finds a wondrous home in the Pinch, a once-thriving Jewish community in Memphis. The Pinch revolves around a single enchanted day containing years, during which the antics of a group of Jewish mystics threaten to ravage the life of general store proprietor Pinchas Pin with miracles, and his nephew Muni's ardor for an alluring tightrope walker collides with his passion for chronicling the wonders of North Main Street. Their stories, gleaned by a hapless bookseller from a fabulist history book, transform the fate of the neighborhood. Now in paperback, The Pinch is a sparkling reminder that Steve Stern is one of our most talented and inimitable storytellers. "[A] big, rangy, saturated, antic new novel, a Pynchonian tragicomedy . . . Stern, an ebullient maestro of words and mayhem, wonder and conscience, orchestrates a cacophonous, whirling, gritty, tender, time-warping saga that encompasses a cavalcade of horror, stubborn love, cosmic slapstick, burlesque humor, and a scattering of miracles." -- Booklist (starred review) "Weird and wonderful . . . [ The Pinch is] a backdrop to Stern's poignant and antic drama, a playground on which his exuberant, larger-than-life characters can run wild . . . The Pinch is composed of . . . perfectly calibrated moments, all of which pulse with a dynamic inventiveness." -- Star Tribune (Minneapolis)

Brighton,1957 Mirabelle Bevan can't resist a cry for help, be it the little girl at a seaside sanatorium who is getting bullied or the strange behaviour of Uma, the Indian nurse who is looking after her. Intrigued she soon finds herself drawn into a spider's web of connections between an upmarket brothel, local priest Father Grogan, a man's body washed up on Brighton beach and a missing nursing sister. Attracted to handsome police doctor, Chris Williams, Mirabelle is determined to finally put her love affair with Jack Duggan behind her and recover from the betrayal of Superintendent Alan McGregor, but the police force in Brighton is undergoing a sea change that keeps leading her back to the sanatorium at the epicentre of a spate of brutal killings. And very soon it becomes apparent Mirabelle is in much more danger than she realises... 'With sharp blows delivered for gender and racial equality, Sheridan's story builds to a chilling climax' Daily Mail

FROM THE NUMBER ONE BESTSELLING AUTHOR Ellen Trawton is running away from it all - quite literally. She is due to get married to a man she doesn't love, her job is dragging her down and her interfering mother is getting on her nerves. So she escapes to the one place she know her mother won't follow her - to her aunt's house in rural Ireland. Once there, she uncovers a dark family secret - and a future she never knew she might have. Meanwhile, Caitlin Macausland is mourning the future she can never have. She died tragically in what the village thinks is suspicious circumstances, and now she is stuck in a limbo, unable to move on. ***PRAISE FOR SANTA MONTEFIORE*** ‘Nobody does epic romance like Santa Montefiore’ JOJO MOYES ‘An enchanting read overflowing with deliciously poignant moments’ DINAH JEFFERIES on Songs of Love and War ‘Santa Montefiore hits the spot for my like few other writers’ SARRA MANNING ‘One of our personal favourites’ THE TIMES on The Last Secret of the Deverills ‘Accomplished and poetic’ Daily Mail ‘Santa Montefiore is a marvel’ Sunday Express And between the two of them is an old lighthouse - the scene of so much tragedy. Can each woman find the peace she so desperately longs for? And can they find the way to live again?

"This vast, rich family saga is set in the crowded courtyards of Jewish Baghdad before World War I. Sami Michael portrays a family exploding with power struggles and intrigue, seductions and betrayals, witches and hunchbacks, ghouls and spirits of flesh and blood. At the centre is Victoria, a woman of character who stands head and shoulders above the courtyard's tumult and dissipation. Victoria is the daughter of the head of the tribe, enslaved to the needs of her family as are all the women of the courtyard. She has been on love with her cousin Rafael since childhood and her story, told from the distance of an old-age home in Israel, is the story of their lifelong relationship, fraught with lies and humiliation, hope and heartache, and stubborn, enduring love." -- Inside front jacket flap

Moses Wine's plans to get closer to his sons and to find love and freedom are delayed by a double murder case involving a guerilla journalist, an old Jewish gangster, Cuban exiles, and the mysterious Sexual Liberation League

Paul Kurtz has been the dominant voice of secular humanism over the past thirty years. This compilation of his work reveals the scope of his thinking on the basic topics of our time and his many and varied contributions to the cause of free thought. It focuses on the central issues that have concerned Kurtz throughout his career: ethics, politics, education, religion, science, and pseudoscience. The chapters are linked by a common theme: the need for a new enlightenment, one committed to the use of rationality and skepticism, but also devoted to realizing the highest values of humanist culture. Many writings included here were first published in magazines and journals long unavailable. Some of the essays have never before been published. They now appear as a coherent whole for the first time. Also included is an extensive bibliography of Kurtz's writings. Toward a New Enlightenment is essential for those who know and admire Paul Kurtz's work. It will also be an important resource for students of philosophy, political science, ethics, and religion. Among the chapters are: "Humanist Ethics: Eating the Forbidden Fruit"; "Relevance of Science to Ethics"; "Democracy without Theology"; "Misuses of Civil Disobedience"; "The Limits of Tolerance"; "Skepticism about the Paranormal: Legitimate and Illegitimate"; "Militant Atheism vs. Freedom of Conscience"; "Promethean Love: Unbound"; "The Case for Euthanasia"; and "The New Inquisition in the Schools."

