Short stories and a scene from a play.

When Olivia, wild-haired and headstrong, makes a terrible mistake, she must turn to the person least likely to help—her mother, Elaine. Motherhood was a role that Elaine never embraced and her best never amounted to much. But now Olivia faces prosecution for a naïve connection to a drug deal and she needs Elaine more than ever. As the days count down and Olivia's future hangs in the balance, Elaine must decide just how much she is willing to give for a second chance with her daughter. "A powerhouse novel of complex emotions so compelling that when I finished the book, I started over again."—Amy Tan

They are two sworn enemies with a single obsession: a woman on the run from them both. Scott Weiss is a private detective. John Foy is a professional killer. The woman is Julie Wyant, a hooker with the face of an angel. Julie spent one night with Foy--a night of psychopathic cruelty that Foy called love. Desperate to get away from him, she vanished without a trace. And Foy wants her back. There's only one man who can find her: Weiss, the best locate operative in the business. She's begged him not to look for her, fearing he'll bring the killer in his wake. But Weiss can't stay away. Now, from a town called Paradise, through a wilderness that feels like hell, Weiss searches for Julie--and the killer follows, waiting for his chance. They are two expert hunters matching move for move--until it ends on Damnation Street.

Follow sixteen-year-old Faith Duckle in this audacious and darkly funny tale as she moves through the difficult journey from the schoolyard to the harlequin world of the circus. At fifteen, Faith was lured under the bleachers by a bunch of boys at a football game and raped. Now, almost a year later, a newly thin Faith is haunted by her past, and by the cruel, flippant ghost of her formerly fat self, who is bent on revenge. This quest for retribution eventually compels Faith to violence, forcing her to flee home in search of the only friend she has -- a troubled but caring busboy named Charlie, who is the lover of a sideshow performer -- and to tumble into the colorful, transient world of the circus. But as she leaves her old life behind and dives headfirst into a world of adult passions and dreams, mercurial allegiances, and exhilarating self-discovery (while paying considerable dues with a shovel in the elephant tent), Faith ultimately begins to discover who she is and all that she is capable of. Wonder When You'll Miss Me combines tender wit with page-turning energy and characters as original as they are memorable. By turns harrowing and poignant, lyrical and hilarious, it is a vibrant, compelling novel readers won't forget.

In her delightful reimagining of A Midsummer’s Night Dream , Amanda Craig slyly serves up a witty cross-cultural farce, a modern-day tale of love and lies set against the magical landscape of Tuscany. When Theo, a workaholic lawyer, his English wife Polly, and their two children rent an idyllic Italian villa, they expect a relaxing summer holiday together. Polly, with her loved ones’ romantic interests at heart, has invited an eccentric mix of friends and family along--including three eligible bachelors, a former model, an Indian-British divorcee with a young son, and her own appalling mother-in-law. They soon discover the Casa Luna is a strange, enchanted place where people find their heart's desire—but at a price. Everyone falls in love, though not with the people they expect, and the results are surprising and hilarious.

The acclaimed author of The Rules of Magic presents a “sexually charged...almost hypnotic”( Publishers Weekly ) novel about men, women, romance, and real life. When Teresa was a little girl, she went to sleep with dreams in her head—dreams of dark-eyed, fearless heroes on white horses who would sweep her away. Then men her mother told her about were a special breed, and someday, Teresa vowed, she would fins one of her own. But now, as the adult Teresa negotiates life and love, she begins to understand that fairy tales don't always come true—and that passion isn't always the stuff of dreams...

FIRST PUBLISHED in English in 1958, Two Women is a compassionate yet forthright narrative of simple people struggling to survive in war. The two women are Cesira, a widowed Roman shopkeeper, and her daughter Rosetta, a naive teenager of haunting beauty and devout faith. When the German occupation of Rome becomes imminent, Cesira packs a few provisions, sews her life savings into the seams of her dress, and flees with Rosetta to her native province of Ciociara, a poor, mountainous region south of Rome. Cesira's currency soon loses its value, and a vicious barter economy, fraught with shifty traffickers and thieves, emerges among the mountain peasants and refugees. Mother and daughter endure nine months of hunger, cold, and filth as they await the arrival of the Allied forces. Cesira scarcely cares who wins the war, so long as victory comes soon and brings with it a return to her quiet shopkeeper's life. Instead, the Liberation brings tragedy. While heading back to Rome the pair are attacked by a group of Allied Moroccan soldiers, who rape Rosetta and beat Cesira unconscious. This act of violence and its resulting loss of innocence so embitters Rosetta that she falls numbly into a life of prostitution. Throughout these hardships Moravia offers up an intimate portrayal of the anguish and destruction wrought by war, both on the battlefield and upon those far from the fray.

