A collection of stories celebrating the Jewish tradition in many different places and different times, some reconstructed from actual events, some based on tradition, and some fictional in form.

'The ultimate book for any Jennings or Gleitzman fan.' Kids Book Review Shortlisted - BILBY Children's Choice Awards 2002 - Prize for Writing for Young Adults Winner - KROC Children's Choice Awards 2000 - Prize for Writing for Young Adults Winner - YABBA Children's Choice Awards 1998 - Older Readers Winner - Dymock's Children's Choice Awards 1999 - Older Readers Winner - CROW Children's Choice Awards 1998 - Prize for Writing for Young Adults Winner - COOL Children's Choice Awards 1998 - Prize for Writing for Young Adults Something very weird is happening to Dawn and Rory. And it's not just their new step-family. Slurping slobberers want to suck their bones out. Strange steel sheep want to smash them to pieces. Giant frogs want to crunch them up. Cruel killer creepers want to squeeze the life out of them. Their parents can't help them. Dawn and Rory are on their own. It's wild. It's wacky. It's WICKED! With the perfect mix of humour and suspense, Wicked! will keep middle-grade readers on the edge of their seat as Rory and Dawn navigate the challenges of life, family ... and monsters! A must-read for any kid (or adult) who loves a good mix of creepy, funny and clever storytelling. ALL SIX PARTS IN ONE! Part 1- The Slobberers Part 2- Battering Rams Part 3- Croaked Part 4- Dead Ringer Part 5- The Creeper Part 6- Till Death Us Do Part ------------------ PRAISE FOR MORRIS GLEITZMAN 'Readers can't get enough of him.' The Independent 'A brilliantly funny writer' Sunday Telegraph 'A virtuoso demonstration of how you can make comedy out of the most unlikely subject' Sunday Times 'He is one of the finest examples of a writer who can make humour stem from the things that really matter in life.' The Guardian

This superb collection signals the long overdue return of Albert Maltz, one of the "Hollywood Ten" blacklisted during the McCarthy era, to the forefront of American letters. From "Afternoon in the Jungle"--an unforgettable glimpse of the brutalization of poverty--to the gripping adventure of "The Farmer's Dog," Maltz probes deep into the American consciousness, displaying a keen outrage at the injustices of poverty, prejudice and oppression. Yet, throughout, he remains true to a central vision of the essential dignity of man.

When God tells Levidow to buy a big blue car and get out of town, he dares to think that his suffering might be over. Instead he begins a journey that will put him out on the open highway with a reincarnation of himself as a much younger man, a hideous woman, and an oversupply of Dr. Brown's soda. His is just one of the journeys undertaken by the characters of From Hunger. With wit and irony, Gerald Shapiro leads us from a London park to the streets of Chicago, from the Vietnam War Memorial to a New York art gallery, as his characters search for sustenance in a world full of hunger. In a stroke of brilliance, solitary Altshuler, the failing, forty-ish shoe designer of the title story, invents an open-toed, stiletto-heeled hiking boot that makes him rich. But money doesn't satisfy his unnamed longing. When his 380-pound Uncle Phil comes to visit, Altshuler learns that there are cravings even greater than his own. "I been hungry my whole life", Uncle Phil says, as he eats his way through barbecued ribs and bags of corn chips, toward an inevitable finale with a meatball sandwich. During his annual research trip to London in "Golders Green", Ted Lustig, an inept scholar, searches for purpose in the life of an obscure German writer whose greatest achievement was his own suicide. Lustig is obsessed with the writer whose brilliant failure mimics his own. But when he meets the aging Anna Peltzman, he begins to realize that meaning isn't always revealed in dramatic moments, but rather in far more puzzling ways. Lenny Schrank is inexplicably drawn to the city of his father's youth in "The Community Seder", where he happens upon a mysterious synagogue filled with faces from his past. "Let anyonewho is hungry, come in and eat", chants the congregation. What Lenny finds at the Passover celebration is an exquisite recognition of all that is missing from his life - and a brief moment of community. With wonderfully idiosyncratic characters and deft use of detail, Gerald Shapiro takes us beyond the grimness of the lives of his characters to reveal the hunger - and the hope - in us all.

The stories in Terrors range from a serious and touching portrait of a dying child kept alive by his love of a superhero to swashbuckling retro pulp adventures, the exploration of a lost civilization buried beneath the sands of the Sahara Desert, and the descent into madness of a famous writer of horror stories when he finds himself trapped in a railroad car with a terrifying party of college coeds.

