"The Reservoir follows an unexceptional man in an exceptional time. We see our present-day pandemic world and New York City through the eyes of a former Wall Street veteran, Ridley, as he, in his enforced quarantined solitude, looks back upon his life. He examines his wins, his failures, the gnawing questions-his career, his divorce, his estranged daughter-and wonders what it all means and who he really is. Sitting and brooding night after night, gazing out his huge picture window high above the Central Park Reservoir, Ridley spots a flashing light in an apartment across the park as if a lonely quarantined person is signaling him in Morse code. His determination to find out who this mystery woman is, this fellow quarantine damsel in distress trapped in her own Fifth Avenue tower, leads him on an epic quest that will ultimately tempt him with either delusional madness or the fulfillment of his own mythic fate. Is he a dying man going mad or an everyman metamorphosing into a hero? Or both? We accompany Ridley as he leaves the safety of his apartment window to save the Fifth Avenue femme fatale and descends into a dangerous, increasingly surreal world of global conspiracies, madness, and sickness of this viral time; beyond that, into the enduring mysteries of love and fatherhood; and deeper still, into the bedrock mystery of life itself. As Ridley's actions grow more and more uncharacteristic, he realizes the key to all the mysteries of now, and even all of history, seem to lie deep beneath the freezing waters of the reservoir. The Reservoir is a twisted rom-com for our distanced time, when the merest touch could kill and conspiracy theories propagate like viruses-a contemporary union of Death in Venice, Rear Window, and The Plague"--

Intelligence turns me on. Lore Segal's tour de force look at the New York literary scene was a hit when it was first released in the 1970s, winning the praise of the literary elite. John Garnder called it “magical.” William Gass said it was “witty, elegant, beautiful.” Stanley Elkin called it “a shamelessly wonderful novel, so flawless one feels civilized reading it.” It's been a cult classic ever since, and appears here in its full, original text, as fresh as ever: the story of the whimsical New York poet Lucinella and her adventures among the literati. It starts at Yaddo writers colony, where life is idyllic, meals are served to you in your rooms, and cocktails are ready at day's end … and still the writers complain and compete. Then it moves back to New York City, where the pampered once again face reality, and wonder: Will a different husband … or the right publisher … or the perfect filing system … put life in order? Lucinella and her circle feel lacking and keep looking, busily going to parties and watching one another 's lives closely for signs of happiness, love and despair. Segal depicts it all with a perfect blend of love and malice. And at the center is Lucinella herself, so full of humanity and frailty that these divertissements do her to death. “Here,” as Cynthia Ozick says, “is the enchanted microcosm, the laughter of mortality.” The Contemporary Art of the Novella series is designed to highlight work by major authors from around the world. In most instances, as with Imre Kertész, it showcases work never before published; in others, books are reprised that should never have gone out of print. It is intended that the series feature many well-known authors and some exciting new discoveries. And as with the original series, The Art of the Novella, each book is a beautifully packaged and inexpensive volume meant to celebrate the form and its practitioners.

The ordinary seaman is Esteban, a 19-year-old veteran of the war in Nicaragua who has come to America with fourteen other men to crew the boat 'Urus'. Docked on a desolate Brooklyn pier, the 'Urus' turns out to be a wreck, sitting idle without plumbing or electricity. Lacking the means to return to their native country or the ability to find other work, the fifteen men become prisoners on a ship that never moves. As Esteban works up the courage to escape into the city and create a new life, the novel reveals the stories he and the other men share: each man's past is shrouded in the residue of broken hopes, hearts and dreams, betrayal and defiance, and of haunting loves, ghostly and actual. Evoking the work of Joseph Conrad, The Ordinary Seaman traces the very real conflicts between native and foreign, traditional and modern, with a voice all of its own.

How to describe Faigele? A recent immigrant from Russia, the wife of an immigrant fur worker, a mother, a housewife, a greenhorn - and an enchantress of such striking beauty that she had the Bronx at her feet. The local postmaster consoled her with hot tea in his office every morning when she came with "Baby" Jerome, hoping for a letter from her brother in war-torn Russia. An admirer enlisted five-year-old Baby to help him produce a forged letter to ease her worry. But it was her dentist, a blackmarketer on the side, who introduced her to the circle of Bronx politicians who made her the dealer of their weekly poker game. Beautiful, passionate, worlds above words like "naive or sophisticated," Faigele has been blessed by her son, a rarely gifted writer who vividly recaptures this astonishing woman in her turbulent setting.

Using himself as the persona, the author interviews the police commissioner concerning racism and a SoHo dealer on art, invades Brooklyn Mafia dens and a Times Square sex palace, and explores a shelter for the homeless

Epstein first introduced Leib Goldkorn in "The Steinway Quintet". In this volume, Goldkorn - Holocaust survivor, flautist, and pianist - is back in an expanded account of the original novella along with two other long tales that continue his richly comic spiral of misadventures that are at once comedies of manners and serious accounts of culture colliding with casual violence.

