"Moacyr Scliar was the preeminent literary voice of the Jewish immigrant experience in modern Brazil. Now his most ambitiously satirical and irreverent novel is at last translated into English, offering not just a significant contribution to Latin American and Jewish literature but to world literature as well. In a past-life therapy session, a mysterious woman makes a remarkable breakthrough when she discovers that in a previous life she was one of King Solomon's seven hundred wives. In language that hilariously mixes modern jargon and biblical diction, she sets out to tell the story of her earlier incarnation three thousand years in the past, revealing how she went from a provincial nobody to a queen. Yet being royalty isn't all it's cracked up to be. As the least desirable of King Solomon's wives and concubines, she is unceremoniously discarded and forgotten in his harem. But as luck would have it, she possesses a unique gift: she is a woman who knows how to read and write. Once her talent is discovered, King Solomon charges her with writing what will become one of the most important texts in human history. Along the way our nameless narrator leverages her newfound status as royal scribe to bring about her own secret agenda. A brilliant feminist critique skewering the absurdities of patriarchy, The Woman Who Wrote the Bible is a comic masterpiece of truly biblical proportions"-- Provided by publisher.

One of the most distinctive voices in mainstream comics since the 1970s, Howard Chaykin (b. 1950) has earned a reputation as a visionary formal innovator and a compelling storyteller whose comics offer both pulp-adventure thrills and thoughtful engagement with real-world politics and culture. His body of work is defined by the belief that comics can be a vehicle for sophisticated adult entertainment and for narratives that utilize the medium's unique properties to explore serious themes with intelligence and wit. Beginning with early interviews in fanzines and concluding with a new interview conducted in 2010 with the volume's editor, Howard Chaykin: Conversations collects widely ranging discussions from Chaykin's earliest days as an assistant for such legends as Gil Kane and Wallace Wood to his recent work on titles including Dominic Fortune, Challengers of the Unknown, and American Century. The book includes thirty-five line illustrations selected from Chaykin, as well. As a writer/artist for outlets such as DC Comics, Marvel Comics, and Heavy Metal, he has participated in and influenced many of the major developments in mainstream comics over the past four decades. He was an early pioneer in the graphic novel format in the 1970s, and his groundbreaking sci-fi satire American Flagg! was an essential contribution to the maturation of the comic book as a vehicle for social commentary in the 1980s. Brannon Costello, Saint Gabriel, Louisiana, is associate professor of English at Louisiana State University, and the author of Plantation Airs: Racial Paternalism and the Transformations of Class in Southern Fiction, 1945-1971. His work has appeared in Mississippi Quarterly; Southern Quarterly; Southern Literary Journal; Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction; and African American Review. 304 pages (approx.), 6 x 9 inches, 35 b&w illustrations, introduction, chronology, index

For a writer, voice is the problem that never lets you go. For a reader, voice is a profound mystery. What is it? How does it develop and why should it even matter? How does the reader hear and respond to an authentic voice, and what happens when the cult of personality threatens to subvert it? These are some of the slippery questions The Writer's Voice addresses with confidence and clarity. Aspiring young writers often confuse voice with stylishness, but the voice that matters has the whole weight of a life, however young, behind it. In this compelling book, renowned poet, author, and critic A. Alvarez defines "voice" as the vehicle by which a writer expresses his aliveness, hooks his readers, and keeps them listening. These powerful reflections from a lifetime's experience belong alongside John Gardner's The Art of Fiction, E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel, and William Zinsser's On Writing Well.

This collection of interviews reveals the intellectual and creative life of one of America's contemporary masters of fiction writing. In spanning his richly productive career, they convey a sense of his continuity and of his growth as a novelist. Roth has said that one of his goals is to reconcile "experience that I am strongly attached to be temperament and training--the aggressive, the crude, and the obscene, at one extreme, and something a good deal more subtle and, in every sense, refined, at the other." These conversations reveal a savvy, thoughtful man who shows great intelligence, confidence, and wit, as well as an admirable sense of humility and tact.

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).