From WATER STREET PRESS A children's story for grown-ups. ..".amongst their own kind, children are the world's most thoroughgoing skeptics." But not eleven-year-old Jeff Greenaway. When his parents suddenly come into possession of hard-to-get tickets to the smash musical How To Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, but can't find a babysitter, Jeff ventures out in the Manhattan night to meet his hero, Count Zackuloff, the mad, moldy host of Channel 5's Midnight Mystery Theater, a horror movie program. Amazingly, the Count takes Jeff along on a publicity stunt in costume to the Horn and Hardart Automat, drawing crowds of curious fans. Next, the Count takes Jeff to a double feature horror matinee at the 58th Street Translux. An unusual friendship develops between the boy and the ghoul. Through it all, Jeff nutures dreams of becoming the Count's on-screen sidekick. But the Count has his own dreams-and they do not include a lifetime of introducing old horror movies on a third-rate New York TV station. James Howard Kunstler's charming tale takes us back to an age when New York City was a natural playground for a little boy and his own, personal vampire hero-a time when it seemed possible that all of our dreams could come true.

This collection of literature attempts to compile many of the classic, timeless works that have stood the test of time and offer them at a reduced, affordable price, in an attractive volume so that everyone can enjoy them.

In That's Life, William Herrick's view of humanity is unsparing yet compassionate. He sees life as commitment--to ideals, friends, family--but no one, least of all Herrick, said it was going to be easy. His portraits of the members of a distinctly American family--a novella, five short stories, and a group of five letters--comprise not quite a novel but more than a collection of stories. "I think of it as a co-operative structure," the author says, "in which each character owns and occupies his or her own place, yet it is the entire family which operates the building. To simplify matters, I call the book a fiction." And so we learn the past and present of each of the Millers: Max and Rebecca, Rebecca's mother Ruth (in an old folks' home), and the three Miller children--Eli, an obsessive artist, Peter, an amateur student of life as he bums rides across the country, and teen-ager Nina, a not-so-innocent working-class child away at prep school on a scholarship. But we learn about them in counterpoint and mosaic as Herrick turns our attention, and our allegiance, first to one member of the family and then another. There are few books where human weaknesses are so fully displayed and yet where human endurance and capacity for joy are so palpably present.

Set in the San Francisco environs of the 1930s, this series of five short stories covers the intrigues of brilliant, stylish, and very polite amateur sleuths Claire Delacroix and her millionaire boss, Akhenaton Beelzebub Chase. They are a perfect pair to solve impossible crimes set forth by police captain Cleland Baxter, who once served with Chase in the Great War. Mystery abounds, beginning with the intriguing puzzle of a Hungarian actor found dead in his locked dressing room with vampire-like puncture wounds in his neck. A deep water explorer disappears from his diving suit, as does a fighter plane[alpha]s passenger after traveling through a cloud. Both Chase and Delacroix have a penchant for re-enacting the scene of the crime, their many talents in evidence as they do. Delacroix is a medical doctor, pilot, and multi-instrument musician with a weakness for movie magazines and a San Francisco Call reporter (who gets his own bonus story set in 1923), while her partner Chase is a professor, inventor, and autodidact polymath whose parents went down with both the Titanic and the Lusitania, with his wartime gassed lungs as a weakness. The crimes solved range from a very deadly massacre of even the house servants, to a missing person caught in the act of attending a bar mitzvah. Through it all there are colorful gadgets and gizmos galore, food both delicious and deadly, and a setting that sparkles as brightly as the characters of the well-matched sleuths. Great fun!

Short stories summon up the tones and twists of contemporary marriages, careers, pleasures, and social quirks

This is a classic science fiction novella by Stanley G. Weinbaum that was originally published in Astounding Stories in 1935. This is the only of Weinbaum's stories to be set on the planet Pluto, written only five years after the planet's discovery. The tale starts with a spaceship called Aardkin that gets boarded by the notorious pirate ship the Red Peri. One year on Frank Keene and astrophysicist Solomon Nestor crash land on Pluto and find themselves captives of the Red Peri herself, the nineteen year-old daughter of the man who built the Red Peri. During their ordeal the secret of the reason behind her forays into piracy are revealed. This work is part of our Vintage Sci-Fi Classics Series, a series in which we are republishing some of the best stories in the genre by some of its most acclaimed authors, such as Isaac Asimov, Marion Zimmer Bradley, and Robert Sheckley. Each publication is complete with a short introduction to the history of science fiction.

