Boxing : Photographs by Larry Fink is a quiet masterpiece drawn from the blue-collar, workaday world of the sport. From reflective prefight meditations to ringside flurries of feints and jabs, from jocular pstfight camaraderie to a handler's sweet consolation of a swollen combatant, Fink registers the grace, beauty and paternal love that belie this brutal American pastime, capturing fighters and their managers in surprisingly candid repose.

Innocence rounds the bend to experience in these beautifully shaped stories of Moscow and Brooklyn, which take up the worldview of the young and overlooked. The stunning Second World War story that opens the book is a masterpiece of ambivalence—about the simultaneous generosity and hypocrisy of Galina, a gentile Russian woman who offers safe harbor to a Jewish friend and her daughter during the German occupation. In “Love Lessons—Mondays, 9 A.M.,” a young math teacher is assigned to teach a girls’ sex education class, even though she herself is still awaiting her first kiss. And in “Mistress,” a boy newly arrived in this country bears witness to the intimate details of his grandparents’ new and diverging lives: his grandmother’s doctors’ appointments, where he is charged with translating her myriad complaints into English, and his grandfather’s clandestine courtship of another woman. Adept at both snapshots and long exposures, Lara Vapnyar, herself a recent immigrant, writes of life’s adventures and possibilities, its disappointments and unexpected turns, with delicate humor, brilliant timing, and striking emotional honesty. She is a writer to relish and to watch.

Hip-Hop is the largest youth culture in the history of the planet rock. This is the first poetry anthology by and for the Hip-Hop generation. It has produced generations of artists who have revolutionized their genre(s) by applying the aesthetic innovations of the culture. The BreakBeat Poets features 78 poets, born somewhere between 1961-1999, All-City and Coast-to-Coast, who are creating the next and now movement(s) in American letters. The BreakBeat Poets is for people who love Hip-Hop, for fans of the culture, for people who've never read a poem, for people who thought poems were only something done by dead white dudes who got lost in a forest, and for poetry heads. This anthology is meant to expand the idea of who a poet is and what a poem is for. The BreakBeat Poets are the scribes recording and remixing a fuller spectrum of experience of what it means to be alive in this moment. The BreakBeat Poets are a break with the past and an honoring of the tradition(s), an undeniable body expanding the canon for the fresher.

Kenny Fries explores love and its ramifications in the age of AIDS. Wit ha keen ear for what people say to one another, a sharp eye for the unerring detail, the just right angle of vision, he shows us a haunting world of risk and loss, tempered by dignity and affirmation. The Healing Notebooks deserve a wide audience - Colette Inez

Includes music from Keith Green for the following songs: Asleep in the Light, Grace By Which I Stand, How Can They Live Without Jesus, Pledge My Head To Heaven, I Want To Be More Like Jesus, If You Love The Lord, Lies, My Eyes Are Dry, Oh, Lord You're Beautiful, Romans VII, To Obey Is Better Than Sacrifice, So You Wanna Go Back To Egypt, Soften Your Heart, You, You Love The World, and Unless The Lord Builds The House.

Take chocolate candy, add a family business at war with itself, and stir with an outsider's perspective. This is the recipe for True Confections , the irresistible new novel by Katharine Weber, a writer whose work has won accolades from Iris Murdoch, Madeleine L'Engle, Wally Lamb, and Kate Atkinson, to name a few. Alice Tatnall Ziplinsky's marriage into the Ziplinsky family has not been unanimously celebrated. Her greatest ambition is to belong, to feel truly entitled to the heritage she has tried so hard to earn. Which is why Zip's Candies is much more to her than just a candy factory, where she has worked for most of her life. In True Confections , Alice has her reasons for telling the multigenerational saga of the family-owned-and-operated candy company, now in crisis. Nobody is more devoted than Alice to delving into the truth of Zip's history, starting with the rags-to-riches story of how Hungarian immigrant Eli Czaplinsky developed his famous candy lines, and how each of his candies, from Little Sammies to Mumbo Jumbos, was inspired by an element in a stolen library copy of Little Black Sambo, from which he taught himself English. Within Alice's vivid and persuasive account (is her unreliability a tactic or a condition?) are the stories of a runaway slave from the cacao plantations of C�te d'Ivoire and the Third Reich's failed plan to establish a colony on Madagascar for European Jews. Richly informed, deeply moving, and spiked with Weber's trademark wit, True Confections is, at its heart, a timeless and universal story of love, betrayal, and chocolate. From the Hardcover edition.