Gornick on V. S. Naipaul, James Baldwin, George Gissing, Randall Jarrell, H. G. Wells, Loren Eiseley, Allen Ginsberg, Hayden Carruth, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth and the intimate relationship between emotional damage and great literature. Vivian Gornick, one of our finest critics, tackled the theme of love and marriage in her last collection of essays, The End of the Novel of Love , a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist. In this new collection, she turns her attention to another large theme in literature: the struggle for the semblance of inner freedom. Great literature, she believes, is not the record of the achievement, but of the effort. Gornick, who emerged as a major writer during the second-wave feminist movement, came to realize that “ideology alone could not purge one of the pathological self-doubt that seemed every woman's bitter birthright.” Or, as Anton Chekhov put it so memorably: “Others made me a slave, but I must squeeze the slave out of myself, drop by drop.” Perhaps surprisingly, Gornick found particular inspiration for this challenge in the work of male writers—talented, but locked in perpetual rage, self-doubt, or social exile. From these men—who had infinitely more permission to do and be than women had ever known—she learned what it really meant to wrestle with demons. In the essays collected here, she explores the work of V. S. Naipaul, James Baldwin, George Gissing, Randall Jarrell, H. G. Wells, Loren Eiseley, Allen Ginsberg, Hayden Carruth, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth. Throughout the book, Gornick is at her best: interpreting the intimate interrelationship of emotional damage, social history, and great literature.

Nearly 14, Pauline has discovered that her life is far more interesting if she records it as a great work of fiction -- featuring, of course, herself as the tragic heroine. Pauline's hand-wringing accounts of misbehaving boyfriends, backstabbing friends, and general angst are intermingled with more serious issues like her parents' divorce and her beloved teacher's loss of a best friend to AIDS. Laced with the pop-culture references young readers love, Pauline's "novel" reveals the realities of today's teenage life.

We're living a national ideology that's invisible to us because we're inside it." "We're living a national ideology that's invisible to us because we're inside it." At the outset of his career E. L. Doctorow told Paul Levine, "History written by historians is clearly insufficient." Doctorow's novels carry out that conviction by imagining the great moments of American history--the Old West, the gilded age, the Depression, the cold war--as backdrops for tales of excruciating moral pain and injustice in America. In Conversations with E. L. Doctorow Christopher D. Morris has gathered over twenty of the most revelatory interviews with the acclaimed author of Ragtime, World's Fair, Billy Bathgate, The Book of Daniel, and other novels, plays, and short stories. Whatever the setting or time period, Doctorow's characters spark an unparalleled urgency in the novelist's recreations of history. In his work the American dream and the values his characters try to live by turn to madness and ashes. Within this collection Doctorow explores the themes of his work not only in the contexts of national and literary history but also in terms of disturbing trends in contemporary American culture. Talking about style, Doctorow discusses his experiments with shifting points of view and unreliable narrators as part of the modernist heritage to which readers have become accustomed. But he stresses that these techniques are always subordinate to the telling of a good story and the creation of memorable characters. "My portrait of J. P. Morgan in Ragtime is truer to the man's soul and the substance of his life than his authorized biography," he says. Doctorow's critical and popular success comes from the creation and re-creation of such great characters and the telling of captivating stories in which the writer serves as an independent witness to both the ideals and the corruptions that have driven our history. Christopher D. Morris has been the Charles A. Dana Professor of English at Norwich University in Northfield, Vermont, since 1996. He is also the author of Models of Misrepresentation: On the Fiction of E. L. Doctorow and regularly publishes in journals like The Ohio Review, Critique, and Film Criticism.

The twelve contemporary fiction writers interviewed in Passion and Craft go beyond the merely autobiographical, revealing that, despite their differences, they share passionate devotion and discipline for their craft. Included are Richard Ford, winner in 1995 of both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award; Gina Berriault, 1997 winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award; Bobbie Ann Mason; T. Coraghessan Boyle; Rick Bass; Leonard Michaels; Christopher Tilghman; Thom Jones; Julia Alvarez; Andre Dubus; Jayne Anne Phillips; and Tobias Wolff. Their comments will interest readers devoted to their novels and stories, other writers, and aspiring writers.

Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer on hysteria, J.A. Symonds and Havelock Ellis on sexuality, a novel by Ford Madox Ford and Joseph Conrad, The Waste Land of T.S. Eliot (and Ezra Pound), even the Lyrical Ballads of Wordsworth and Coleridge: men making books together. Wayne Koestenbaum's startling interpretation of literary collaboration focuses on homosexual desire: men write together, he argues, in order either to express or to evade homosexual feelings. Their writing becomes a textual intercourse, the book at once a female body they can share and the child of their partnership. These man-made texts steal a generative power that women's bodies seem to represent. Seen as the site of a struggle between homosexual and homophobic energies, the texts Koestenbaum explores - works of psychoanalysis, sexology, fiction, and poetry - emerge as more complex, more revealing. They crystallize and refract the anxiety of male sexuality at the end of the last century, and open up a deeper understanding of connections today between the erotic and the literary. Drawing upon the work of feminist critics, Koestenbaum connects male collaboration and the exchange of women within patriarchy: he peers into both medical texts and imaginative literature, disturbing our ready acceptance of the co-authored work. This strong and unsettling book transforms our understanding of the creative process, providing a new sense of what both collaborative and solitary artistry mean.

The hero of Paul Ableman's Vilp (1962) is Clive Witt, a novelist in search of a hero for his new novel. He advertises for suitable applicants, and from seventy-three replies he selects three: Professor Guthrie Pidge, a zoologist; Pad Dee Murphy, an Irish-Burmese peasant; and Harry Glebe, the inventor of the renowned earth-borer. Clive's novel, though, progresses slowly. His three heroes refuse to mix their very disparate elements into a harmonious whole. Eventually, Clive scraps it and harnesses his team of heroes to a new work, an exciting science fiction tale called The Silver Spores . In this, mankind meets the Vilp! The novel ends with the 5,000 strong Vilp Galactic Council communing in space at an incredibly high telepathic level. 'Excellent... vital, taut, brilliantly imaginative' Anthony Burgess

Antonio Cristoforo Baldini, aka Tonly Baldwin, is born in New York's Little Italy in 1928 to an immigrant family on the fringes of organized crime. Tony, good-looking and a talented singer, romanticizes the dangerous lives of his brothers. Upon their violent deaths he turns away from the past, landing the lead in a Broadway musical, and falling in love with its wealthy producer, Priscilla Poyncroft Porter. However, Tony's charmed life, and his marriage, soon begin to unravel, and he finds himself drawn to a mysterious, matchstick violin made by a prisoner, and to his memories of the seductive lives of his brothers. His past, and present, begin to catch up with him. Soon, with the help of a therapist Dr. Norma Mellows, he finds himself making a case to fight for his freedom and true identity.

Here are eighteen interviews with this novelist & historian that portray him to be both an admirable writer & spellbinding talker & reveal his evolution into a great narrative artist.

Five years of breakdown separate pianist Theo Mangrove’s last recital in Europe from his planned comeback in Aigues-Mortes, "the town of dead water." At home in tiny East Kills, NY, Theo begins jotting in 25 notebooks, purchased all at once and addressed to his mother. Theo’s wife, aside from servicing two of Theo’s twenty daily erections, will have nothing to do with him. The other eighteen—taken care of by male hustlers, random strangers in YMCA locker-rooms and naked piano students—contribute to Theo’s sense of dissolution as his "comeback" approaches. Overcome with the belief that Moira Orfei, queen of the Italian circus during the 1960’s, must perform with him, Theo begins to write to her and to pen what may or may not be her cryptic replies into his notebooks. In a fugue of notes and troubling memories, Theo prepares for Aigues-Mortes, struggling with Moira’s guidance towards one final, full celebration of "the partial, the flawed, the almost, the not quite." Peopled by piano playing relatives, prostitutes, muses and manipulators; poet and cultural critic Wayne Koestenbaum’s first novel shines a hot light on the treacherous crossroads of sex, death, family and popular culture.