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.

One of the hallmarks of French author Patrick Modiano's writing is a singular ability to revisit particular motifs and episodes, infusing each telling with new detail and emotional nuance. In this evocative novel the internationally acclaimed author takes up one of his most compelling themes: a love affair with a woman who disappears, and a narrator grappling with the mystery of a relationship stopped short. Set in mid-sixties Paris, After the Circus traces the relationship between the narrator, a young man not quite of legal age, and the slightly older, enigmatic woman he first glimpses at a police interrogation. The two lovers make their uncertain way into each other's hearts, but the narrator soon finds himself in the unsettling, ominous presence of others. Who are these people? Are they real, or simply evoked? Part romance, part detective story, this mesmerizing book fully demonstrates Modiano's signature use of atmosphere and suggestion as he investigates the perils and the exhilaration of young love.

Take one of the crowning musical geniuses of mid-Nineteenth Century Europe; surround him with enemies, some of whom are fiercely jealous of his talent, others in love with his beautiful wife, add several scoundrels, including a kleptomaniac music critic who ends up murdered under highly mysterious circumstances and there you have the world of Robert and Clara Schumann in the Germany of the 1850s, as told by the narrator, Dusseldorf's top detective, Inspector Hermann Preiss.

This anthology brings together, for the first time, the complete published works of Jewish Canadian poet Miriam Waddington and features a rare selection of previously unpublished poems. Miriam Waddington's verse is deceptively accessible: it is personal but never private, emotional but not confessional, thoughtful but never cerebral. The subtlety of her craft is the hallmark of a modernist poet whose work opens to the world and its readers. She details intoxicating romance and mature love, the pleasures of marriage and motherhood, the experience of raising two sons to adulthood, and the ineffable pain of divorce. As she moved through life, she wrote clearly and uncompromisingly about the vast sweep of Canada, her travels to new lands, the passage of time, the death of her ex-husband, the loss of close friends and, later, of growing old. Miriam Waddington's verse is deceptively accessible: it is personal but never private, emotional but not confessional, thoughtful but never cerebral. The subtlety of her craft is the hallmark of a modernist poet whose work opens to the world and its readers. She details intoxicating romance and mature love, the pleasures of marriage and motherhood, the experience of raising two sons to adulthood, and the ineffable pain of divorce. As she moved through life, she wrote clearly and uncompromisingly about the vast sweep of Canada, her travels to new lands, the passage of time, the death of her ex-husband, the loss of close friends and, later, of growing old. Supplementary material is available here: https://press.uottawa.ca/en/supplementary-material-the-collected-works-of-miriam-waddington/

Product description Jenny Fox goes to South America to build a school in her grandfather’s country — but her summer adventure turns into much more than community service when she meets Nelson, the charismatic leader of the project. Jenny isn’t the only one with her eyes on Nelson. As she and her flirtatious rival get closer to Nelson, though, she discovers his dark side: an ugly prejudice against his country’s enemies across the border. She doesn’t want to lose him, but how can she accept his bigotry? While love and conscience clash inside her, a real war threatens to break out around her. This is a summer she’ll remember for the rest of her life. From Booklist "The teens' fiery arguments humanize the big questions, as Jenny witnesses the prejudice against the poorer and darker people who have lost their land, including the housekeeper who works for the volunteers but eats alone... Are the hostile guerrillas on the border terrorists or freedom fighters? Readers will join the discussion." -- Booklist

The Nature of Sympathy explores, at different levels, the social emotions of fellow-feeling, the sense of identity, love and hatred, and traces their relationship to one another and to the values with which they are associated. Scheler criticizes other writers, from Adam Smith to Freud, who have argued that the sympathetic emotions derive from self-interested feelings or instincts. He reviews the evaluations of love and sympathy current in different historical periods and in different social and religious environments, and concludes by outlining a theory of fellow-feeling as the primary source of our knowledge of one another. A prolific writer and a stimulating thinker, Max Scheler ranks second only to Husserl as a leading member of the German phenomenological school. Scheler's work lies mostly in the fields of ethics, politics, sociology, and religion. He looked to the emotions, believing them capable, in their own quality, of revealing the nature of the objects, and more especially the values, to which they are in principle directed.--

Melanie is a mother and a lover, middle-aged, eccentric, courageous, and often hilariously unpredictable. She’s also deeply scarred by her internment as a child in Drancy, a Nazi detention camp. Through the humanity and friendship of an English boy, Christopher Lewis, and her self-appointed protector, Jakob Bronski, Melanie managed to survive. Forty years later, Jakob, now a frail, well-known Soviet dissident, and Christopher, a writer who’s never forgotten the young Melanie, reenter her life. Memories of the past, coupled with her husband’s infidelity, upset Melanie’s precarious emotional stability, forcing her to confront the absurdity of trying to balance good and evil, guilt and love, duty and desire. With its finely drawn characters, rich humanity, and rare wit,Emotional Arithmeticis a novel of memory and hope, offering an unforgettable look at how the shadows of the past illuminate the present.