Abraham Geiger's magnum opus provides a comprehensive history of Judaism from its biblical roots to the 19th century. Geiger was a pioneering scholar of Jewish studies and an instrumental figure in the development of Reform Judaism. This book remains an essential resource for scholars and lay readers alike seeking to deepen their knowledge of Jewish history and tradition. 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 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. 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.

Now in his mid-thirties, Nathan Zuckerman, a would-be recluse despite his newfound fame as a bestselling author, ventures onto the streets of Manhattan in the final year of the turbulent sixties. Not only is he assumed by his fans to be his own fictional satyr, Gilbert Carnovsky (" Hey, you do all that stuff in that book?" ), but he also finds himself the target of admonishers, advisers, and sidewalk literary critics. The recent murders of Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., lead an unsettled Zuckerman to wonder if " target" may be more than a figure of speech. In Zuckerman Unbound-- the second volume of the trilogy and epilogue "Zuckerman Bound"-- the notorious novelist Nathan Zuckerman retreats from his oldest friends, breaks his marriage to a virtuous woman, and damages, perhaps irreparably, his affectionate connection to his younger brother...and all because of his great good fortune!

"Of all the characters in modern Jewish fiction, the most beloved is Tevye, the buoyant, compassionate, philosophical, Bible-quoting dairyman whose life embodies the precarious existence of a Jew in Eastern Europe. Three of Tevye's daughters are well known from the musical and film Fiddler on the Roof. Here the story continues with the tales of his younger daughters, Schprintze and Beilke" --back cover.

On the road with the Blank Generation, Go Now takes readers on a wild trip across the country and into the head of a down-on-his-luck punk musician. Billy, a burnt-out, drug- and sex-addicted punk musician, sets out with his erstwhile French girlfriend, Chrissa, on a cross-country writing assignment that turns into a ricocheting, brain-searing, agonizing head trip.

The World of the Talmud by Morris Adler is a comprehensive guide to the history and teachings of the Talmud. The book covers the origins of the Talmud, the development of its teachings, and its impact on Jewish culture and society. Adler provides a detailed analysis of the Talmud's structure, language, and themes, as well as its relationship to other Jewish texts and traditions. The book also explores the Talmud's influence on Jewish law, ethics, and philosophy, and its relevance to contemporary issues facing the Jewish community. With its clear and accessible style, The World of the Talmud is a valuable resource for anyone interested in Jewish history, religion, and culture.Contents: Attempting a Definition; The Rise of the Oral Law; Why Oral? The Mishna; The Gemara; Halacha and Aggada (Law and Lore); Who Were the Rabbis? The Religion of the Rabbis; Aspects of Rabbinic Social Teaching; On Justice and Courts; The Denials of Rabbinic Teaching; The Enduring Worth of the Talmud.This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the old original and may contain some imperfections such as library marks and notations. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions, that are true to their original work.

When We Were Romans is a haunting psychological novel and another masterful work from the author of the prize–winning English Passengers . Nine-year-old Lawrence is the man of his family. He watches over his mother and his willful little sister Jemima. He is the one who keeps order, especially when his mother decides they must leave their life in England behind because of threats from Lawrence's father. But their new life in Rome does not go as planned. Short of money and living off of his mother's old friends—all who seem to doubt her story—Lawrence soon realizes that things are not what they seem.

My Secrets Joan Collins

Gus Washington, a 1970s descendant of the famous traitor George Washington in this alternative history, redeems his family's name by engineering a tunnel from England to the colonies in America.

