A quartet of audacious fictions that capture the pathos and absurdity of life in the age of the internet A spectacularly talented young writer has returned from the present with Four New Messages, urgent and visionary dispatches that seek to save art, sex, and even alienation from corporatism and technology run rampant. In "Emission," a hapless drug dealer in Princeton is humiliated when a cruel co-ed exposes him exposing himself on a blog gone viral. "McDonald's" tells of a frustrated pharmaceutical copywriter whose imaginative flights fail to bring solace because of a certain word he cannot put down on paper. In "The College Borough" a father visiting NYU with his daughter remembers a former writing teacher, a New Yorker exiled to the Midwest who refuses to read his students' stories, asking them instead to build a replica of the Flatiron Building. "Sent" begins mythically in the woods of Russia, but in a few virtuosic pages plunges into the present, where an aspiring journalist finds himself in a village that shelters all the women who've starred in all the internet porn he's ever enjoyed. Highbrow and low-down, these four intensely felt stories explain what happens when the virtual begins to colonize the real -- they harness the torrential power and verbal dexterity that have established Cohen as one of America's most brilliant younger writers.

"An authoritative biography of Jozef Pilsudski, a key figure in interwar Europe regarded as the founding hero of a pluralistic and democratic modern Poland. After the first elected president was assassinated, Pilsudski lost faith in Poles' commitment to democracy, led a military coup, and ruled as a strongman, leaving a complicated legacy"--

"Reconstructing the Talmud [...] introduces the modern Talmud student to the techniques developed over the last century for uncovering how this literature developed. Opening with an extended introduction outlining the methods employed by scholars to engage in such analysis, Reconstructing the Talmud proceeds with nine examples concretely demonstrating how such methods are applied to actual passages from the Bavli. Sorting out the layers of the Bavli, understanding each layer within its cultural and historical context, and comparing it with earlier sources, reveals a dynamic world of change, debate, halakhic diversity and development far richer and more nuanced than that which is evident in the static and fixed text of the printed edition. Reconstructing the Talmud introduces the reader to the world of academic Talmudic research and opens new venues of exploration and understanding of one of the world's great literary treasures"--

Cinema has long shaped not only how mass violence is perceived but also how it is performed. Today, when media coverage is central to the execution of terror campaigns and news anchormen serve as embedded journalists, a critical understanding of how the moving image is implicated in the imaginations and actions of perpetrators and survivors of violence is all the more urgent. If the cinematic image and mass violence are among the defining features of modernity, the former is significantly implicated in the latter, and the nature of this implication is the book's central focus. This edited anthology brings together a range of newly commissioned essays and interviews from the world's leading academics and documentary filmmakers, including Ben Anderson, Errol Morris, Harun Farocki, Rithy Phan, Avi Mograbi, Brian Winston, and Michael Chanan.

A generous selection of poems by Hans Arp, Bertolt Brecht, Gunter Grass, Wilhelm Lehmann, Gottfried Benn, Yvan Goll, Nelly Sachs, Peter Huchel, Gunter Eich, Christine Lavant, Joannes Bobrowski, Paul Celan, Helmut Heissenbuttel, Ernst Jandl, Ingeborg Bachmann, Hans Magnus Enzensberger, and Gunter Kunert, printed in German, with an Introduction in English.

What is the current state of English law? Who are our judges, and who appoints them? How good is the jury system? Do our courts deliver justice? What should be the relations between government and the legal profession?

"The book of Anna is written in the voice of Anna Asher, a fictional Czech-German Jew who spent her adolescence in a concentration camp and now lives in 1950s Prague answering phones for the secret police. This genre-defying book of prose diary entries and autobiographical poems offers intimate glimpses of Anna's present--her writing process, relationships with neighbors, obsessive sexual behavior, chain-smoking, and idiosyncratic exploration of Jewish tradition--while the poems recount her unsparing efforts to reckon with horror, survival, and their aftermath. Written in the midst of Joy Ladin's gender transition, this book asks provocative questions about the meaning of trauma, gender, suffering and empathy that speak to our current historical moment in haunting and indelible ways"--

