Dorothy Parker ( 1893 to 1967) was an American poet and satirist, best known for her wit, wisecracks, and eye for 20th century urban foibles. From a conflicted and unhappy childhood, Parker rose to acclaim, both for her literary output in such venues as The New Yorker and as a founding member of the Algonquin Round Table. Following the breakup of the circle, Parker traveled to Hollywood to pursue screenwriting. Her successes there, including two Academy Award nominations, were curtailed as her involvement in left wing politics led to a place on the infamous Hollywood blacklist. Parker went through three marriages (two to the same man) and survived several suicide attempts, but grew increasingly dependent on alcohol. Dismissive of her own talents, she deplored her reputation as a "wisecracker". Nevertheless, her literary output and reputation for her sharp wit have endured. She sold her first poem to Vanity Fair magazine in 1914 and, some months later, she was hired as an editorial assistant for another Condé Nast magazine, Vogue. She moved to Vanity Fair as a staff writer following two years at Vogue. In 1917, married a Wall Street stock broker, Edwin Pond Parker II but they were separated by his army service in World War I. She had ambivalent feelings about her Jewish heritage given the strong antisemitism of that era and joked that she married to escape her name. In the 1920s alone she published some 300 poems and free verses in outlets including the aforementioned Vanity Fair, Vogue, "The Conning Tower" and The New Yorker along with Life, McCall's and The New Republic. She published her first volume of poetry, Enough Rope, a collection of previously published work along with new material in 1926. The collection sold 47,000 copies]and garnered impressive reviews. The Nation described her verse as "caked with a salty humor, rough with splinters of disillusion, and tarred with a bright black authenticity."

"Why are we all so hostile? So quick to take offence? Truly we are living in the age of outrage. A series of apparently random murders draws amiable, old-school Detective Mick Matlock into a world of sex, politics, reality TV and a bewildering kaleidoscope of opposing identity groups. Lost in a blizzard of hashtags, his already complex investigation is further impeded by the fact that he simply doesn't 'get' a single thing about anything anymore. Meanwhile, each day another public figure confesses to having 'misspoken' and prostrates themselves before the judgement of Twitter. Begging for forgiveness, assuring the public 'that is not who I am'. But if nobody is who they are anymore - then who the f**k are we? Ben Elton returns with a blistering comic satire of the world as it fractures around us. Get ready for a roller-coaster thriller, where nothing - and no one - is off limits."--Provided by publisher.

The first female Conservative rabbi in the U.S. reflects on ancient Jewish traditions as a guide to reconciliation and peacebuilding in our lives, our communities, and our world.

'Brisk, smart, witty, elliptical ... Recalls the directors of the New Wave ... Bracing and brilliant' Independent When Patrick Modiano was awarded the 2014 Nobel Prize for Literature he was praised for using the 'art of memory' to bring to life the Occupation of Paris during the Second World War. Born in 1945, Modiano's brilliant, angry writings burst onto the Parisian literary scene and caused a storm. His first, ferociously satirical novel, La Place de l'Étoile , was remarkable in seriously questioning both Nazi collaboration in France and the myths of the Gaullist era. The Night Watch tells the story of a man caught between his work for the French Gestapo and for a Resistance cell. Ring Roads recounts a son's search for his Jewish father, who disappeared ten years previously. These brilliant, almost hallucinatory, evocations of the Occupation attempt to exorcise the past by exploring the morally ambiguous worlds of collaboration and resistance.

"Schiffrin evokes the bittersweet tang of emigre life in New York." --The New York Times Book Review Andre Schiffrin was born the son of one of France's most esteemed publishers, in a world peopled by some of the day's leading writers and intellectuals, such as Andre Gide, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Antoine de Saint-Exupery. But this world was torn apart when the Nazis marched into Paris on young Andre's fifth birthday. Beginning with the family's dramatic escape to Casablanca--thanks to the help of the legendary Varian Fry--and eventually New York, A Political Education recounts the surprising twists and turns of a life that saw Schiffrin become, himself, one of the world's most respected publishers. Emerging from the emigre community of wartime New York (a community that included his father's friends Hannah Arendt and Helen and Kurt Wolff), he would go on to develop an insatiable appetite for literature and politics: heading a national student group he renamed the Students for a Democratic Society--the SDS. leading student groups at European conferences, once, as an unwitting front man for the CIA. and eventually being appointed by Random House chief Bennett Cerf to head the very imprint cofounded by his father--Pantheon. There, he would discover and publish some of the world's leading writers, including Noam Chomsky, Michel Foucault, Art Spiegelman, Studs Terkel, and Marguerite Duras. But in a move that would make headlines, Schiffrin would ultimately rebel at corporate ownership and form his own publishing house--The New Press--where he would go on to set a new standard for independent publishing. A Political Education is a fascinating intellectual memoir that tells not only the story of a unique and important figure, but of the tumultuous political times that shaped him. From the Hardcover edition"--