"Roger Levy, the protagonist of Alan Furst's fast-moving and funny suspense novel, is an enterprising young man in business for himself. In fact, his is a kind of modern American success story, although it just happens that his business is dealing dope around the various colleges and universities in Pennsylvania. So when he is stopped, his van searched and his "merchandise" discovered by the Pennsylvania police, he has no choice but to appear to cooperate when offered his freedom in exchange for complicity in an apparent CIA murder scheme. Back home in New York the chase is on, and it is only with the help of his lawyer, his street sense and a lot of his own hard-earned cash that Levy is finally able to identify and evade the enemy, uncover the unlikely source of the plot and come away with enough capital to fulfill his own version of the American dream--to retire and live above his own Chinese restaurant, its kitchen available to him twenty-four hours a day. Set in the last days of the sixties, Your Day in the Barrel is at once a fond spoof of the suspense genre and a fiercely contemporary thriller told in the truly original voice of a young writer making his highly auspicious debut." -- Book jacket flap.

Meet Phil Snyder: new father, nursing assistant at a cutting-edge biotech facility on Staten Island, and all-around decent guy. Trouble is, his life is falling apart. His wife has betrayed him, his job involves experimental surgeries with strange side effects, and his father is hiding early-onset dementia. Phil also has a special talent he doesn't want to publicize--he's a mind reader and moonlights as Brainstorm, a costumed superhero. But when Phil wakes up from a blackout drunkand is confronted with photos that seem to show him assaulting an unknown woman, even superpowers won't help him. Try as he might, Phil can't remember that night, and so, haunted by the need to know, he mind-reads his way through the lab techs at work, adoring fans at Toy Polloi, and anyone else who gets in his way, in an attempt to determine whether he's capable of such violence.

Now available for the first time in English, Manea's acclaimed novel of émigrés in America, free yet imprisoned by the past Norman Manea, Romania's most famous contemporary author, twice has survived the grip of totalitarian regimes. No stranger to exile, he mines its complexities and disorientations in this extraordinarily compelling novel, The Lair. Exile in the motherland and away from it is the shared plight of his protagonists. Nowhere at home, they move through their lives in a continuous, ever-elusive quest for national and individual identity. Manea's characters seek a place and a voice in America, only to discover that the shackles of their native totalitarian and nationalist ideologies are impossible to break. Manea's themes and narrative approach are intricate: his style fluctuates in correspondence with the instability of his characters' lives, his story is encased within an elaborate network of allusions and paradoxes. Yet in the midst of the novel's overriding disorientation, the author establishes intersections and uncovers the universal. Through the predicaments of his perpetual outsiders, he offers a poignant assessment of the conflicts of the individual in the age of globalization. He writes with unmatched intensity and a unique sensitivity to the human tragicomedy.

"When Adam Freedman--a skinny, immature, and lackluster high school student from Piedmont, California--is sent by his parents to join his older sister Casey in New York City, he is hopeful that his life is about to change. And it sure does. It is the Summer of 2006--the year of gay marriage demonstrations and the rise of transgender rights--and Casey has thrust herself into New York's fringe lesbian, sexual, and political scene. Accustomed to being a social misfit, Adam now finds himself part of a wild subculture complete with underground clubs, drinking, and friendly women who take a surprisingly intense interest in him. It takes some time for him to realize many in this new crowd assume he is transgendered--a boy who was born a girl--or else why would he always be around? But then he meets Gillian, the girl of his dreams. If only she weren't a lesbian! And if only she didn't believe he was really (sort of) a girl. Ariel Schrag's scathingly funny and poignant debut novel puts a fresh spin on questions of love, attraction, self-definition, and what it takes to be at home in your own skin"--

A Memoir"It was easy to invent a fable.When the letters did come from school, I'd scratch out a note in my father's hand, talk of fatigue, visits to the brain surgeon, etc.The East Bronx was like the Sahara, where a child and all his records could get lost in some infinite sand dune."What does an 11 year-old boy do when his classmates call him "Dumbo" and his parents don't seem to know that he exists?His mother, the beautiful Faigele spends her days pushing her 2 year-old son Marvin around in a stroller and barely hears Jerome's clarinet playing. The answer for Jerome Charyn is to go to the local movie house and hide out for a few hours every day.At the movies, he can escape, not be himself for a little while. One day, while watching Samson and Delilah for the seventh time that week, he is suddenly grabbed from his seat, dragged down a flight of stairs and winds up being introduced to a whole new way of life by three "cellar rats," as Jerome likes to call them.They make him a part of their group and he soon finds himself dressed in a Feuerman & Marx suit collecting money for Farouk, the local gangster. Many of the men remember his mother, The Dark Lady, from her days as dealer of their local poker game.With his distinctive style, a deep and accurate feeling for time and place, and an uncanny ability to communicate the world as seen through the imagination of an unusual boy, Charyn has created another gem of a memoir, a worthy sequel to The Dark Lady from Belorusse.