Two Englishmen have met suspicious ends in Veniceone by gunshot, the other by drowning. That much is certain but nothing else is. Murder? Suicide? Accident? Another mystery is the anonymous notes sent to residents of a quiet English village, spreading the scandalous though false word of an affair between Derek Crowley and Gerda Porson. She is the wife of Crowley's business partner, the unspeakable Charles Porson, a tireless macho who adores handguns and the spanking-and-bondage ritual meted out by his bored, disgusted wife, who is in love only with his money. Was the drug-laced Bloody Mary intended for Porson? How to explain Derek's wife's penchant for masculine clothing? Who loaded the supposedly blank pistol in an amateur theatrical production? Long afterward, Jason Durling's brilliant deductive sleuthing will resolve the murders left unsolved by trhe Italian police and ignored by Scotland Yard; but he will come to great grief in his turn. Again Symons meets his own high standards: this tale is quickwitted, civilized, highly intelligent, sharply observed, complicated without being cluttered, and always in the firm control of a dextrous and accomplished storyteller.

In this volume, Jules Chametzky has gathered his very personable stories and reminiscences of some of the many writers he has met or known as he writes, some fleetingly, a few more intensely over the course of his more than half a century in the business of reading, writing, and talking about literature, of teaching and editing. Not only do those writers emerge as the complicated and fascinating human beings they are, but we also come to know Jules himself, a warm and gracious storyteller. Praise for Out of Brownsville: NO STUDENT of American Jewish writing needs to be reminded that Jules Chametzky is one of its pioneers. A founding editor of the influential Massachusetts Review, he is perhaps especially noted for his study of the fiction of Abraham Cahan. He now caps a distinguished career as critic, editor, and teacher with this delightful volume of memoirs. It is astonishing to know how many of the shapers of literature in America Chametzky knew not merely as subjects met in passing but understood as artists. Readers and scholars will, of course, find their own favorites among the individual memoirs, but beyond the perceptiveness of the recollections and the shrewd assessments in them, there emerges Jules himself, warm, gracious, accepting, modest about his own achievements, which he scarcely mentions. One closes the book with a sense of regret that it has ended and with a feeling how good it was for those who met Jules and enjoyed, however briefly, his friendship. Joseph C. Landis, Editor, Yiddish-Modern Jewish Studies, Professor Emeritus of English, Queens College, CUNY WOVEN INTO these lively portraits and reminiscences of others are not only sudden illuminations of the characters portrayed and of the fleeting moments captured here, but also insights into the fragility of life, the power to create, and the strange magic of human encounters that make Jules Chametzky s memoir so touchingly social and pleasurable to read. Werner Sollors, Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English Literature and Professor of African and African American Studies, Harvard University LEGENDARY EDITOR Jules Chametzky s book is autobiography at its cleanest: one s life through the eyes of others. His astute, personable dispatches are a map of Jewish intellectual trends in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century. Ilan Stavans, Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture (Spanish), Amherst College ACCORDING TO the Jewish Midrash, the Book and the Sword came wrapped together, with a message: Regard what is written in the book, or be delivered to the sword. Jules Chametzky s love of books and their very human creators is expressed in this cultural memoir with affection and marvelous charm, yet there is also a tone of urgency, from a man who has dedicated his life to keeping the book open and the sword sheathed. Lawrence Bush, Editor, Jewish Currents About the Author: Jules Chametzky is Professor of English, emeritus, at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he taught from 1958 until 2004. He was a founder of The Massachusetts Review, of which he is Editor, emeritus, after 27 years as senior co-Editor. Chametzky has published numerous articles and reviews on Jewish American and American literature in popular and academic journals. His major publications include From the Ghetto: The Fiction of Abraham Cahan; Our Decentralized Literature: Cultural Mediations in Selected Jewish and Southern Writers; the Penguin edition of Abraham Cahan s The Rise of David Levinsky. He co-edited Black and White in American Culture: Ten Years of The Massachusetts Review; and Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology. Chametzky is the father of three sons and was married for 52 years to the late poet Anne Halley.

There are 4,000 friends, lovers, relatives, and neighbors in Venus, Kansas. Holly Parker lives just west of there. Holly Parker knows that people almost always make the wrong choices. Like her sixteen year-old-son who is dating his former sixth grade teacher. Like her friend, Marvelle, still mourning a husband she should have left long before he died and broke her heart. But while 36-year-old Holly can see what's best for other people, when it comes to her own life her vision is less than perfect. With the kind, decent veterinarian who lives next door interested in her, Holly would rather turn back to an ill-starred love affair with a married man--her boss at the restaurant where she works as a waitress. But there's also Gene Rollison, the quietly sexy state trooper who seems to turn up at all the wrong moments, leaving Holly flustered and confused. That's when a grieving friend, a few crazy summer nights, and a small Kansas town come together to help Holly see what she's been missing, and where she should go from here. "West Of Venus marks the arrival of a major new talent, a writer who treats her characters tenderly, capturing for us, with remarkable skill and grace, both their loneliness and their very human desire for connection.