The story is set in a future world where humanity is struggling with the threat of a deadly plague known as "wolfbane." The plague is highly contagious and causes severe physical and psychological symptoms, leaving society in a state of fear and desperation. The plot centers on a scientist named Dr. Vickers who is working on a potential cure for the plague. As he and his team work tirelessly to develop a vaccine, they face numerous challenges, including bureaucratic obstacles, limited resources, and the social chaos caused by the pandemic. Dr. Vickers discovers a potential breakthrough but faces a moral and ethical dilemma regarding the distribution and use of the cure. The story explores themes of scientific responsibility, the impact of disease on society, and the difficult choices that arise in the face of a global crisis.

This book has been considered by academicians and scholars of great significance and value to literature. This forms a part of the knowledge base for future generations. So that the book is never forgotten we have represented this book in a print format as the same form as it was originally first published. Hence any marks or annotations seen are left intentionally to preserve its true nature.

"Selected by Cynthia Ozick from a dozen books written across more than fifty years, the essays and short stories gathered here constitute a summing-up of her remarkable literary career. In such classic essays as 'Who Owns Anne Frank?,' 'What Helen Keller Saw,' 'Dostoevsky's Unabomber,' and 'Transcending the Kafkaesque,' Ozick examines some of the world's most illustrious writers and their work, tackles compelling contemporary literary and moral issues, and looks into the wellsprings of her own lifelong engagement with literature. In her short stories, including 'A Hebrew Sibyl,' 'What Happened to the Baby?,' 'Dictation,' 'The Biographer's Hat,' and 'The Conversion of the Jews,' Ozick demonstrates again and again her stylistic brilliance and the originality of her distinctive interweaving of the strands of history and myth." -

"The literature of the twenty-first century will belong to Neuman." —Roberto Bolaño Searching for an inn, the enigmatic traveler Hans stops in a small city on the border between Saxony and Prussia. The next morning, Hans meets an old organ-grinder in the market square and immediately finds himself enmeshed in an intense debate—on identity and what it is that defines us—from which he cannot break free. Indefinitely stuck in Wandernburg until his debate with the organ-grinder is concluded, he begins to meet the various characters who populate the town, including a young freethinker named Sophie. Though she is engaged to be married, Sophie and Hans begin a relationship that defies contemporary mores about female sexuality and what can and cannot be said about it. Traveler of the Century is a deeply intellectual novel, chock-full of discussions about philosophy, history, literature, love, and translation. It is a book that looks to the past in order to have us reconsider the conflicts of our present. The winner of Spain's prestigious Alfaguara Prize and the National Critics Prize, Traveler of the Century marks the English-language debut of Andrés Neuman, a writer described by Roberto Bolaño as being "touched by grace."

A wry, thought-provoking fictional portrayal of ten pivotal weeks in the life of Leon Trotsky, inspired by the Russian revolutionary's exile in New York City in 1917, by the New York Times bestselling author of The Company January 12, 1917: An ocean liner docks in New York Harbor. Among the disembarking emigrants is one Lev Davidovich Bronshtein—better known by his nom de guerre, Leon Trotsky. Bronshtein has been on the run for a decade, driven from his beloved Russia after escaping political exile in Siberia. He lives for—and is ready to sacrifice his life for—a workers’ revolution, at any cost. But is he ready to become an American? In the weeks leading up to the February Revolution that will eventually see Lenin’s Bolsheviks seize power, Bronshtein haunts the streets, newspaper offices, and socialist watering holes of New York City, wrestling with the difficult questions of his personal revolutionary ideology, his place in his own family, his relationship to Lenin, and, above all, his conscience. Master of the espionage novel Robert Littell brings to life the world-famous revolutionist’s sojourn in the Bronx in this extraordinary meditation on purpose, passion, and the price of progress.