Sexual Studies, Social Studies

Is Faith Darwin Asbury really Grace Paley? Or is it coincidental that the personal history, politics, and relationships of the fictional Asbury seem to mirror those of the well-known author? And do other characters in Paley's stories represent individuals she has known, in scenes and entire episodes she has experienced? A writer who translates her life into art not only saves her own life, according to Paley, but offers others the revelation of its meaning. That idea is at the core of Judith Arcana's biographical reading of this strongly autobiographical writer. Grace Paley's Life Stories interweaves details about Paley with critical discussions of her works, examining her as a woman, mother, activist, and Jew. Arcana visited and interviewed Paley at her homes in Vermont and New York over a period of several years. She also interviewed Paley's family, friends, and colleagues. Such extensive research is unmatched in Paley scholarship; Arcana's focus on the political crucible of Paley's consciousness is rare in contemporary literary criticism.

"Eugenio Zolli is a prophet for our time, charged with asking a single question: Why? This question was a grace from God that set him off on his course as a scholar and a mystic. In trying to explore the missing link between the Old and New Testament, he discovered the love of God for all humanity. In this way, his life experience led him to an accomplishment in Jesus Christ, in itself a prophecy of the New World mentioned in the Holy Scripture"--

Points out that a woman who likes numbers, figures things out precisely, and can see things in her head, has some of the skills needed to be an engineer.

485 page hardcover 9 1/2 x 6 1/2 approximate, 3 page center photos in black and white.Cofounder and director of The Living Theatre.

one in a series from nesfa of alder sf writers

Rare Book

Armchair fiction presents extra large paperback editions of the best in classic science fiction novels. “The Tomorrow People,” was penned by well known author, Judith Merrill, who spins a chilling sci-fi tale. Something on Mars was killing people! An ill-fated expedition to the Red Planet vanished without so much as a trace. On another expedition, only one man came back alive. That man was Johnny Wendt, and he was the only man to ever set foot on Mars and return to tell about it. His knowledge could prove to be decisive in the desperate East-West race for outer space superiority. Unfortunately, Johnny Wendt didn’t know just exactly what it was that made Mars a death trap…and he didn’t know that he’d brought it back with him!

The following essays deal with antisemitism:

Book by Judith rossner

This first large-scale empirical work on the adjustment problems of immigrants in Israel is now updated with a new introduction by the author and a preface by Alex Weingrod. The extraordinary phenomenon of worldwide immigration to Israel has made this searching study of people in transit possible. "Immigrants on the Threshold" reports on the attitudes and behaviors of almost 2,000 people from twenty countries during their first year in Israel during the early years of mass migration. It is of particular interest as the phenomenon of integration becomes an issue for concern in many other parts of the world. "Immigrants on the Threshold" by Judith Shuval presents a theoretical framework closely intermeshed with rich empirical findings. No other work in this field approaches this study in either depth of theoretical analysis or in design and execution of data collection performed by conducting in-depth interviews and then using statistical analysis to quantify results in exacting and objective detail. It attempts to answer a number of critical questions: What factors in the immigrants' past and present condition their responses to the strain of transit? What is the role of commitment to the goal of the new society into which they must incorporate? What is the role of different social and economic backgrounds in determining patterns of acculturation? What factors affect the aspirations and mobility patterns of immigrants? The answers to these questions - the hypotheses formulated and the conclusions reached in "Immigrants on the Threshold" - contribute substantially to the fields of both sociology and social psychology. These answers, and the methods used to reach them, should be of interest to anyone in these fields and the field of applied social research, as well as those interested in Israel and questions of immigrant integration.

This eighth volume in the Studies of Israeli Society series presents a broad array of topics related to the sociology of immigration to Israel. The focus is on immigration and migration during the 1980s and 1990s. The chapters were selected from a list of approximately 450 articles on the subject by Israeli sociologists. The book covers such issues as migrants in the occupational structure; migration and health; formal and informal mechanisms of integration; ethnic identities and processes of integration; and processes of migration and their implications.