"To This Day, Nobel prizewinner S. Y. Agnon's last novel (first published in Hebrew in 1952), is also his last to be translated into English. On the surface it is a comically entertaining tale of a young writer - a Galician Jew who has lived in Palestine, returns to Europe on the eve of World War I, and is now stranded in Berlin - who wanders from rented room to rented room in a city with a severe wartime housing shortage. On a deeper level it is a profound commentary on exile, Zionism, divine providence, human egoism, and other typically Agnonian concerns." --Book Jacket.

To a large degree, In Mr. Lublin's Store sums up Agnon's thematic and formal development. This novel is also a prime example of an objective correlative for a world that is out of joint—a world where a plot is no longer possible because impersonal forces deriving from the setting where it takes place, Germany, no longer permit development of a normal plot. Only the components of the place, which determine the fate of many individuals who live there, can be described. The entire tradition has been undermined, although many of the characters yearn for it in their nostalgia for the shtetl of their birth. However, there is no hope of returning home; there is no chance to rebuild the fallen tabernacle of the tradition.

That rarest of things, a children's book for "children" of all ages.... In this picaresque and highly entertaining novel, Leutenlieb, a.k.a. Baron Munchausen (great-great-great grandson of his celebrated ancestor), takes us on a roller-coaster ride through the history of the Twentieth Century, introducing us along the way to a galaxy of iconic figures - from Hitler to Hemingway, from Al Capone to Greta Garbo - while describing how, with breath-taking imagination, brilliant ingenuity and technological expertise of staggering proportions (not to mention legendary modesty!) he succeeds in solving all the problems with which he is faced. The darker side is there too - two world wars, Nazi extermination camps and Soviet labour camps - but through it all our protagonist maintains his optimism, his integrity, his belief in the power of the indomitable human spirit, and his sense of humour. The full tragi-comedy of life is there. Shlomo Kalo, a nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature and a story teller of international renown brings us a book of refreshing insights and ingenious humor that younger readers can enjoy too. Scroll up and grab your copy today!

Seven queer fantasy shorts set in the tropical Jewish world of the Mangoverse novels. "Your Name is Love" An energetic royal guard takes her artist wife on a scavenger hunt around the city so she can stop having artist's block about the lesbian graphic novel she's supposed to make for the queen. "No Whining" Trans woman Chef Yael dithers over whether to switch wine sellers, at the urging of her husband Aaron, when her regular vendor is incompetent but the delivery girl is a trusted ally. "Every Us" A prince with anxiety is comforted in the arms of his partner when he wakes up from a nightmare. "Take Time to Stop and Eat the Roses" A trans teenager and his girlfriend go on a midnight quest for flowers for her sister's wedding. "The Generous Princess" A royal family with two moms and two dads puts their own special twist on celebrating Purim. And now, bundled with Tales from Outer Lands, two contrasting stories of heroic Jewish womanhood: "Rivka in Port Saltspray" Trapped in a seedy port town because an innkeeper is holding her shapeshifting dragon-horse hostage until she can pay all the charges he invented, nomadic warrior Rivka finally has a chance at some decent money when a wealthy but weak man hires her to rescue his fiancée. But she has to think on her feet when she learns there may be more at stake. "Aviva and the Aliens" On the night before the royal Passover seder, Aviva has to outsmart the aliens who abducted her to cook for them because they had grown sick of their spaceship's food replicators. Will she get home before Queen Shulamit wakes up and panics from her absence?

Tournament is Shelby Foote's first novel, published originally by Dial Press in 1949. Summa's reprint includes an exclusive preface by the author concerning his literary development and the genesis of Tournament and an introduction by Louis D. Rubin, Jr., the dean of American literature criticism. Tournament is a brilliant novel of the post-Civil War South, replete with Proustian and Faulknerian overtones. Many of the characters that appear in subsequent novels by Shelby Foote come onto the scene for the first time in this work. It is a must acquisition for every fan of Shelby Foote--From item description.