Atlit is a holding camp for "illegal" immigrants in Israel in 1945. There, about 270 men and women await their future and try to recover from their past. Diamant, with infinite compassion and understanding, tells the stories of the women gathered in this place. Shayndel is a Polish Zionist who fought the Germans with a band of partisans. Leonie is a Parisian beauty. Tedi is Dutch, a strapping blond who wants only to forget. Zorah survived Auschwitz. Haunted by unspeakable memories and too many losses to bear, these young women, along with a stunning cast of supporting characters who work in or pass through Atlit, begin to find salvation in the bonds of friendship and shared experience, as they confront the challenge of re-creating themselves and discovering a way to live again.

An anthology of classic and modern selections of poetry, fiction, and drama, representing the great masters of world literature, with each selection followed by critical commentary and analysis

Venice for Lovers is a memorable collaboration by two fine stylists who have fashioned their own personal homages to Venice, one with a novella, the other with a personal essay. Every year for all the thirty they have been married, Begley and Muhlstein have escaped to Venice to write. In her contribution to the book, Muhlstein charmingly describes how she and her husband dine at the same restaurant every night for years on end, and how becoming friends with restaurateurs has been an unsurpassed means of getting to know the city and its inhabitants, far from the tourists in San Marco Square. In his short novella, Begley writes a story of falling in love with--and in--Venice. His twenty-year-old protagonist, enamored with an older, far worldlier woman of twenty-seven, is lured by her to the City of Water, only to be unceremoniously dumped and left to fend for himself after a brief rendezvous. But he discovers a lasting love for Venice itself--not an uncommon romance, as Begley's brilliant literary essay on the city's place within world literature demonstrates: Henry James, Marcel Proust, and Thomas Mann were all illustrious predecessors.

The Divine Comedy (Italian: Divina Commedia [diˈviːna komˈmɛːdja]) is a long Italian narrative poem by Dante Alighieri, begun c. 1308 and completed in 1320, a year before his death in 1321. It is widely considered to be the pre-eminent work in Italian literature and one of the greatest works of world literature. The poem's imaginative vision of the afterlife is representative of the medieval world-view as it had developed in the Western Church by the 14th century. It helped establish the Tuscan language, in which it is written, as the standardized Italian language. It is divided into three parts: Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso.

Until recently, women have been noticeably absent from historical and sociological accounts of modernity. As a step toward remedying this situation, the essays gathered here challenge the continuing separation of sociological from textual analysis in cultural (and feminist) theory and inquiry. They address critically the question of women's writing, exploring the idea that women may begin to define their own lives and construct their own identities in a patriarchal culture through the very process of writing. They also present a cogent defense of a feminist cultural politics, including a politics of the body. Integrating material drawn from a variety of sources--feminist theory, cultural and literary analysis, sociology, and art history-- Feminine Sentences is an original discussion of women's relationship to modern and postmodern culture. Janet Wolff's book represents a major statement of her distinctive position, and will be of interest to everyone working in the areas of cultural and literary theory, women's studies, and sociology. FROM THE BOOK: "Women . . . are sentenced to containment and silence. . . . This collection is intended as a contribution to the overthrow of that 'sentence,' and to the process whereby women find ways to intervene in an excluding culture, and to articulate their own experience. Feminine sentences are those formulations and expressions, in a variety of cultural forms and media, of women's own voice." "The literature of modernity describes the experience of men. It is essentially a literature about transformations in the public world and its associated consciousness. . . . In so far as the experience of 'the modern' occurred mainly in the public sphere, it was primarily men's experience." "I want to argue that a feminist cultural politics of the body is a possibility. . . . There is every reason . . . to propose the body as a privileged site of political intervention, precisely because it is the site of repression and possession."

