One of America's most popular Jewish writers, Chaim Potok (b. 1929) is the author of such novels as The Chosen (1967), The Promise (1969), The Book of Lights (1981), and Davita's Harp (1985). Each of his novels explores the tension between tradition and modernity, and the clash between Jewish culture and contemporary Western civilization, which he calls "core-to-core culture confrontation." Although primarily known as a novelist, Potok is an ordained Conservative rabbi and a world-class Judaic scholar who has also published children's books, theological discourses, biographies, and histories. Conversations with Chaim Potok presents interviews ranging from 1976 to 1999. Potok discusses the broad range of his writing and the deep influence of non-Jewish novels-in particular, Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited and James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man -on his work. Interviews bear witness to Potok's many other influences-Orthodox Jewish doctrine, Freudian psychoanalytical theory, Picasso's Guernica, and Jewish kabbalah mysticism. Though labeled an American Jewish writer, Potok argues that Flannery O'Connor should then be called an American Catholic writer and John Updike an American Protestant writer. "In his mind," editor Daniel Walden writes, "just as Faulkner was a writer focused on a particular place, Oxford, Mississippi, . . . so Potok's territory was a small section of New York City." Potok often explores conflict in his writings and in his interviews. Strict Jewish teachings deem fiction an artifice and therefore unnecessary, yet since the age of sixteen Potok has been driven to write novels. At the root of all of these conversations is Potok's intense interest in the turmoil between Jewish culture, religion, and tradition and what he calls "Western secular humanism." As he discusses his work, he continually includes broader issues, such as the state of Jewish literature and art, pointing out with pride and enthusiasm his belief that Jewish culture, in the twentieth century, has finally begun to have a significant role in producing and shaping the world's art and literature. Whether discussing the finer details of Talmudic textual analysis or his period of chaplaincy during the Korean War, Potok is articulate and philosophical, bringing deep consideration into what may seem small subjects. Although his novels and histories take place primarily in the recent past, the Chaim Potok that emerges from this collection is a writer deeply rooted in the tensions of the present. Daniel Walden is Professor Emeritus of American Studies, English and Comparative Literature at Penn State University. He has written or edited several books, including On Being Jewish (1974), Twentieth Century American Jewish Writers (1984), The World of Chaim Potok (1985), and American Jewish Poets: The Roots and the Stems (1990).

This study tests the alternative to the theory that the Dead Sea Scrolls emanate from the Essene community. It advances the theory that the Qumran community continues the haburah of the first century B.C., and that it is closer in custom to the old haburah than is the Rabbinic community.

When Tzviki's family moves from Israel to New York, Tzviki, of middle-school age, has a hard time adjusting to his schoolmates. Nonetheless, he succeeds, with newfound and hard-won self-confidence. When his family returns to Israel, he befriends a brilliant Hasidic boy, and keeps level-headed during a hostage crisis. His sister, Miri, also endures an agonizing friendship.

Chana Bloch's collection of new and selected poetry is a retrospective view on Jewish texts and traditions, illness, death, gender, memory, and family life.

Close Listening brings together seventeen strikingly original essays, especially written for this volume, on the poetry reading, the sound of poetry, and the visual performance of poetry. While the performance of poetry is as old as poetry itself, critical attention to modern and postmodern poetry performance has been surprisingly slight. This volume, featuring work by critics and poets such as Marjorie Perloff, Susan Stewart, Johanna Drucker, Dennis Tedlock, and Susan Howe, is the first comprehensive introduction to the ways in which twentieth-century poetry has been practiced as a performanc