Based on an intriguing alternative history hypothesis, this novel imagines a world where the Moors never left Southern Spain after their 800-year reign but instead expanded their empire across Europe. This fascinating premise is explored through the chaotic lens of a bumbling film crew in the Sahara desert. The director, lost in a haze of Moroccan kif, has embraced the local culture a little too enthusiastically. With the scriptwriters gone and the leading actor in a perpetual sulk inside his Airstream, the production is at a standstill. Enter Tinctorio Indigolin, a bitcoin billionaire on the run from a Shakespeare-quoting Irish assassin. In a bid to leverage a tax loss, Indigolin acquires the film rights, injecting a new lease of life into the project. Mysteriously, a captivating screenplay begins to appear on set, page by page, night after night. Penned by an enigmatic writer, the script proposes a world where the Moors didn't just resist expulsion in 1492 but went on to dominate Spain, France, and Italy, creating an Islamic State of Europe. As the screenplay unfolds, it transforms the lives of everyone involved in the film. The narrative weaves through a labyrinth of twists, assassinations, and narrow escapes, employing the most unexpected methods, only to culminate in the most uplifting conclusion you'll encounter this year.

Tornado Pratt is the last of the old-style American tycoons who has lived his life with ferocious vigour through the vacillating fortunes of twentieth-century America. The novel finds him in a hotel room at the end of his days, as he recounts in a dying monologue the events of his turbulent life. What is revealed, in an account full of jokes and surprises, is a brash, lustful, comic, profane, naive and sentimental man who, driven on by remorse, displays a wry and perceptive honesty about himself, even as his memories begin to merge with imaginings. Often funny and sometimes moving, Tornado Pratt's voice is an unforgettable one in which he confronts his own mortality, and in which Paul Ableman gives us an astonishing, affecting and life-affirming story. Auberon Waugh called Tornado Pratt 'a magnificent and memorable novel'.

When Primo Verona's wife, Beatrice, left him for Pasquale Benvenuto, their close friend who ran the delicatessen on the corner of Long and Bloem Streets, Primo cast a spell on Pasquale's shoes so that ever afterwards their laces would spring undone as he walked out of his front door. It was an easy enough spell to sidestep. Pasquale, unaware that it was magic he was dealing with, merely cursed the quality of modern laces and thereafter wore shoes that did not need them. Primo Verona, a professional magician and soothsayer, is born with a gift of clairvoyance so strong that he is able to predict his own mother's death while still in her womb. He is brought up on a rich diet of astronomy, philosophy and storytelling by his watchmaker father and widowed aunt, both survivors of the death camps in Auschwitz. Primo accurately reads the futures of the local Long Street community of Italians and Jews, who pay him in wads of money, honey cake, tiramisu and other delicacies. Pasquale Benvenuto, his close friend since childhood and fellow soldier in the Angolan war, is the owner of a bar and delicatessen favored by local businessmen and gamblers alike. Pasquale is passionate and headstrong, his culinary reputation resting on the recipes for the fruited breads and salamis his father taught him to make -- a love of which he acquired while hiding from the horrors of the Holocaust. Together Primo and Pasquale form an easy friendship triangle with the beautiful Beatrice, Primo's wife and Pasquale's former girlfriend, but when she leaves her husband for her old love, Primo is devastated. He casts spells to spoil Pasquale's creations and to win back Beatrice, but he inadvertently conjures up an unexpected visitor. Patricia Schonstein delivers a dazzling and evocative novel that mixes magical realism with the big themes -- war, love, death, betrayal and the afterlife -- to entertaining effect. A Time of Angels is spellbinding storytelling that no reader will soon forget.