This is a story that asks the question, "Can a two hundred and fifty pound woman, pregnant with twins, liberate herself from husband and Westchester home and find love, sex and joy on a Vermont commune?" Author of "Looking for Mr. Goodbar"

In her award-winning book Harmful to Minors , Judith Levine radically upended our fixed ideas about childhood. Now, she tackles the other end of life in this poignant memoir of a daughter coming to terms with a difficult father who is sinking into dementia, presenting an insightful exploration of the ways we think about disability, aging, and the self as it resides in the body and the world. In prose that is unsentimental yet moving, serious yet darkly funny, complex in emotion and ideas yet spare in diction, Levine reassembles her father's personal and professional history even as he is losing track of it. She unpeels the layers of his complicated personality and uncovers information that surprises even her mother, to whom her father has been married for more than sixty years. As her father deteriorates, the family consensus about who he was and is and how best to care for him constantly threatens to collapse. Levine recounts the painful discussions, mad outbursts, and gingerly negotiations, and dissects the shifting alliances among family, friends, and a changing guard of hired caretakers. Spending more and more time with her father, she confronts a relationship that has long felt bereft of love. By caring for his needs, she learns to care about and, slowly, to love him. While Levine chronicles these developments, she looks outside her family for the sources of their perceptions and expectations, deftly weaving politics, science, history, and philosophy into their personal story. A memoir opens up to become a critique of our culture's attitudes toward the elderley. A claustrophobic account of Alzheimer's is transformed into a complex lesson about love, duty, and community. What creates a self and keeps it whole? Levine insists that only the collaboration of others can safeguard her father's self against the riddling of his brain. Embracing interdependence and vulnerability, not autonomy and productivity, as the seminal elements of our humanity, Levine challenges herself and her readers to find new meaning, even hope, in one man's mortality and our own.

Once there were four women, three of them sisters, who fell under the spell of a revolutionary poet. Their shared vision of communal love left a trail of destruction, including two suicides and abandoned children. This book is based on the lost papers of the Shelley circle.

From the award-winning author of Minor Characters comes a haunting novel about the persistence of love and the sustaining and destabilizing power of memories In the vibrant downtown Manhattan art world of the 1960s, where men and women collide in "lucky and unlucky convergences," a series of love affairs has left Joanna Gold, a young photographer, feeling numbed. Then, at yet another party, a painter named Tom Murphy walks up to her. "Why do you hang back?" he asks. Rather than another brief collision, their relationship is the profound and ecstatic love each had longed to find. But it's undermined by Tom's harrowing past--his fatherless childhood, his wartime experiences, and most of all, the loss of the two children he left behind in Florida, along with the powerful red, white, and black paintings he will never set eyes on again. Tom, both tender and volatile, draws Joanna into the unwinnable struggle against the forces that drive him toward death. Once again, Joyce Johnson brings to life a mythic bohemian world where art is everything and life is as full of intensity and risk as the bold sweep of a painter's brush across a canvas. A New York Times Notable Book Excerpted in The New Yorker and Harper's Magazine

