What is a woman? What is a man? How do they—and how should they—relate to each other? Does our yearning for "wholeness" refer to something real, and if there is a Whole, what is it, and why do we feel so estranged from it? For centuries now, art and literature have increasingly valorized uniqueness and self-sufficiency. The theoreticians who loom so large within contemporary thought also privilege difference over similarity. Silverman reminds us that this is but half the story, and a dangerous half at that, for if we are all individuals, we are doomed to be rivals and enemies. A much older story, one that prevailed through the early modern era, held that likeness or resemblance was what organized the universe, and that everything emerges out of the same flesh. Silverman shows that analogy, so discredited by much of twentieth-century thought, offers a much more promising view of human relations. In the West, the emblematic story of turning away is that of Orpheus and Eurydice, and the heroes of Silverman's sweeping new reading of nineteenth- and twentieth-century culture, the modern heirs to the old, analogical view of the world, also gravitate to this myth. They embrace the correspondences that bind Orpheus to Eurydice and acknowledge their kinship with others past and present. The first half of this book assembles a cast of characters not usually brought together: Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Marcel Proust, Lou-Andréas Salomé, Romain Rolland, Rainer Maria Rilke, Wilhelm Jensen, and Paula Modersohn-Becker. The second half is devoted to three contemporary artists, whose works we see in a moving new light:Terrence Malick, James Coleman, and Gerhard Richter.

Symposium of the Whole traces a discourse on poetry and culture that has profoundly influenced the art of our time, with precedents going back two centuries and more. Beginning with a reassertion of the complexity of poetry among peoples long labeled “primitive” and “savage,” many recent poets have sought to base a new poetics over the fullest range of human cultures. The attempt to define an ethnopoetics has been significantly connected with the most experimental and future-directed side of Romantic and modern poetry, both in the Western world and, increasingly, outside it. As a visionary poetics and as a politics, this complex redefinition of cultural and intellectual values has involved a rarely acknowledged collaboration between poets and scholars, who together have challenged the narrow view of literature that has excluded so many traditions. In this gathering, the Rothenbergs follow the idea of an ethnopoetics from predecessors such as Vico, Blake, Thoreau, and Tzara to more recent essays and manifestos by poets and social thinkers such as Olson, Eliade, Snyder, Turner, and Baraka. The themes range widely, from the divergence of oral and written cultures to the shaman as proto-poet and the reemergence of suppressed and rejected forms and images: the goddess, the trickster, and the “human universe.” The book’s three ethnographic sections demonstrate how various poetries are structured and composed, how they reflect meaning and worldview, and how they are performed in cultures where all art may be thought of as art-in-motion. Among the poetries discussed are the language of magic; West African drum language and poetry; the Huichol Indian language of reversals; chance operations in African divination poetry; picture-writings and action-writings from Australia and Africa; and American Indian sacred-clown dramas and traditional trickster narratives. The cumulative effect is a new reading of the poetic past and present—in the editors’ words, “a changed paradigm of what poetry was or now could come to be.”

Henri Bergson’s Laughter, An Essay on the Meaning of the Comicis an essential read for scholars, academics, and students of philosophy. Through an examination of the psychological and physiological effects of laughter, Bergson argues that the comic arises from the perception of incongruity and mechanical inelasticity in the human world. Drawing on a range of sources, including philosophy, science, and literature, Bergson’s work offers a comprehensive and compelling exploration of the nature of comedy. Laughter, An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic is an invaluable resource for those interested in the philosophical, psychological, and sociological implications of humor. This edition is based on the 1911 translations by Cloudesley Brereton (1863-1937) and Fred Rothwell (1869-1934). Henri Bergson (18 October 1859 – 4 January 1941) was a French philosopher who was one of the most influential thinkers of the early 20th century. His work focused on the nature of time and memory and how they influence the human experience. He developed a unique philosophical approach, combining elements of philosophical idealism, realism, and pragmatism. Although his ideas were initially met with skepticism, they gained wide acceptance throughout the philosophical community. Bergson is best known for his two major works, Matter and Memory (1896) and Creative Evolution (1907). He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1927 for his contributions to philosophy. Bergson was born in Paris, France, to an affluent Jewish family. He was educated at the Lycee Condorcet and the Ecole Normale Superieure. After graduating, he began teaching philosophy at the University of Paris, where he quickly developed a reputation as an innovative and influential thinker. He argued that time and memory could not be understood through the traditional methods of scientific analysis and proposed a new approach to understanding the human experience. Bergson's philosophy was based on the concept of durée, or "duration," which argued that time and memory are inseparable, and that time is experienced differently by each individual. He also argued that memory is a creative force, allowing individuals to make choices based on their past experiences. His theories have had a lasting impact on the fields of psychology and philosophy, particularly in the areas of phenomenology and existentialism. Bergson's work has been the subject of numerous books and essays, and his influence has been felt across a variety of disciplines, including literature, film, and anthropology.

Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1966, S. Y. Agnon is considered the towering genius of modern Hebrew literature for his hard-edged modernism and soft-hued imagery. With this new collection of stories, the English-speaking audience has, at long last, access to the rich and brilliantly multifaceted fictional world of one of the great writers of this century. These stories span the lifetime of a quintessential wandering Jew - born in Buczacz, Poland, living in Germany, and finally settling in Jerusalem - and they bring to life the full gamut of the modern Jewish experience in fiction. This broad selection of Agnon's fiction introduces the full sweep of the writer's panoramic vision as chronicler of the lost world of Eastern European Jewry and the emerging society of modern Israel. Here are stories that portray the richly textured culture of traditional Jewish life in Poland, as well as changes in the life of the community over time. Several stories reflect on the Jewish infatuation with German and Western culture in the interwar period: "On the Road," for example, narrates an eerie encounter on the eve of a holy day between an itinerant Jew and a ghostly company of martyred Jews from the Crusades. The early years of Jewish settlement in the land of Israel are recalled in "Hill of Sand," which is also a revealing portrait of the artist as a young man; "A Book That Was Lost" is a powerful metaphor for the writer's own journey from Buczacz to Jerusalem.

"The House of Twenty Thousand Books is journalist Sasha Abramsky's elegy to the vanished intellectual world of his grandparents, Chimen and Miriam, and their vast library of socialist literature and Jewish history. A rare book dealer and self-educated polymath who would go on to teach at Oxford and consult for Sotheby's, Chimen Abramsky drew great writers and thinkers like Isaiah Berlin and Eric Hobsbawm to his north London home; his library grew from his abiding passion for books and his search for an enduring ideology. The books, documents, and manuscripts that covered every shelf at 5 Hillway were testaments to Chimen's quest -- from the Jewish orthodoxy of his boyhood, to the Communism of his youth, to the liberalism of his mature years. The House of Twenty Thousand Books is at once the story of a fascinating family and chronicle of the embattled twentieth century. The House of Twenty Thousand Books includes 43 photos. "--

The words ‘hasid’ and ‘hasidism’ have become so familiar to people interested in the Jewish world that little thought is given to understanding exactly what hasidism is or considering its spiritual and social consequences. What, for example, are the distinguishing features of hasidism? What innovations does it embody? How did its founders see it? Why did it arouse opposition? What is the essential nature of hasidic thought? What is its spiritual essence? What does its literature consist of? What typifies its leadership? What is the secret of its persistence through the centuries? How have scholars explained its origins? Is hasidism an expression of mystical ideas, or a response to changing social circumstances? What is its connection to kabbalah? To Shabateanism? To messianism? What is its relationship to the traditional structures of authority in the Jewish world? This book aims to answer all these questions in a lucid and accessible manner. Rachel Elior focuses on the fundamental positions and the factors of primary importance: the substantial issues that recur in the hasidic texts, including how hasidim have seen themselves over the centuries, how they have constructed a new spiritual and social ideal, and how that ideal has stood the test of reality. The goal is to present the main characteristics of the hasidic movement and to examine the social implications of its mystical ideas. The text is fully supported by references to the relevant hasidic sources and academic literature. The book concludes with a list of the hasidic texts on which the discussion is based and a comprehensive bibliography of scholarly works on kabbalah and hasidism.

Newly discharged from the Korean War army, reeling from his mother's recent death, freed from old attachments and hungrily seeking others, Gabe Wallach is drawn to Paul Herz, a fellow graduate student in literature, and to Libby, Paul's moody, intense wife. The anarchy caused by the Herzes' struggle with responsible adulthood and his own eager love affairs vicariously tests Gabe's desire to be connected to the ordered 'world of feeling' that he finds in books.--from publisher's description.