Product Description Chronicles the imaginative, phantasmagorial adventures of a young woman, Raquel, the daughter of a Brazilian-Jewish parents, a prize convent-school student, and lover of Miguel From Publishers Weekly Scliar has written a tangled mysterious novel of Jewish alienation and mystic Catholic redemption. Born of Jewish-Hungarian parents, Raquel Szenes grows up amid the dogma and mysticism of the Brazilian Catholic church. She is also estranged from Jewish devotion by her ethnic isolation and enthralled by surreal visions of retribution and sublime redemption. In time, her shattered psyche attaches itself to various secular dietieslove, sex, money. Ultimately, death at the hands of the demented spectral narrator is her only release from a cycle of devotion and sudden damnation. Scliar's lean parable-like prose is by turns precise, evasive and erotic. Specific in detailing her childhood and life with her parents, Scliar is opaque and puzzling when he endows Raquel with aimless zealotry and arrogance. A sometimes fascinating, sometimes awkward novel of Brazilian ethnicity, assimilation and identity. (AugustpThe more than 75 sugar- and dairy-free desserts in this book demonstrate how much health foods have changed in recent years. No longer need dessert be a grainy-textured, carob-filled penance, reminding one with every bite of what one is missing. The desserts offered here provide a satisfying, sweet and, above all, festive touch to the end of a meal. There are simple fruit compotes, apple and strawberry mousses, almond torte with raspberry filling, ginger-peach pie, maple-walnut cookies and a Guinness spice cake that is a sure winter favorite. (Sugar-free sweetening is made possible by the use of barley syrup, fruit juices and maple syrup.) The authors are not antagonistic toward eggs but also endorse kanten, kuzu and tofu, all of which are readily available at health food stores. These recipes will be appreciated by people allergic to milk products. Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Australian Readers Remember is a novel cultural history, based on an investigation into the reading habits of sixty elderly Australians, who were asked to recall and to analyse what they were reading in the late nineteenth century and during the first three decades of the twentieth century, It is the first work of Australian literary history to focus on readers' experience and attitudes. Part One discusses the project, the place of oral history, and the problems involved in analysing the finding. Part Two offers an account of readers' memories of novels, verse, children's books, newspapers etc. Part Three examines the diffusion of literature and how the subjects obtained access to books. Part Four, the most original in the book, analyses the status of reading, attitudes towards books, as well as myths and prejudices surrounding the act of reading.

The Village, first published in 1952, begins on the very day the war ended. Two women, who have been firm friends during the war, go as usual to the Red Cross Post. Here they spend the night as they always had done, chatting over a cup of tea. As dawn breaks they lock the door 'but still they lingered, unwilling finally to end this night and the years behind it. '"There's a lot of us will miss it," Edith said. "We've all of us felt at times, you know, how nice it was, like you and me being able to be together and friendly, just as if we were the same sort, if you know what I mean." "I'll miss it a lot too," Wendy said. There was no point in her saying that it could go on now, the friendliness and the companionship and the simple human liking of one woman for another. Both knew that this breaking down of social barriers was just one of the things you got out of the war, but it couldn't go on.' The main theme of The Village is that Wendy's attempt to cling on to her old way of life was already under pressure by 1939 and had become even more out-of-date by 1945. It is Edith who is the New Britain, with her prosperous son and her commonsense and indeed kindness. Wendy, with her snobbery and her refusal to change and her uncompromising attitude to her daugher, is the Old. When Labour swept to a landslide victory in 1945 'Attlee's government promised a fairer future for all and no going back to the inequalities of the pre-war world,' writes Juliet Gardiner in her Afterword to this Persephone edition of The Village. When Wendy goes back up the road to Wood View on Priory Hill 'where the gentry lived' and Edith goes downhill on the other side, 'down Station Road among the working classes', they both assume that the values and habits of pre-war Britain will continue. But Britain has already changed a great deal, a change symbolised by Edith's son Roy, a printer with excellent prospects, falling in love with the penniless Margaret, Wendy's daughter. 'The story of the romance between the two of them forms the central narrative of the novel,' Juliet Gardiner continues, 'and the attitude of the other villagers when the news gets out illuminates their understanding - or rejection - of the village's elaborately calibrated social stratification. This is a finely-observed novel about the losses and gains of the Second World War, how hopeless and how isolating it would be to hold onto the past, how illusory was the notion that the war had broken down class barriers, or had managed to save "deep England" from the future and how peace, too, would produce its own list of casualties. It is also about the futility of 'keeping up appearances', the boredom of middle-class women with nothing to do, even the realisation that cooking and housework had to be streamlined if theose women were to take their place in society. But above all The Village is an extremely enjoyable and well-written novel evoking an entire community (there is a long cast of characters at the beginning) and a whole way of life, and has one of the most ancient plots in the world - a young couple who fall in love but are forbidden to marry.