Praised in recent years as a “calculating, improvisatory, essential poet” by Daisy Fried in the New York Times , and as “the foremost poet-critic of our time” by Craig Dworkin, Charles Bernstein is a leading voice in American poetry. Near/Miss , Bernstein’s first poetry collection in five years, is the apotheosis of his late style, thick with off-center rhythms, hilarious riffs, and verbal extravagance. This collection’s title highlights poetry’s ability to graze reality without killing it, and at the same time implies that the poems themselves are wounded by the grief of loss. The book opens with a rollicking satire of difficult poetry—proudly declaring itself “a totally inaccessible poem”—and moves on to the stuff of contrarian pop culture and political cynicism—full of malaprops, mondegreens, nonsequiturs, translations of translations, sardonically vandalized signs, and a hilarious yet sinister feed of blog comments. At the same time, political protest also rubs up against epic collage, through poems exploring the unexpected intimacies and continuities of “our united fates.” These poems engage with works by contemporary painters—including Amy Sillman, Rackstraw Downes, and Etel Adnan—and echo translations of poets ranging from Catullus and Virgil to Goethe, Cruz e Souza, and Kandinsky. Grounded in a politics of multiplicity and dissent, and replete with both sharp edges and subtle intimacies, Near/Miss is full of close encounters of every kind.

GOD'S LOVE FOR ISRAEL by Charles Lee Feinberg UNDATED Hardcover 7 1/2 x 5 1/4 inches, 123 pages American Board of Missions to the Jews

Originally published in 1937, this collection of lectures by psychologist Charles S. Myers examines the applications and implications of psychology on a variety of topics, including musical appreciation and choosing a career. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in the history of psychology and its practical functions.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work was reproduced from the original artifact, and remains as true to the original work as possible. Therefore, you will see the original copyright references, library stamps (as most of these works have been housed in our most important libraries around the world), and other notations in the work. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. As a reproduction of a historical artifact, this work may contain missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

In The Atrocity Archive, English hacker and government agent Bob Howard, seconded to field-work with no training, tangles with a Nazi death-cult with access to parallel dimensions. In The Jennifer Morgue, a billionaire businessman, obsessed with a certain series of spy novels and movies, has concocted a fiendish scheme to raise a cyclopean entity from the ocean floor, and only Bob--in an ill-fitting tuxedo and a gimmicked econobox car--can stop him. Also includes the novellas "The Concrete Jungle" (a Hugo winner) and "Pimpf," along with an introduction by Ken MacLeod, afterwords by the author, and an extensive glossary of spy terms.

The third book (after The Family Trade and The Hidden Family ) in the saga of the Merchant Princes by Charles Stross, in which Miriam gets into deadly trouble. Miriam Beckstein has gotten in touch with her roots and they have nearly strangled her. A young, hip, business journalist in Boston, she discovered (in The Family Trade ) that her family comes from an alternate reality, that she is very well-connected, and that her family is too much like the mafia for comfort. In addition, starting with the fact that women are family property and required to breed more family members with the unique talent to walk between worlds, Miriam has tried to remain an outsider and her own woman. She started a profitable business in a third world she has discovered, outside the family reach (recounted in The Hidden Family ). She fell in love with a distant relative, but he died saving her life. Now, however, in The Clan Corporate , Miriam may be overreaching. And if she gets caught, death or a fate worse is around the bend. There is, for instance, the brain-damaged son of the local king who needs a wife. But they'd never make her do that, would they?

A bold fantasy in the tradition of Roger Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber, The Merchant Princes is a sweeping new series from the hottest new writer in science fiction! The six families of the Clan rule the kingdom of Gruinmarkt from behind the scenes, a mixture of nobility and criminal conspirators whose power to walk between their world and ours make them rich in both. Braids of family loyalty and intermarriage provide a fragile guarantee of peace, but a recently ended civil war has left the families shaken and suspicious. Miriam, a hip tech journalist form Boston, discovered her alternate-world relatives with explosive results that shook three worlds. Now, as the prodigal Countess Helge Thorold-Hyorth, she finds herself ensnared in schemes and plots centuries in the making. She is surrounded by unlikely allies, lethal contraband, and, most dangerous of all, her family. With her modern American attitudes, she's not sure she can fit in, or if she even wants to, but to stay alive, she really has no choice. To avoid a slippery slope down to an unmarked grave, Miriam must build a power-base of her own. She started applying modern business practices and scientific knowledge to a trade heretofore dominated by medieval mercantilists-with unexpected consequences for three different timelines, including the quasi-Victorian one exploited by the hidden family. Blending the creativity and humor of Roger Zelazny, the adventure of H. Beam Piper and Philip Jose Farmer, and the rigor and scope of a science-fiction writer on the grandest scale, Charles Stross has set a new standard for fantasy epics. Charles Stross is one of the big new SF writers of the 21st century, and the saga of The Merchant Princes is his most ambitious work yet.