KQED Radio's Michael Krasny is one of the country's leading interviewers of literary luminaries, a maestro for educated listeners who prefer their discourse high and civil. He is a writer's interviewer. But it didn't start out that way. In Off Mike , Krasny, host of one of public radio's most popular and intellectually compelling programs, talks of his strong desire to become a novelist in the footsteps of Bellow and Philip Roth, and then discovering his real talent as a communicator—a deft ability to draw others out as an interlocutor. In a mix of memoir and reportage, Krasny takes readers inside his world. He gives an account of the polarizing transformation of talk radio, from his early days at KGO commercial radio, through to his current role at NPR, where he manages to keep the flow of talk in his San Francisco based show animated and politically balanced. Forum fans and lovers of literature will be riveted by the insightful and amusing vignettes and behind the scenes accounts. They will get a taste of the sharp commentary from his encounters with panels of experts, and interviews with cultural and political personalities as well as writers.

Taken from the journals of distinguished writer Leonard Michaels, Time Out of Mind chronicles the author's life as a friend, lover, husband, and father. With wrenching dramatic intensity, it captures the character and the mind of an extraordinary talent -- from his days as a struggling young writer in Greenwich Village, through the turbulent Vietnam era, to his years as a professor of English literature at Berkeley. This is an unforgettable portrait of an artist in the world -- from one of the most acclaimed authors of our time.

"It was one of history's great vanishing acts. As early as 3500 BCE, scribes in the mud-walled city-state of Sumer used a reed stylus to press tiny wedge-shaped symbols into clay. For three thousand years, the script chronicled the military conquests, scientific discoveries, and epic literature of the grand kingdoms of Mesopotamia - Assyria, Babylon, the mighty Achaemenid Empire - along with precious minutia about everyday life so long ago. But as the palaces of these once great kingdoms sank beneath the desert sands, the meaning of these characters was lost. London, 1857. Colossal sculptures of winged bulls and alabaster bas-reliefs depicting cities under siege and vassals bearing tributes to Biblical kings lined the halls of the British Museum. In the Victorian era's obsession with the triumph of human progress, the mysterious kingdoms of ancient Mesopotamia - the very cradle of civilization - had captured the public imagination. Yet Europe's best philologists struggled to decipher the strange characters. Cuneiform seemed to have thousands of symbols - with some scholars claiming each could be pronounced in up to eight, nine, even ten different ways. Others insisted they'd cracked the code and deciphered inscriptions that corresponded precisely to the Old Testament - proving the veracity of the Word of God. Was it all a hoax? A delusion? A rollicking adventure through the golden age of archaeology, The Writing on the Wall tracks the decades-long race to decipher the oldest script in the world. It's the story of a swashbuckling young archeologist, a suave British military officer, and a curmudgeonly Irish rector, all vying for glory - from the ruins of Persepolis to the opulence of Ottoman-era Baghdad - in a quest to unearth the relics of lost civilizations and unlock the secrets of humanity's past"--

"Comic verse," writes editor John Gross, "is verse that is designed to amuse--and perhaps that is as far as any attempt at a definition ought to go." In The Oxford Book of Comic Verse, Gross has combed the annals of literature in English from the middle ages to the present, gathering poems that provoke laughter, smiles, and even reflections on the human condition--but always poems that amuse. From limericks to social satire, The Oxford Book of Comic Verse offers a remarkable collection of outstanding light poetry. Gross has brought together the finest writers in the history of the English language--from Chaucer and Skelton to Shakespeare and Swift, Lord Byron to Robert Browning, Emily Dickinson to John Updike--offering delightful examples of their comic verse. Many of these lines dance with whimsy, such as John Skelton's Colin Clout ("For though my rhyme be ragged,/ Tattered and jagged,/ Rudely rain-beaten,/ Rusty and moth-eaten,/ If ye take well therewith,/ It hath in it some pith"); others float heavier thoughts on light rhymes--as in Matthew Prior's succinct Human Life ("What trifling coil do we poor mortals keep;/ Wake, eat, and drink, evacuate and sleep."). The range of writers who have composed comic verse is astonishing, as is the delight of the poems themselves. Here we read T.S. Eliot mocking himself ("How unpleasant to meet Mr. Eliot!/ With his features of clerical cut"); poet and Soviet historian Robert Conquest, mingling his two professions in a limerick ("There was a great Marxist called Lenin/ Who did two or three million men in/ --That's a lot to have done in/ --But where he did one in/ That grand Marxist Stalin did ten in"); and Wendy Cope commenting on her disillusionment with poets ("I used to think all poets were Byronic./ They're mostly wicked as ginless tonic/ And wild as pension plans"). And along the way, we are treated to witty song lyrics as well, from First World War soldiers' tunes, to Irving Berlin, to Cole Porter, to Lorenz Hart ("When love congeals/It soon reveals/ the faint aroma of performing seals/The double-crossing of a pair of heels/I wish I were in love again!"). Whether it comes from anonymous popular culture or the icons of the literary canon, comic verse has been a source of pleasure and diversion through the ages--a combination of wit, verbal artistry, and even serious contemplation. This collection, compiled by one of our finest critics and anthologists, brings this tradition into the hands of today's readers, offering hours of delight.