“In these 35 stories, one struggles to find a sentence that is anything less than jewel–box perfect.” — The New York Times Book Review Gina Berriault is known for the complexity and compassion with which she weaves her characters, and her stories are such models of economy that they seem almost telepathic. In this reissue of her collected stories—twenty years after its first publication—with a new introduction by renowned author and devoted Berriault advocate Peter Orner—we see the deft hand of this well–loved master of the short story at its best. Berriault employs her vital sensibility—sometimes subtly ironic and sometimes achingly raw—to touch on the inevitability of suffering and the nature of individuality, daring to see into the essence of our predicaments. What moves us? What dictates our behavior? What alters us? Her writing is spare, evanescent, pulsing with life and shimmering with life's strange hope. Her stories illustrate the depth of her emotional understanding. “Half the women in the world are right now in bed, theirs or somebody else's, whether it's night or day, whether they want to be or not...” With Women in Their Beds, Berriault's prose—moving, honest, and wise—achieves a mastery of the short story form that was in evidence every step of her long career. She was a completely modern writer, blessed with an exquisite sense of the potency of words and the ability to create moments of empathy that are both disturbing and mysteriously amusing.

Raphael Lipkin is a man obsessed. He hears voices. He talks to ghosts. He is spending the summer at the Mountain Clinic, a psychiatric hospital in upstate New York--not as a patient, but as a visiting professional with a secret, personal quest.A professor of literature and a Holocaust survivor, Raphael, having rebuilt his life since the war, sees it on the verge of coming apart once more. He longs to talk to Pedro, the man who rescued him as a fifteen-year-old orphan from postwar Poland and brought him to Paris, becoming his friend, mentor, hero, and savior. But Pedro disappeared inside the prisons of Stalin's Russia shortly after the war. Where is Pedro now, and how can Raphael discern what is true and what is false without him?

Kevin is a thirtysomething homebody, happily committed to his hydroponics-expert girlfriend, Amber, as they grow weed in their basement in Vancouver. Out of the blue, Amber announces that she has been selected for a reality show where she will compete for one of two seats on the first human-led mission to Mars. If selected, she must stay on Mars for good, because the technology to come home doesn'[Bokinfo]

Deborah Eisenberg is almost unmatched in her mastery of the short story form. In this, her seventh collection, she demonstrates her virtuosic abilities in precisely distilled, unflinchingly honest studies of human connection and disconnection. From a group of friends whose luxurious Manhattan sublet becomes a front-row seat to the catastrophe of 9/11; to the Roman holiday of a schoolteacher running away from the news of her ex-husband's life-threatening illness; to the too painful love of a brother for his schizophrenic sister, Eisenberg evokes painful and tender truths, both poetic and deeply political. 'The stories are, in their masterly crosshatching of light and dark, concentrated bursts of perfection’ The Times ‘Wonderful . . . written with a ruthless, compassionate eye and a subtle humour' Guardian ‘Further confirms her reputation as one of the most imaginative and exquisitely perceptive of today’s short story writers' Scotland on Sunday 'She makes you smile as much as she haunts with stark truths . . . In the US, many people consider Eisenberg to be up there with Alice Munro, the female monarch of the short-story form. It’s time the UK considered putting her up there too’ Financial Times

Deborah Eisenberg is nearly unmatched in her mastery of the short story form. Now, in her newest collection, she demonstrates once again her virtuosic abilities in precisely distilled, perfectly shaped studies of human connection and disconnection. From a group of friends whose luck in acquiring a luxurious Manhattan sublet turns to disaster as their balcony becomes a front-row seat to the catastrophe of 9/11; to the Roman holiday of a schoolteacher running away from the news of her ex-husband's life-threatening illness, and her unlikely guide, a titled art scout in desperate revolt against his circumstances and aging; to the too painful love of a brother for his schizophrenic sister, whose tragic life embitters him to the very idea of family, Eisenberg evokes, in brooding passionate and brilliant prose, a brutally honest portrait of our lives today, showing us truths which are both poetic and deeply political. 'Like Alice Munro, virtually her only equal in the field, Deborah Eisenberg seems incapable of writing a bad short story . . . Eisenberg's writing at times approaches the beauty of a line of poetry. She manipulates her readers with a master's blend of humor and poignancy. Her stories are wondrous' San Francisco Chronicle