As illustrated in Goethe's famous novel of the same name, elective affinities are powerful relationships that crystallize under changing conditions. In this new book, Lydia Goehr focuses on the history of elective affinities between philosophy and music from German classicism, romanticism, and idealism to the modernist aesthetic theory of Theodor W. Adorno and Arthur C. Danto. Aesthetic theory, she argues, depends on a dynamic philosophy of history centered on tendencies, yearnings, needs, and potentialities. With this in mind, she recasts the theses of Adorno and Danto regarding the death or end of philosophy, art, music, and human experience as arguments for continuation and survival. Elective Affinities tracks the migration of aesthetic and critical theory from Germany to the United States following the catastrophic period of the twentieth century marked by the Second World War. --

When in May 1930, the Council of Trinity College, Cambridge, had to decide whether to renew Wittgenstein's research grant, it turned to Bertrand Russell for an assessment of the work Wittgenstein had been doing over the past year. His verdict: "The theories contained in this new work . . . are novel, very original and indubitably important. Whether they are true, I do not know. As a logician who likes simplicity, I should like to think that they are not, but from what I have read of them I am quite sure that he ought to have an opportunity to work them out, since, when completed, they may easily prove to constitute a whole new philosophy." "["Philosophical Remarks] contains the seeds of Wittgenstein's later philosophy of mind and of mathematics. Principally, he here discusses the role of indispensable in language, criticizing Russell's "The Analysis of Mind. He modifies the "Tractatus's picture theory of meaning by stressing that the connection between the proposition and reality is not found in the picture itself. He analyzes generality in and out of mathematics, and the notions of proof and experiment. He formulates a pain/private-language argument and discusses both behaviorism and the verifiability principle. The work is difficult but important, and it belongs in every philosophy collection."--Robert Hoffman, "Philosophy "Any serious student of Wittgenstein's work will want to study his Philosophical Remarks as a transitional book between his two great masterpieces. The Remarks is thus indispensible for anyone who seeks a complete understanding of Wittgenstein's philosophy."--Leonard Linsky, American Philosophical Association

The Spanish Ballad (originally published as "Die Jüdin von Toledo") is a 1955 novel by German-Jewish writer Lion Feuchtwanger. The story focuses on the "Golden Age" of learning in medieval Spain, and also describes the affair of Alfonso VIII with the Jewish Raquel in Toledo. In Lion Feuchtwanger's prologue to the story, he mentions that the ballad was originally written by Alfonso X of Castile in regards of his Great-Grandfather (Alfonso VIII).

Rebecca Nachman is a Rabbi without a synagogue. Having resigned from her dwindling congregation, she now works as a college counselor at a small Vermont college advising students about private matters and offering the "Jewish perspective" on issues raised at faculty dinner parties. Deeply lonely and on the edge of losing her faith, she comes into possession of a Torah, the last relic of Czechowa, a village of Polish Jews who were exterminated by the Nazis. With the Torah, the unquiet spirits of the village dead begin to visit Rebecca. On one visit they leave a manuscript written in Hebrew and titled My Life, an autobiography by God who, like any eager author, is seeking a sympathetic reader. No one has ever finished reading the manuscript, including Thomas Aquinas, Martin Luther, Maimonides, and Augustine. God thinks Rebecca will. Rebecca's life is further complicated when one of her advisees-a troubled young woman who seemed on the verge of confessing something-is found murdered. As the college struggles to comprehend the tragedy and a police investigation is launched, Rebecca begins reading, and so comes to confront the central challenge to her faith in His most troubling and unlikely incarnation. Julius Lester's first adult novel in more than a decade, The Autobiography of God marks the return of an utterly original and provocative voice in American letters, addressing religion with wicked humor and profound reverence.