Mermen? Yes. Long before mermaids emerged to people our inner seas, long before they established their restless, inviting niche in human fantasy, there was the merman. Born of the human need to dominate the great fruitful oceans, to control the vast destructive seas, to regulate the healing rains, to understand the tides, the merman emerged. The merman was water personified. The imposing water gods could be wheedled, cozened, implored, but―in the end―they were never fooled. How often were Poseidon or Neptune, Lir, Njord and the rest pictured riding the waves along inhospitable shores, shaking their magical tridents or spears or fists at the weak, imploring humans on land? The sea gods called up storms or quieted waves. They flooded the lands. They drowned the unwary. Yet despite the importance of early fish-tailed gods such as Ea-Enki and Dagon; despite the preponderance of mermen in the mythologies of Babylon, Greece, the British Isles, the Scandinavian peninsula, Germany; despite the mermen ranging along Slavic shores and inland seas; despite the mermen found in Chinese and Japanese lakes, along Polynesian island coasts, and in the lore and literature of the Middle East, the merman has become Legend’s Forgotten Man. With its 27 stories from around the world, this volume reconstructs the unnatural history of the Merman.

Based on years of research and thousands of notes left by John Bennett, Mr. Skylark is an unusually intimate biography of a pivotal figure in the Charleston Renaissance, the brief period between the two World Wars that first witnessed many of the cultural and artistic changes soon to sweep the South. The book not only examines Bennett's life but also reveals the rich tapestry of the literary and social history of Charleston. An outsider who became an insider by marrying into the local aristocracy, Bennett was perfectly placed to observe social and artistic change and to prompt it. He published the first scholarly treatise on Gullah, the language of the coastal Southern blacks, and collected African American spirituals and tales. But after breaking several racial taboos of the time, he was publicly condemned, and it was only through mentoring such writers as Hervey Allen and DuBose Heyward that he was eventually welcomed back into the heart of the city. Today, the Charleston aesthetic, which mourned the loss of beauty in a modernizing South, is often overlooked in the study of Southern literature, but Bennett, through his extensive private correspondence and notes, offers insight into the forces that shaped this cultural movement. Restored to us in all his complexity and humor, Bennett is important for his own accomplishments, but also for providing a lens through which to view southern literary history and the complexities of a changing South.

Written while Lombroso was professor of forensic medicine at the University of Turin, L'Uomo delinquente (Criminal Man) set out to conduct an anthropological study of its subject. The premise was that the criminal is born and could be identified from congenital traits. By learning to recognise them, and by developing a detailed system of classification, the aim was better to understand the criminal so as to optimise prevention, reform, or containment. The author leaves no stone unturned, examining every type and level of criminal, recording every measurable characteristic, be it physical, physiological, or psychological. Although subsequently subject to criticism, and now long deprecated, the work was enormously influential in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as both a pioneering and sincere effort to understand the origins and sources of crime. The work went through five Italian editions, in which Lombroso continued to expand and refine his theory. However, because of its length, it was difficult to get the book translated, so no English edition existed until after the author's death. First published in 1911, the present text is a summary prepared for the Anglo-American market by his daughter, Gina, while her father still lived, and it is in this form that it became known in the English speaking world. Its influence would be felt throughout Europe and America, and would transcend criminology to find references in literature. The likes of Émile Zola, Leo Tolstoy, Joseph Conrad, and Bram Stoker, the later in his descriptions of the vampire in Dracula, drew from Lombroso's work on criminal man.

