Tom Richards has fallen off a crane while directing his latest movie, The Hamburger Girl, fracturing some ribs and a hip. A comic procession of doctors, nurses, and relatives files through his hospital room. Another director replaces him at the studio, and everything in his cinematic dream is being changed - the screenplay, the title, the plot. Tom is baffled and furious. His children's marriages are coming apart, and who can be certain of his own? People everywhere are losing their jobs. His real life and his creative life become ever more displaced while he gradually recovers his health, his balance, and his natural imbalance. Tom's shrewd wife, Claire; their daughter Marigold, for whom Tom has ambivalent feelings; his beautiful daughter Cora, by his first marriage; and his lovers, family, friends, and colleagues all find themselves revolving in a sexual and economic maelstrom that gradually results in violence. "What we are doing", Tom tells his film crew at last, "is real and not real. We are living in a world where dreams are reality and reality is dreams. In our world everything starts from a dream".

In a small town among the citrus groves in the Santa Bernita Valley, so the locals claim, nothing ever goes according to plan. "It's a great place to live, they say, if you like surprises: it's just like life, only different." Certainly a number of Rito's inhabitants--fewer than a hundred in all--are surprised to be living here. Red Ray, for instance, a wildly alcoholic lawyer who bought a dilapidated Victorian mansion in an attempt to rehabilitate his marriage and regain the affections of his wife and young son. After destroying those hopes with a spectacular final binge, Red established a drunk farm, Round Rock, on the ruins. There, one day at a time, he follows his new, unexpected calling. Many months after her husband decamped (almost immediately) for Los Angeles, Libby Daw still lives alone in their trailer, and finds herself even more rooted to the valley she dreams of escaping. And there's Lewis Fletcher, a sometime graduate student whose keen intelligence is sorely tested by his erratic behavior and current predicament. Without exactly knowing why, and entirely against his wishes--or by default and sheer good luck--he finds himself placed in Ray's care at Round Rock. As these people seek out or maintain their various niches in the valley, the peculiar history of the place asserts itself. An heiress descended from the original settlers, Billie Fitzgerald still acts as though she owns it all; devoted to her father and son, she obscures her mercurial emotions from even her closest friends. The past also returns with David Ibañez, whose family had harvested the groves for generations--and whose talents and secrets (and thus, he discovers, his future) are inextricably bound to the complex, close-knit town he thought he had left behind. With insight matched with artistry, Michelle Huneven traces the emerging destinies of these characters as each of them struggles for peace and equilibrium, even happiness and love, against hapless, all-too-human frailty and circumstance. A vivid evocation of landscape and community, Round Rock derives great power from psychological subtlety, and from affection for and profound understanding of lives strained or broken but on the mend. Fresh, remarkably mature, and constantly surprising, this astonishing debut wins both your trust and your heart.

Following her acclaimed, Los Angeles Times Book Prize–nominated novel, The God of War , Marisa Silver’s extraordinary book, Alone With You , is a starkly elegant and superbly rendered collection of short stories. Marisa Silver dazzled and inspired readers with her critically acclaimed The God of War (a Los Angeles Times Book Prize finalist), praised by Richard Russo as “a novel of great metaphorical depth and beauty.” In this elegant, finely wrought new collection, Alone With You, Silver has created eight indelible stories that mine the complexities of modern relationships and the unexpected ways love manifests itself. Her brilliantly etched characters confront life’s abrupt and unsettling changes with fear, courage, humor, and overwhelming grace. In the O. Henry Prize–winning story “The Visitor,” a VA hospital nurse’s aide contends with a family ghost and discovers the ways in which her own past haunts her. The reticent father in “Pond” is confronted with a Solomonic choice that pits his love for his daughter against his feelings for her young son. In “Night Train to Frankfurt,” first published in The New Yorker, a daughter travels to an alternative-medicine clinic in Germany in a gambit to save her mother’s life. And in the title story, a woman vacations in Morocco with her family while contemplating a decision that will both ruin and liberate them all. From “Temporary,” where a young woman confronts the ephemeral nature of companionship, to “Three Girls,” in which sisters trapped in a snowstorm recognize the boundaries of childhood, the nuanced voices of Alone With You bear the hallmarks of an instant classic from a writer with unerring talent and imaginative resource. Silver has the extraordinary ability to render her fictional inhabitants instantly relatable, in all their imperfections. Her stories have the singular quality of looking in a mirror. We see at once what is familiar and what is strange. In these stirring narratives, we meet ourselves anew.

The nineteen stories contained herein, all beautifully translated for the first time into English by Sue Boswell, combine work published by Marcel Schwob (1867-1905) in newspapers together with manuscripts never published in his lifetime. From historical pieces, such as "Poupa", an early unfinished novel which takes place in ancient Rome, to horrific tales, such as "The Hand of Glory" and "The Maison Close", and others, such as "On Umbrellas", which are completely unclassifiable, the present collection displays the diversity and genius of one of France's greatest yet largely forgotten writers.