First published in 1977, this novel is set in the 1930s within a small community of Jews in Peru. Don Jacobo Lerner, an immigrant from Czarist Russia, lies on his deathbed trying to piece together his life and is shown to be the tragic but heroic prototype of the Wandering Jew.

Is the Bible actually a love story between a deity and a people? And what does this love story have to do with the modern world? In With All Thine Heart distinguished cultural critic Ilan Stavans speaks to freelance writer Mordecai Drache about love in the Bible. Presented in an engaging, conversational format and touched with striking artwork, the textured dialogue between Stavans and Drache is meant to show how the Bible is a multidimensional text and one that, when considered over the course of history, still has the power to shape our world. The theme of love provides the connective tissue that binds this work. Addressing a wide range of topics, from biblical archaeology and fundamentalism to Hollywood movies, lexicography, and the act of praying, With All Thine Heart suggests that the Hebrew Bible is a novel worth decoding patiently, such as one does with classics like Don Quixote de la Mancha, In Search of Lost Time, and Anna Karenina. Similar to the protagonists in these tales, biblical characters, although not shaped with the artistic nuance of modern literature, allow for astonishing insight. This exploration of love through the pages of the Bible--organized chronologically from Genesis to Exodus and followed by insightful meditations on the Song of Songs and the Book of Job--is a delightful intellectual and spiritual treat . . . Shema Ysrael!

A unique novel of parents and children - and the spaces between them Dr. Niels Berners - a Swiss plastic surgeon living in New York - is struggling to recover from his dysfunctional son's abandonment of him. He joins a group of four other parents, all with absent children either in jail or in jeopardy, to discuss their feelings and seek a sense of community, comfort, and closure. Hortense Calisher artfully strings together tales of healing, brilliantly tracing the shadow of the generational gap. With compassion and precision, she paints the bruised egos of concerned parents confronting very empty nests.

Internationally renowned novelist Harry Mulisch's The Procedure is a haunting and fascinating novel about two men who try to create life but fail. In the late sixteenth century, Rabbi Jehudah Löw, in order to guarantee the safety of the Jews in Prague, creates a golem by following a procedure outlined in a third-century cabalist text. Four hundred years later, Victor Werker, a Dutch biologist mourning the loss of his stillborn daughter, causes an international uproar when he creates a complex organic clay crystal that can reproduce and has a metabolism. But his unsettling discovery takes its toll as his inner and outer demons pursue him around the world, from California to Venice, Cairo, and Jerusalem.

The son, Christopher Wendelin, a member of Germany’s guilt-gnawed Hitler Youth generation, attempting under an assumed Hebrew name, on an Israeli kibbutz, the most extreme form of atonement for his father’s unforgivable sin. The father, Richard Wendelin, Germany’s leading film producer under the Hitler regime - the man who made the most infamous of all the anti-Semitic propaganda films of the Third Reich, "Ritual Murder," shown throughout Germany and especially to the concentration camp guards as a documentary of the murder of a Christian girl by Jews… These are the inevitable antagonists in this stunning novel of Germany’s post-war generation and its confrontation with the Nazi past - certainly one of the most controversial books to come out of Germany in years. Only after his abortive flight to Israel, at the riot-torn première of his father’s first film since the war - Richard Wendelin’s attempt to make a comeback in a Germany resisting reminders of its past - does Christopher first grasp the full complexity of the contemporary fathers unable to erase the past and sons who won’t even let them try…