As she did in her bestselling, highly acclaimed Mediterranean Light, Shulman creates marvelous healthful adaptations of classic dishes - this time re-creating Mexican cuisine, her first love as a cook. The result is a cookbook to treasure. Mexican Light lets you eat all the irresistible foods from south of the border - for parties, for company, and for every day. Largely vegetarian but with an abundance of chicken and fish dishes, the recipes in Mexican Light are a great.

Gathering 25 years work by one of America's most elegant and pertinent poets, this title contains work from eight books, including an excerpt from the erotic verse novel 'Love, Death and the Changing of the Seasons', and a work written in the shadow of hegemonic empire.

My Mother's Body, Marge Piercy's tenth book of poetry, takes its title from one of her strongest and most moving poems, the climax of a powerful sequence of Poems to her mother. Rooted in an honest, harrowing, but ally ecstatic confrontation of the mother / daughter relationship in all its complexity and intimacy, it is at the same time an affirmation of continuity and identification. "The Chuppah" comprises poems actually used in her wedding ceremony with Ira Wood. This section sings with powerfully female love poetry. There is also a sustained and direct use of her Jewish identity and faith in these poems, as there is in a number of other poems throughout the volume. Readers of Piercy's previous collections will not be surprised to encounter her mixture of the personal and the political, her love of animals and the Cape landscape. There are poems about doing housework, about accidents, about dreaming, about bag ladies, about luggage, about children's fears of nuclear holocaust; about tomcats, insects in the rafters, the influence of a name, appleblossoms and blackberries, pollution, and some of the ways women objectify one another. In "Does the light fail us, or do we fail the light?" Piercy writes with lacerating honesty about our relationships with the elderly and about hers with her father. Some of the most moving poems are domestic, as in the final sequence, "Six underrated pleasures," which finds in daily women's tasks both pleasure and mystery, affirmation of serf and connection with the mother. In all, My Mother's Body is one of Piercy's most powerful and balanced collections.

Drawn to Percy Bysshe Shelley's creed of love, freedom, and justice, three women--Mary and Fanny Godwin and their step-sister Claire--surrounded by a circle of writers and radical thinkers, enjoy a revolutionary way of living that includes free love and vegetarianism.

XYXX is a limited-edition anthology of erotic short fiction by acclaimed short story writer, Jonathan Papernick. The five stories in this collection are shot through with lust, adultery, desire, sex and all of the struggles and complications of eros in the modern world. Author Steve almond once wrote, "Papernick writes with tremendous passion about the downside of love, sex..." Papernick brings that passion to the page with the stories "We Were One," "What Is It Then, Between Us?" "In Flagrante Delicto," "The Cinq a Sept Girl," and the deeply personal lament, "Saudade." This collection features artwork by Aubrey Beardsley, Egon Scheile, and Max Ernst.

Countless apt locutions from French have entered the English language, some becoming everyday phrases, others tossed around recklessly by film critics and gourmets. Until now there hasn't been a single handy source a non-French speaker could turn to for explanation - or riposte. In Je Ne Sais What? Jon Winokur, author of The Portable Curmudgeon, explores the French expressions, maxims, and literary allusions that grace English. With his customary finesse, Winokur offers definitions and often brief etymological notes and illustrative quotations for such Gallicisms as cherchez la femme, savoir vivre, nom de guerre, demi-monde, sang froid, and c'est la vie. Unlike Franglais, the hybrid of French and English which has the French Academy in a furor over phrases like les chicken nuggets, Frenglish, as Winokur defines it, is grammatically correct French that enriches English discourse. A nonpareil companion to Eugene Ehrlich's Amo, Amas Amat and More, which helped make Latin a living language once more, Je Ne Sais What? is both a practical reference and a word lover's bon ami. The perfect browsing antidote to ennui, the perfect gift for Francophiles, armchair linguists, and crossword addicts, this delightful guide to the language of love, fashion, food, and diplomacy explains the French everyone uses but few fully understand.

"My name is Jimmy Hendricks and I'm a recovering idiot." So begins John Blumenthal's third novel, the moving story of a small-town New England entrepreneur with a proble-matical name who reacts to the abrupt, unanticipated dissolution of his marriage by revisiting the past, and finds himself haunted by memories of three virgins, each of whom he tricked and betrayed twenty years before. Overcome by remorse and tantalized by curiosity, he vows to wipe the slate clean. The result is an ironic tale of deceit, suspense, love and redemption that transports readers back and forth through time, and ultimately suggests that the past is not necessarily prologue (along with answering the pressing question: What the hell is half a virgin?) John Blumenthal is the author of What's Wrong with Dorfman? and Millard Fillmore, Mon Amour. He has also written for television and is the co-author of the movies Blue Streak and Short Time. He currently contributes to The Huffington Post.