Nathan, a blind Jewish scribe, tells the story of the coming of the Messiah in the person of one Simon Stern—from his birth on the Lower East Side, through his career as a millionaire dealer in real estate, to his building of a refuge for the Jewish remnant of World War II. "A majestic work of fiction that should stand world literature's test of time, to be read and reread. A masterpiece."— Commonweal "This book ensnares one of the most extraordinarily daring ideas to inhabit an American novel in a number of years. For one thing, it is that risky devising, dreamed of only by the Thomas Manns of the world, a serious and vastly conceived fiction bled out of the theological imagination. For another, it is clearly an 'American' novel—altogether American, despite its Jewish particularity: it is not so much about the history of the Jews as it is about the idea of the New World as haven. . . . In its teeming particularity every vein of this book runs with a brilliance of Jewish insight and erudition to be found in no other novelist. Arthur Cohen is the first writer of any American generation to compose a profoundly Jewish fiction on a profoundly Western theme."—Cynthia Ozick, New York Times Book Review "This stately, ambitious amalgam of Jewish myth, history, theology, and speculations on the Jewish soul is like an enormous Judaic archeological ruin—often hard for the uninitiated to interpret, but impressive. . . . Intelligent, inventive, fascinating."— New Yorker

Amidst the lights and glamour of the New York theater district during the 1950s, two Holocaust survivors confront each other in order to reckon with a common past - one that hides an awful secret. Jud Kramer, a successful stage director, is in the midst of mounting his most painful and personal play while trying to enjoy the happiness he has found with his beautiful actress wife and baby daughter. Into his life comes Carl Walkowitz, a brooding, charismatic drifter who displays the scars of his concentration camp past in his wounded leg and half-closed eye. It is the relationship of these two men, one who lives in the past and the other trying to grasp hold of the present, that drives the story of Who Shall Live, Who Shall Die to its terrifying conclusion. Step by step, inexorably, Walkowitz strips Jud of everything dear to him, until finally, standing on an empty stage, the two men, with a woman between them, come face to face in a life-and-death struggle only one of them can survive.

When her parents separate, twelve-year-old Sarah Stein feels split into her mother's daughter and daddy's girl, but a disgraced firefighter who lives in a hidden room in the Brooklyn Bridge, and her grandmother's story of her own childhood, help Sarah find her true self.

Book by Charyn, Jerome

"Written in 1944 by Ben Gold, the president of the Furriers Union, this working-class, coming-of-age novel traces the family origin, immigration, and radicalization of an everyman named Avreml Broide. Mirroring Gold's own life, Avreml's story begins entangled in a complex intergenerational social and criminal community in Bessarabia just after the turn of the twentieth century. Personal dramas drive a young Avreml to New York City in his young adult years, where he finds a job in the fur industry and devotes himself entirely to his union, party, and the fight against fascism, often to the detriment of his personal life and relationships. Through strikes, dissidence, and finally on the front lines of the Spanish Civil War, Avreml's journey presents the fascinating ambiguity of subsuming the self in service to party discipline... This novel offers a powerful counternarrative to histories and narratives of Jewish immigration that emphasize materialist American dreams and upward class mobility. Your Comrade, Avreml Broide offers an enticing mix of fact and fiction to demonstrate the personal risks, revolutionary dreams, and heartaches of Yiddish-speaking American Communists."--Publisher's description.

"Written in 1944 by Ben Gold, the president of the Furriers Union, this working-class, coming-of-age novel traces the family origin, immigration, and radicalization of an everyman named Avreml Broide. Mirroring Gold's own life, Avreml's story begins entangled in a complex intergenerational social and criminal community in Bessarabia just after the turn of the twentieth century. Personal dramas drive a young Avreml to New York City in his young adult years, where he finds a job in the fur industry and devotes himself entirely to his union, party, and the fight against fascism, often to the detriment of his personal life and relationships. Through strikes, dissidence, and finally on the front lines of the Spanish Civil War, Avreml's journey presents the fascinating ambiguity of subsuming the self in service to party discipline... This novel offers a powerful counternarrative to histories and narratives of Jewish immigration that emphasize materialist American dreams and upward class mobility. Your Comrade, Avreml Broide offers an enticing mix of fact and fiction to demonstrate the personal risks, revolutionary dreams, and heartaches of Yiddish-speaking American Communists."--Publisher's description.