In the immediate aftermath of World War II, more than a quarter million Jewish survivors of the Holocaust lived among their defeated persecutors in the chaotic society of Allied-occupied Germany. Jews, Germans, and Allies draws upon the wealth of diary and memoir literature by the people who lived through postwar reconstruction to trace the conflicting ways Jews and Germans defined their own victimization and survival, comprehended the trauma of war and genocide, and struggled to rebuild their lives. In gripping and unforgettable detail, Atina Grossmann describes Berlin in the days following Germany's surrender--the mass rape of German women by the Red Army, the liberated slave laborers and homecoming soldiers, returning political exiles, Jews emerging from hiding, and ethnic German refugees fleeing the East. She chronicles the hunger, disease, and homelessness, the fraternization with Allied occupiers, and the complexities of navigating a world where the commonplace mingled with the horrific. Grossmann untangles the stories of Jewish survivors inside and outside the displaced-persons camps of the American zone as they built families and reconstructed identities while awaiting emigration to Palestine or the United States. She examines how Germans and Jews interacted and competed for Allied favor, benefits, and victim status, and how they sought to restore normality--in work, in their relationships, and in their everyday encounters. Jews, Germans, and Allies shows how Jews were integral participants in postwar Germany and bridges the divide that still exists today between German history and Jewish studies.

James Salter's exalted place in American letters is based largely on the intense admiration of other writers, but his work resonates far beyond the realm of fellow craftsmen, addressing themes--youth, war, erotic love, marriage, life abroad, friendship--that speak to us all. Following the publication of his first novel, Salter left behind a military career of great promise to write full-time and--through decades of searching, exacting work--became one of American literature's master stylists. Only months before he died, at the age of eighty-nine, he agreed to serve as the first Kapnick Writer-in-Residence at the University of Virginia, where he composed and delivered the three lectures presented in this book and introduced by his friend and fellow novelist, National Book Award-winning author John Casey. Salter speaks to us here with an easy intimacy, sharing his unceasing enchantment with the books that made up his reading life, including works by Balzac, Flaubert, Babel (whose prose is "like a handful of radium"), Dreiser, Celine, Faulkner. These talks provide an invaluable opportunity to see the way in which a great writer reads. They also offer a candid look at the writing life--the rejection letters, not one but two negative reviews in the New York Times for the same book, writing in the morning or at night and worrying about money during the long afternoons. Salter raises the question, Why does one write? For wealth? For admiration, or a sense of "importance"? Confronting a blank sheet that always offers too many choices, practicing a vocation that often demands one write instead of live, the answer for Salter was creating a style that captured experience, in a world where anything not written down fades away. -- Amazon.com.

Islamic antisemitism is as old as Islam itself, and is not a mere borrowing from non-Muslim sources, as has been claimed. The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism provides comprehensive, meticulously documented evidence that a readily discernible, uniquely Islamic antisemitism—specific Muslim hatred of Jews—has been expressed continuously since the advent of Islam. Writing in 1971, S.D. Goitein, the pre-eminent scholar of Muslim-Jewish relations as revealed in the Geniza documentary record of the high Middle Ages (950-1250 C.E.), employed the term antisemitism, “…in order to differentiate animosity against Jews from the discrimination practiced by Islam against non-Muslims in general. Our scrutiny of the Geniza material has proved the existence of ‘antisemitism’ in the time and the area considered here…”. Goitein cited as concrete proof of his assertion that a unique strain of Islamic Jew hatred was extant at that time (i.e., up to a millennium ago)—exploding the common assumption of its absence—the fact that letters from the Geniza material, “…have a special word for it and, most significantly, one not found in the Bible or in Talmudic literature…but one much used and obviously coined in the Geniza period.” Important examples of antisemitic motifs in the foundational Muslim texts are presented: from the Koran and Koranic exegesis by the greatest classical and modern Muslim commentators; the hadith (words and deeds of the Muslim prophet Muhammad as recorded by pious Muslim transmitters), the sira (earliest Muslim biographies of Muhammad), as well as the writings of influential Muslim jurists, theologians, and scholars, from the Middle Ages through the contemporary era. These primary sources, and seminal secondary analyses translated here for the first time into English such as Hartwig Hirschfeld’s mid 1880s essays on Muhammad’s subjugation of the Jews of Medina, and George Vajda’s elegant, comprehensive 1937 study of the hadith—detail the sacralized rationale for Islam’s anti-Jewish bigotry. Numerous complementary historical accounts illustrate the resulting the plight of Jewish communities in the Muslim world across space and time, culminating in the genocidal threat posed to the Jews of Israel today. The Legacy of Islamic Antisemitism debunks the conventional wisdom which continues to assert that Muslim Jew hatred is entirely a 20th century phenomenon, a loose amalgam of re-cycled medieval Christian Judeophobic motifs, calumnies from the Czarist Russia “Protocols of the Elders of Zion”, and standard Nazi propaganda, that only arose after the advent of the Zionist movement and the protracted Arab-Jewish conflict over all of the lands comprising the original 1922 Mandate for historical Palestine. Scholars, educators, and interested lay readers will find this collection an invaluable resource for understanding the phenomenon of Muslim antisemitism, past and present. An updated Author’s Preface for this new edition—which includes materials through January 3, 2020—elucidates the current global pandemic of Muslim Antisemitism, and its resulting violent manifestations, in Israel, Western Europe, and the United States. Doctrinal drivers of this hatred, as espoused by iconic Muslim religious leaders representing the pinnacles of institutional Islamic religious education—both Sunni and Shiite—are introduced. This compendious, timely exposé rivets upon freshly translated samples of modern, seminal Koranic glosses—rife with Jew-hatred—which shape current understandings of Islam’s holy book, and Islam itself, by the Muslim masses. The new Preface concludes with a focused discussion about why non-Muslim religious leaders, especially Jews, must admonish institutional Islam to begin its own process, akin to Vatican II/Nostre Aetate, of expunging at least the most virulent Jew-hating motifs from Islam’s core theology.