The award-winning author of Minor Characters writes with delicious transparency about a love that cannot be harnessed and a woman who refuses to be deceived In the great wave of husband-leaving ushered in by the Sexual Revolution, Molly Held frees herself from her cold, flagrantly unfaithful husband after their final quarrel turns violent. With her five-year-old son, she lights out for an Upper West Side apartment and the new life she hopes to find with Conrad Schwartzberg-the charismatic radical lawyer who has recently become her lover. Having escaped from a desert, she lands in a swamp. While Conrad radiates positive energy, he is unable to tell Molly-or anyone who loves him-the truth. No longer the wronged wife, Molly now finds herself the Other Woman. She is sharing Conrad with Roberta, another refugee from marriage-with Conrad's movements between the two of them disguised by his suspiciously frequent out-of-town engagements. Roberta either knows nothing or prefers to look the other way, but Molly's maddening capacity for double vision takes over her mind. What saves her from herself is her well-developed sense of irony, which never fails her-or the reader. "Ironic, witty and always graceful." -Marilyn French, author of The Women's Room "Johnson . . . reveals a knack for lyric bitterness." -Kirkus Reviews "Another superb novel of feminine risk-taking." -Ann Douglas " Bad Connections] is controlled, smooth, deftly written: it evokes scene and character with admirable sure swiftness. . . . Joyce Johnson's touches are all true." -Harper's Magazine "Joyce Johnson is a writer of wit and perception . . . and she has a keen eye for the irony of modern life." -The New York Times Book Review "Often funny, sometimes cathartically angry, always skillful in rendering the small, excruciating moments that add up to the misery of love gone bad." -The Village Voice "The new literature of the aggrieved woman has produced something here quite memorable, a sad, beautiful casebook of unrequited love, unrequited humanity." -E. L. Doctorow "Painfully perceptive, psychologically accurate." -Judith Rossner "A subtle, witty, rueful tour de force of that strange new territory which all of us now inhabit: modern women's modern lives." -Barbara Probst Solomon Joyce Johnson was born in 1935 in New York City, the setting for all her fiction: Come and Join the Dance, recognized as the first Beat novel by a woman writer, Bad Connections, and In the Night Caf . She is best known for her memoir Minor Characters, which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1983 and dealt with coming of age in the 1950s and with her involvement with Jack Kerouac. She has published two other Beat-related books: Door Wide Open: A Beat Love Affair in Letters, and The Voice Is All: The Lonely Victory of Jack Kerouac. She has also written a second memoir, Missing Men, and the nonfiction title What Lisa Knew: The Truths and Lies of the Steinberg Case.

Transmigration explores many kinds of journeys in, through and after death: the journey of a self from one gender to the next; the journey of the soul in and out of flesh; the journey of a marriage into and out of love; the journey of a body from amputation to wholeness. Boiling human existence down to love, wish and desperation, Joy (formerly Jay) Ladin cobbles many materials— shreds of Cosmo Girl, metaphysics and how-to text, intimate moments and moments of despair—into a halting, sometimes faltering path from a life that is unlivable to life that is fully lived.

Lloyd has a particular set of skills. He writes the small print for prescription drugs, marital aids, and incontinence products. The clients present him with a list of possible side effects. His job is "to "ecite and minimize", sometimes by just saying them really fast and other times by finding the language that can render them acceptable. The results are ingenious. The methods diabolical. Lloyd has a habit too. He cops smack during coffee breaks at his new job writing copy for Christian Swingles, an online dating service for the faithful. He finds a precarious balance between hackwork and heroin until he encounters Nora, a mysterious and troubled young woman, a Sylvia Plath with tattoos and implants, who asks for his help. Lloyd falls swiftly in love, but Nora bestows her affections at a cost. Before Lloyd clears his head from the fog of romance, he finds himself complicit in Nora's grand scheme to horrify the world and exact revenge on those who poison the populace in order to sell them the cure.

Titles include: Hernando's Hideaway * Hey There * I'm Not at All in Love * Once-A-Year Day (Polka) * Small Talk * Steam Heat * There Once Was a Man.

His love was like a hurricane Jocko Robinson is the 97th richest man in America and the creator of The Lamplighter, the world-popular TV crime series. But that doesn't stop Jocko from getting shot in the head while looking for a tofu burger in Los Angeles. And that won't stop Jocko from falling helplessly in love with the Hurricane Lady, a former model who calls herself Inertia and serves a crime lord from Cologne. A man in love among a tangle of lovers, Jocko is desperately trying to pry Inertia away from her life of mayhem and promiscuity. To succeed, Jocko has to enter the realm of his own fantasy -- and somehow find a way out again.

"This new critical biography provides a complete picture of German novelist, playwright and poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. It offers fresh, thought-provoking interpretations of all the major works, including novels such as The Sorrows of Young Werther and The Elective Affinities, plays such as Egmont and Iphigenia in Tauris, and Goethe's greatest work, Faust. Alongside these works the incidents of his life are analysed, including his love affairs and his meetings with the great people of the age, such as Napoleon Bonaparte. Jeremy Adler shows how Goethe's encyclopedic interest in numerous fields influenced later thinkers such as Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud, Émile Durkheim and Susan Sontag. Goethe has often been called the last Renaissance man. He was in fact the first of the moderns - a maker of modernity."--Page 4 of cover.

Marie de Gournay was eighteen when she read, and was overwhelmed by, the essays of the French philosopher Montaigne. She had to be revived with hellebore. When she finally met Montaigne, she stabbed herself with a hairpin until the blood ran in order to show her devotion. He made her his adopted daughter for the two months they knew each other. He died four years later, after which, though scorned by intellectuals, she became his editor. Jenny Diski engages with this passionate and confused relationship between 'father and daughter', old writer/young acolyte, possible lovers, using both their voices. Much of their story is about absence of the people they love. In Jenny Diski's hands it becomes a fascinating tale.