Delivered as an improvised monologue at a writer's conference, Gordon Lish's novel My Romance weaves a intriguing pattern of tell-and-show on such themes as money, psoriasis and how to deal with it, why Lish dresses the way he does, and mortal matters--illness and death--in the Lish family.

In a house in a quiet street in North London, Helena struggles with her self-appointed task of writing a book about the reclusive American artist Joseph Cornell. At the same time she dreams and thinks about her sister Alice working in an orphanage in Chechnya. She is certain that Alice despises her for living a life of comfort and privilege, far away from the horrors of war; yet she knows too that her work is more than self-indulgence. How to reconcile these two visions? Enter Ed, a Czech journalist and photographer who claims he has been working in Chechnya and brings news of Alice, along with the request for a bed for the few days he has to be in London. Gabriel Josipovici’s sparkling new novel charts the course of those few days, as Joseph Cornell’s mysterious life and the strange boxes he constructed wage a silent struggle in Helena’s mind and spirit with the imperatives of the present.

Set in rural New England, Busch's powerful yet subtle second novel explores the collapse and renewal of a contemporary marriage.

A nineteenth-century epistolary novel about a vengeful woman, available to modern readers for the first time. In The Passions (1811), Countess Appollonia Zulmer, beautiful, rich, and popular, can have any man she wants, at least until she meets Count Wiemar, who rejects her in favor of Julia, a simple and obedient woman. Despondent and then furious, Appollonia vows revenge on the couple, leading to madness, suffering, and death. An epistolary novel about the destructive power of emotion, The Passions offers new insights into early feminism, romance, and early nineteenth-century religion. It is an engrossing, powerful work of literature, featuring one of the most memorable female villains of all time. This edition makes the engrossing novel available to modern readers for the first time.

The last of the true believers is Sunny Mansfield, as golden a girl as WASP Connecticut can rear: her first novel just out and a fellowship waiting at Cornell. Then, she meets brilliant poet David Harvey who teaches her painful but ultimately rewarding lessons in the meaning of love.

A caravan of Jews wanders through pre-World War II Eastern Europe on a heartbreaking quest, in this latest novel from the award-winning writer. Among the group is Laish, a 15-year-old orphan, who narrates the story of this against-all-odds journey.

"In the beginning there was Lucette, who is the mother to three children--Sammy, a gentle giant, almost blind, but a genius with locks; Corinne, a flighty beauty who cannot keep a job; and "the child," an afterthought, who strives to make sense of her fractured Egyptian-Jewish immigrant family. Lucette's children would like a kinder, warmer home, but what they have is a government-issued concrete box, out in the thorns and sand on the outskirts of Tel Aviv; and their mother, hard-worn and hardscrabble, who cleans homes by night and makes school lunches by day. Lucette quarrels with everybody, speaks only Arabic and French, is scared only of snakes, and is as likely to lock her children out as to take in a stray dog. The child recounts her years in Lucette's house, where Israel's wars do not intrude and hold no interest. She puzzles at the mysteries of her home, why her father, a bitter revolutionary, makes only rare appearances. And why her mother rebuffs the kind rabbi whose home she cleans in his desire to adopt her. Always watching, the child comes to fill the holes with conjecture and story. In a masterful accumulation of short, dense scenes, by turns sensual, violent, and darkly humorous, The Sound of Our Steps questions the virtue of a family bound only by necessity, and suggests that displacement may not lead to a better life, but perhaps to art"--

Originally published in 1983 and now reissued, a portrayal of middle-class Englishwomen in the interwar period which draws on the work of such novelists as May Sinclair, Rosamond Lehmann and Rebecca West.

Book by Hentoff, Nat.

Translation of La Nuit (1961) by Clodagh Kinsella

Howard Johnson and Walt Disney are determined to acquire land near Orlando, Florida from Margery Post Merriweather, heiress of the family cereal fortune

As with so many members of his generation, down-on-his-luck writer-filmmaker Milton Siegel has what some might call an unhealthy fixation on the TV shows, movies, books, music, and celebrities from his childhood that spanned the 1980s and 1990s. Unlike many of his generation, Milt has spent most of his life as an adult (so to speak) chronicling this same pop culture of his youth. Hey, it's a living ... sometimes. After quitting his job at a regional newspaper (or after having been fired, depending on who you ask), Milt finds himself on what becomes a quixotic quest to promote his latest pop culture history project around the country over one progressively insane and hilarious month. Throughout his many misadventures to come, Milt must contend with: a horde of salivating manic nerds, an inexplicable rash of natural disasters, clickbait-concocting media pundits, overly ambitious pseudo-celebrities, bafflingly incompetent event coordinators, a desperately hemorrhaging bank account, a super seductive stripper, ultra-competitive frenemies, and his own sense of the precarious future while being so embroiled in his childish past. In the end, it's up to Milt to make it through the month-long nomadic tour of laughter, tears, and revelations ahead without losing his mind. If he's really lucky, he might even make rent, keep his new wife from fleeing in terror, and perhaps have a little fun along the way. --from Amazon.