Product Description Journeys beyond the Pale is the first book to examine how Yiddish writers, from Mendele Moycher Sforim to Der Nister to the famed Sholem Aleichem, used motifs of travel to express their complicated relationship with modernization. The story of the Jews of the Pale of settlement encompasses current-day Russia, the Ukraine, Belarus, and Poland. Review "This book is deliciously subversive. Garrett demonstrates that the major writers in Yiddish, a language without its own territory, wrote as if their Jewish subjects lived and traveled freely at the center of the world; not on its margins, not in a ghetto, not in a valorized state of exile."—David G. Roskies, Jewish Theological Seminary "Garrett’s work goes a long way towards conceptualizing and analyzing a phenomenon omnipresent in Yiddish short stories, novels, poetry, and drama, combining theoretical considerations of the journey in general and specific, nuanced readings of Jewish journeys in particular."—Jeremy Dauber, Columbia University "This kind of scholarship is vital for the further progress in Yiddish studies and its integration into the mainstream humanities."—Mikhail Krutikov, Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and author of Yiddish Fiction and the Crisis of Modernity, 1905–1914 From the Back Cover "This book is deliciously subversive. Garrett demonstrates that the major writers in Yiddish, a language without its own territory, wrote as if their Jewish subjects lived and traveled freely at the center of the world; not on its margins, not in a ghetto, not in a valorized state of exile."-David G. Roskies, Jewish Theological Seminary "Garrett's work goes a long way towards conceptualizing and analyzing a phenomenon omnipresent in Yiddish short stories, novels, poetry, and drama, combining theoretical considerations of the journey in general and specific, nuanced readings of Jewish journeys in particular."-Jeremy Dauber, Columbia University "This kind of scholarship is vital for the further progress in Yiddish studies and its integration into the mainstream humanities."-Mikhail Krutikov, Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies and author of Yiddish Fiction and the Crisis of Modernity, 1905-1914 About the Author Leah V. Garrett is assistant professor of Judaic studies and English literature at the University of Denver, Colorado.

"In The Kingdom of Cain, crime novelist, screenwriter, and cultural critic Andrew Klavan explores how artists' imaginative engagement with the evil of murder in film and literature can point us to ways of living honestly, beautifully, and even joyfully in a dark world"--

The papers in this book represent a unique integration of Jewish history and classics. They tackle from different angles the extent to which Jews in the Graeco-Roman period differed from other peoples in the Mediterranean region, and how much Jewish evidence can be used for the history of the wider classical world. The authors make extensive use not only of types of evidence familiar to classicists, such as inscriptions and the writings of Josephus, but also Jewish religious literature, including Rabbinic texts. The various studies demonstrate that, although Jews lived to some extent apart from others with distinctive customs, in many ways their history also highlights the cultural presuppositions and preoccupations of their non-Jewish contemporaries. The book aims to encourage wider use of the Jewish evidence by classicists and will be important for all students of the classical world.

Nadine Gordimer describes this collection of her non-fiction pieces as a reflection of how I've looked at this century I've lived in. The collection of essays, articles and addresses encompass Gordimer's own evidence of the inequities of apartheid as she saw them in 1956, her account of the bans on literature still in effect in the mid-1970s, through to South Africa's emergence in 1994 as a free country. Gordimer's canvas is global and her themes are wide-ranging. She examines the impact of technology on our expanding world-view, the convergence of the moral and the political in fiction and she reassess the role of the writer in the modern world.

Described as “a continuous carnival” and “the crossroads of the world,” Times Square is a singular phenomenon: the spot where imagination and veracity intersect. To esteemed scholar and author Marshall Berman, it is also the flashing, teeming, and strangely beautiful nexus of his life. In this remarkable book, Berman takes us on a thrilling illustrated tour of Times Square, revealing a landscape both mythic and real. On the Town is a unique look through the lens of the ideas and works of art that inspired–or were inspired by–this landmark’s allure. Times Square pulses with life, drawing countless millions who long to be surrounded by too many in the midst of too much. Beyond the immense crowds, the intoxicating lights, the imposing architecture, and even the recent incursion of corporate headquarters that limn the Square’s present boundaries, there is an indefatigable humanity (and undeniable sexual tension) that, for more than a century, has nourished creative expression. Interleafing his own recollections with astute social commentary, Berman reveals how movies, graphic arts, literature, popular music, television, and, of course, the Broadway theater have reflected Times Square’s voluminous light to illuminate a vast spectrum of themes and vignettes. Berman shows us Times Square as it is seen in Alfred Eisenstadt’s iconic photography, the movies of Busby Berkeley, John Schlesinger, and Martin Scorsese, and the stage choreography of Jerome Robbins. Conversely, we see how Times Square’s distinctive aura finds its source in a stunningly diverse list of performers, writers, and impresarios, including Theodore Dreiser, Florenz Ziegfeld, Ethel Merman, Al Jolson, Bob Dylan, and Bruce Springsteen. Berman also celebrates the unsung heroes of Times Square–the artists, engineers, and hucksters behind the Square’s landmark signs that, throughout the decades, re-created raging waterfalls, blew smoke rings, bathed onlookers in the Square’s eerily welcoming light, and projected the image of what Americans want to be against a surface of who we really are. Part love letter, part revelatory semiotic exposition of a place known to all, On the Town is a nonstop excursion to the heart of American civilization, written by one of our keenest, most entertaining cultural observers.