For more than five decades, with relentless candor, biting wit, and striking imagery, Bruce Benderson's fiction has celebrated the warped beauty of our megalopolises, including their clashes between the classes and their subcultures of sex and drugs. Oppressed but flamboyant, the voices of his subterranean worlds have become just too intense to be ignored. Now, for the first time, all his short texts, including 21 never before published, appear together in the same volume. Included is one of the first post-Stonewall coming out stories, written in 1970, decades before such narratives developed into a full genre. This, then, is the complete and definitive Bruce Benderson reader. Benderson's most well-known book, The Romanian: Story of an Obsession, was awarded the prestigious Prix de Flore in its French edition. Other publications include the essay collection Sex and Isolation, the short story collection Pretending to Say No, and the novels Pacific Agony and User.

Beautifully crafted, perceptive, sometimes shocking, and often heartbreaking stories that examine the impact of cheap international travel on modern lives and relationships A boys' weekend in Eastern Europe spirals out of control. A bleeding tourist is rescued by a stranger in downtown Toronto. A middle-aged woman vacationing in Tunisia considers the local options for love. An unemployed man shares his fantasies of a sex tour of Arizona with his long-suffering girlfriend. A woman is drawn into an impromptu but life-changing football game in the heart of the Amazon. With wit, wisdom, insight, and pathos, this collection examines men and women of all ages who, through the advent of discount air travel, play out their lives and loves across the globe. It brilliantly captures the isolation, dislocation, and occasional epiphanies of those who find themselves 1,000 miles from home, and those who long to be.

"An all-access ticket to the celebrated and wholly original mind of Mark Leyner, "one of the smartest and funniest humans since Aristophanes" (Jay McInerney). Praised as "chaotic and vibrant" (Charles Yu), "visionary" (Sam Lipsyte), and "supremely original" (John Cusack), the work of Mark Leyner has inspired a generation of contemporary novelists and has long deserved its place of recognition among the literary superstars of the seismic postmodernism-influenced movement of the early 21st century. A Shimmering, Serrated Monster!: The Mark Leyner Reader samples the staggering highlights from Leyner's extraordinary career in all of its bizarre and infatuating glory, with excerpts spanning from his groundbreaking early novels My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist (1990) and Et Tu, Babe (1992) to his modern masterpieces The Sugar-Frosted Nutsack (2012) and The Last Orgy of the Divine Hermit (2021). Appreciations from modern masters introduce each novel and the book includes original pieces in Leyner's irrepressible voice, including a timeline ("The Story So Far") and a new Afterword ("The Highlighted Passages"). This comprehensive volume is the perfect entry point for readers attracted to mind-expanding prose, and a bouquet of delights for those who have loved any of his past works"--

What an Impact! Your Shabbos table will never be the same after picking up this book, guaranteed! Shabbos Table Impact features short, powerful stories corresponding to each week's parsha; this fifth in the Impact series is full of humorous, inspiring and thought-provoking stories perfect for your Shabbos table. The spicy, insightful comments are ideal discussion starters for your seuda, entertaining and always on the mark. For an even greater Shabbos Impact, Rabbi Kaplan shares a wealth of practical guidelines and helpful tips that will transform your Shabbos table from ordinary to extraordinary. Rabbi Kaplan renowned rebbe, educator and sought after lecturer keeps audiences worldwide spellbound with his captivating stories and lectures, presented in his inimitable, witty style. This book will give you a sampling and have you eagerly anticipating more.

With this, his famous inaugural collection of stories, Max Apple dives into the mainstream of American culture, and his unfailingly wry depictions of the forces that drive this great nation (greed, lust, perfection, ice cream) make his stories exciting, frightening, and eternally new.

The White Man in the Tree is a comedy of cultural misunderstandings set in the Caribbean, New York, and Paris, a novella and eight stories about people who, because of their differences, misjudge each other. Whether it is a sophisticated European filmmaker, an ambitious young black Haitian woman, a promising politician obsessed with women's feet, or a fish-out-of-water rabbi in search of a kosher chicken in Curaçao, each of Kurlansky's characters engages us with impulses and interactions that are by turns comic, insightful, and poignant. The White Man in the Tree is an affectionate portrait of a unique society, where Europe, America, Africa, and Asia meet Latin America.

Since publishing his first collection in the eighties, John J. Clayton has continued to write "powerful stories of urban life in America, of life often enough among Jews who carry their exile and their wilderness within them. The prose is powerful, an impressive mixture of sinuous sentences--which one reads as if one overhears thoughts. All of these characters are bruised. They are often enough triumphant, though, even if locked into mortal flesh, because they have an astonishing belief in the spirit" (Fredrick Busch). We are pleased to be publishing the definitive collection of Clayton's remarkable stories. Included are two previously published collections, Bodies of the Rich and Radiance: Ten Stories , together with a selection of previously uncollected stories, and a large collection of new stories, Wrestling with Angels , plus an introduction to his work by the author.