The Man Who Was Not With It is the story of young Bud Williams and his safari southward to Florida. On the way, he is abruptly confronted with the con men, addicts, and freaks, and the bruised innocence, of carnival and nightclub life.

In artfully crafted interlocking flashbacks set against a vividly drawn scrim of New York City, Busch lets his hapless hero tell his story of the angst-driven complications of both licit and illicit love. It was Greenwich Village in the Sixties, and Zimmer was writing copy for a sleazy PR agency. Rhona was a voluptuous Nazi-hunting librarian who taught him introductory love and guilt and drove him into the arms of the tall blonde shiksa Lillian.

Growing up in Soviet Russia, Kat Knopman worships her parents, Jewish intellectuals who teach literature at a Moscow school, run a drama club, and dabble in political radicalism. When Kat is diagnosed with rapidly-progressing scoliosis, the trajectory of her life changes and she finds herself at a different institution-- a school-sanatorium for children with spinal ailments. Confined to a brace, surrounded by unsympathetic peers, Kat embarks on a quest to prove that she can be as exceptional as her parents despite her physical limitations, her Jewishness, and her suspicion that her beloved parents are in fact flawed.

"Newlyweds just barely out of their childhood, the ben-Yichyas make their new home in Jerusalem, in the shadows of the dark towering walls of stone and amid a community of devout Jews living in squalor. Who among these impoverished neighbors will buy the exquisite jewelry that Ezra fashions from gold and silver? And how will the young Yemenite couple maintain their ancient traditions and customs while struggling to weave themselves into the vivid tapestry of immigrants from distant lands who comprise the old Yishuv?"--from jacket.

An autobiographical novel of Yoram Kaniuk's years as a young painter in the New York of the 1950s. Wounded and alienated, a war veteran at the age of nineteen, Kaniuk arrives in Greenwich Village at its peak period of artistic creativity, and finds his way among such giants as Charlie Parker, Billie Holiday, Willem de Kooning, and Frank Sinatra.

In That's Life, William Herrick's view of humanity is unsparing yet compassionate. He sees life as commitment--to ideals, friends, family--but no one, least of all Herrick, said it was going to be easy. His portraits of the members of a distinctly American family--a novella, five short stories, and a group of five letters--comprise not quite a novel but more than a collection of stories. "I think of it as a co-operative structure," the author says, "in which each character owns and occupies his or her own place, yet it is the entire family which operates the building. To simplify matters, I call the book a fiction." And so we learn the past and present of each of the Millers: Max and Rebecca, Rebecca's mother Ruth (in an old folks' home), and the three Miller children--Eli, an obsessive artist, Peter, an amateur student of life as he bums rides across the country, and teen-ager Nina, a not-so-innocent working-class child away at prep school on a scholarship. But we learn about them in counterpoint and mosaic as Herrick turns our attention, and our allegiance, first to one member of the family and then another. There are few books where human weaknesses are so fully displayed and yet where human endurance and capacity for joy are so palpably present.

A husband falls into a psychological spiral in a novel by the author of Laura, "an expert at suspense and suspicion" (The New York Times). When Fletcher marries Elaine, his second wife, nineteen years his junior, he can't imagine a more passionate union. Then an illness destroys his confidence, and all he can picture is her next affair. He keeps a secret diary of his fantasized suspicions, making his impending suicide look like murder... With what Graham Greene once called her "devilish cunning," Vera Caspary reveals, with sure psychological insight, the strange desires that hide in the hearts of seemingly respectable people. Out of a web of love, jealousy, guilt, and hate, she has woven one of her most suspenseful thrillers. "Caspary writes emotive entertainments, part romance, part suspense, about women destined to kill or doomed to die." --Kirkus Reviews "A beautiful job." --The Boston Herald The Man Who Loved His Wife is part of the Femmes Fatales series, featuring the best of women's writing in the classic pulp genres of the mid-20th century. From mystery to hard-boiled noir to taboo lesbian romance, these rediscovered queens of pulp offer subversive perspectives on a turbulent era with such titles as Now, Voyager; Stella Dallas; Bunny Lake is Missing; The Girls in 3-B; and more.