"With every step, the Tomb Guards pay homage to America's fallen. Discover their story, and that of the unknown soldiers they honor, through resonant words and illustrations. Keeping vigil at the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, in Arlington National Cemetery, are the sentinel guards, whose every step, every turn, honors and remembers America's fallen. They protect fellow soldiers who have paid the ultimate sacrifice, making sure they are never alone. To stand there--with absolute precision, in every type of weather, at every moment of the day, one in a line uninterrupted since midnight July 2, 1937--is the ultimate privilege and the most difficult post to earn in the army. Everything these men and women do is in service to the Unknowns. Their standard is perfection. Exactly how the unnamed men came to be entombed at Arlington, and exactly how their fellow soldiers have come to keep vigil over them, is a sobering and powerful tale ... that honors the soldiers who honor the fallen"--Provided by publisher

The present collection marks an attempt to bring together outstanding examples of the Short Story as it has been practiced by writers of almost every race, from the earliest days of civilization down to the present century. Its purpose is not to show, by a series of texts chosen on academic grounds, how the form developed, but to bring together the best examples of every form by which men have endeavoured to entertain and instruct their fellows. No art is more spontaneous than that of the short story, also it is certain that stories of some sort were told as soon as man became articulate. The period covered in the present collection embraces nearly five thousand years, but there can be no reasonable doubt that the Egyptian tales that open the volume, the first of their kind known to us, are the finished products of an art that was practised thousands of years before these were written. And since the beginning of civilization as we know it, there has been no break in the tradition of tale-telling: the demand for stories is as strong and insatiable in man today as it was before he discovered how to make stone weapons. The editors of this collection have approached their task of selection with open minds: they have not allowed themselves to be influenced by any theory of what a short story should be, except that which requires that it be interesting of its kind. So, without confining themselves to any theory of classification, the editors have chosen a wide variety of stories designed to appeal to the general reader and perhaps to the student as well, in the belief that what has delighted the Indians and Chinese from time immemorial, the ancient Egyptians, the Jewish shepherds and warriors of Biblical times, the Greeks of Homer`s days and the Romans of Caesar`s, will appeal with equal force to the inhabitants of the civilized world of today. These stories were written not for critics and historians, editors of anthologies and specialists, but for all mankind. They have tried to bear in mind that the Short Story is a tale which 'holdeth children from play and old men from the chimney corner.'

In these powerful essays Jacqueline Rose delves into the questions that keep us awake at night, into issues of privacy and publishing, exposure and shame. Do some women writers - Christina Rossetti, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath - have a special talent for self-revelation? Or are they simply more vulnerable to the invasions of biography? Turning to psychoanalysis, Rose explores its affinity with modernism and asks what it can tell us about the limits of knowledge, both about the most intimate and baffling components of experience and about the furthest, hallucinatory, reaches of the mind. These fine studies move deftly between public, political and private, unconscious worlds. Offering new links between feminism, psychoanalysis, literature and politics, On Not Being Able to Sleep provides a resonant and thought provoking collection for the present day.