Miriam Beckstein is a young, hip, business journalist in Boston. She discovered in The Family Trade and The Hidden Family that her family came from an alternate reality, that she was very well-connected, and that her family was too much like the mafia for comfort. She found herself caught in a family trap in The Clan Corporate and betrothed to a brain-damaged prince, and then all hell broke loose. Now, in The Merchants' War , Miriam has escaped to yet another world and remains in hiding from both the Clan and their opponents. There is a nasty shooting war going on in the Gruinmarkt world of the Clan, and we know something that Miriam does not; something that she's really going to hate--if she lives long enough to find out.

Short story collection containing such gems as "Antibodies," "Bear Trap," "Extracts from the Club Diary," "A Colder War," "TOAST: A con report," "A Boy and His God," "Ship of Fools," "Dechlorinating the Moderator," "Yellow Snow," and "Big Brother Iron.""I hadn't been paying close attention to Stross's work. It's a mistake I won't make again." -- Michael Swanwick

"Charlotte Dacre's debut novel Confessions of the Nun of St Omer (1805) was a bestseller in its day, launching the career of a woman who would go on to become one of the nineteenth century's most notorious female novelists. The work tells the story of the wilful Cazire, who recounts her passionate and destructive youthful adventures from the convent where she now lives in seclusion. Although Dacre's fame, then and now, rests largely on her sensationalist plots and portrayal of sexually self-possessed female villains, Confessions of the Nun of St. Omer shows a different side to her writing, one that is engaged in the political debate surrounding the French Revolution and eager to uphold the conservative moral line. Indeed, in many ways the novel strives to exemplify the moral and social orthodoxies of its time - dealing with themes of education, passion, seduction and the dangers of the radical 'new philosophy'. Yet even at this early stage of her career the author's frank exploration of the power of female desire reveals a willingness to experiment with themes left untouched by more conventional Romantic era novelists, themes that would dominate her writing for years to come. This edition of Charlotte Dacre's book is based on the Chawton House Library copy of the text from 1805 and contains textual notes. The book will be of interest to those researching the Gothic, women's writing and the development of the nineteenth-century novel."--

Perhaps more than any other aspect of rabbinic literature, the laws about and discussions of menstruation have polarized current discussions of gender relations in Jewish culture. Is the designated impurity of menstruation sexist? Or does ritual absence from sex during menstruation encourage a rhythmic reaffirmation of conjugal intimacy?This book offers a new perspective on the extensive rabbinic discussions of menstrual impurity, female physiology, and anatomy, and on the social and religious institutions those discussions engendered. It analyzes the functions of these discussions within the larger textual world of rabbinic literature and in the context of Jewish and Christian culture in late antiquity. How did gender work—how was it made to work—in rabbinic literature? How did that literature dictate the place of women in Jewish culture? In search of answers to these questions, the author analyzes the architectural metaphors deployed to describe female anatomy, arguing that this discursive construction operated culturally to associate women with the home and exclude them from rabbinic study halls. The author shows that rabbinic discourse is not completely controlled by rabbinic ideology, however. She analyzes talmudic discussions that allow alternative gender perspectives to emerge, indicating that women and their bodies were not completely objectified. This suggests that the Babylonian Talmud does not present a completely homogeneous gender structure, but contains a number of different, sometimes contradictory, possibilities. The book concludes with a study of early Christian texts that relate to the same biblical laws on menstrual impurity as rabbinic texts, focusing in particular on a Jewish-Christian text in which the anonymous author polemicizes against Jewish women converts who remain attached to the biblical laws. This text allows us to reconstruct women’s perspectives on the inscription of religious meaning onto their bodies and physiological processes.

Tune in to the wild new series by the bestselling author of "Sunset Island". Welcome to "Trash", the hippest, raciest TV talk show ever. Ten thousand teens apply and six are picked as interns, and given an awesome apartment. Fantastic friends, hot romance, a summer to remember, so long as no one, especially "Trash", unearths intern Chelsea's secret.