A New York story, a dark comedy, Balls: A Novel tells of the 30-year-old Henry Schiller, a songwriter and lounge-player, in love with a woman far younger and more musically gifted than himself, one with her eye on other men and the rise of her own career, whose crisis deepens when he discovers he has testicular cancer.

A profoundly unsettling collection of tales of Americans caught up in the ethnic, religious, social, economic, and political conflicts of modern day Israel, by an astonishing new voice. In a land where sudden death is an everyday fact of life, a boy dodges bullets and searches through rubble for news of his soldier father. An aging rabbi?s faith is tested by a crippling, seemingly supernatural affliction. A middle-aged man comforts his Holocaust-survivor mother as she faces senility, convinced that Nazis are conspiring against her. And the mysterious biblical red heifer makes a startling appearance in the midst of a decidedly contemporary struggle. In these unsettling tales, the remarkable Jon Papernick transports us to modern-day Israel, a country torn by war, strife, and controversy throughout the history of its statehood. Giving voice to striking characters--Israelis, Palestinians, and Americans; Arabs, Christians, and Jews--caught in the ethnic, religious, social, and political conflicts of a dangerous region, Papernick brings the images we glimpse from afar, in newspapers and on television, chillingly to life. By turns starkly realistic and allegorically fantastic, these tales chronicle the conflict from the inside and illuminate the suffering and anger experienced by those on all sides. In?An Unwelcome Guest,? a young Jewish settler from New York plays a deadly game of backgammon with a ghostly old Arab while his pregnant wife sleeps unaware. In?The King of the King of Falafel,? a restaurant rivalry ends in apocalyptic violence. In "Lucky Eighteen," two young Americans living in Jerusalem as the Oslo accords collapse juggle political activism and a devastating love triangle--under the dark specter of suicide bombings. And in the brilliant, horrifying title story, a lonely shepherd wanders a broken no-man's-land, carrying with him the burden of an unspeakable act. In these haunting and strangely beautiful stories, the tragic carnage of the Middle East is rendered in unforgettable form. Suffused with rage, violence, humor, magic, and religion, this gripping collection leaves a profound impact. Evenhanded yet passionate, shocking yet hopeful, The Ascent of Eli Israelheralds the arrival of a masterful storyteller. Please visit.

Never Going Home is a wake-up tale of passionate love, intrigue, despair, and tragedy. The players in Never Going Home are alone. They find their way to one another and create a family of super-intellects. Betty, a wise eighty-five-year-old retired librarian, leads the family. Other accomplished family members include Harold, a lawyer; Bailey, a widow and mother with an MSF degree in finance; Will, a sociologist; Bob, a bank president; Gloria, with an MBA degree; and Lenny, a Vietnam veteran who studied psychotherapy to understand his PTSD in which he relives his combat experiences. Ruby, a Las Vegas showgirl, and voted best of Vegas five years running, hearing of Lenny's thesis in psychotherapy, surmises Lenny could be the key to unlocking her very private dysfunction. Betty reveals the enormous wealth Harold and she accumulated investing in the military-industrial complex off a tip from an aircraft-manufacturing lobbyist Harold defended in court prior to the Vietnam War. They made millions as crony capitalists. There seems to be no challenge the family can't rise to. Author Jerry Lewis exposes through his "can-do" characters a wide variety of issues facing Americans today: war, deplorable treatment of veterans, religious intolerance, racial issues, corruption and deception, cultural evolution, mismatch disease, health-care hoaxes, diet, and exercise. This book will earn a front-and-center position on your bookshelf.

A fictional profile of the brilliant, prolific painter Camille Pissarro traces his colorful life, along with that of his remarkable wife, Julie, and his career at the center of the circle of the Impressionists

First published in the US in 1932, The Sleepwalkers is about three protagonists "sleepwalking", that is, living between vanishing and emerging ethical systems just as the somnambulist exists in a state between sleeping and waking. Together they present a panorama of German society and its progressive deterioration of values that culminated in defeat and collapse at the end of World War I. The novel explores what Broch described as "the loneliness of the I" in its three parts. The protagonists of the first two parts of the book are represented as holding to certain sets of values. Broch describes the struggles they undergo as their codes for living, or values, prove inadequate to the realities of the social environment they find themselves in. Joachim von Pasenow in the first part is "the romantic". In the second part, August Esch tries to live according to the motto "business is business". Eventually, in the third part, the amoral Huguenau's only standard for behavior is his personal profit. He follows this maxim in all his actions, swindling and murdering without remorse. Ultimately, he reaches a point of zero values without remorse and his dealings bring him finally to the zero point of values. Although Broch doesn't hold Huguenau up as someone to admire, he does present him as the inevitable harbinger of fascism. As one reviewer noted, "His characters are sleepwalkers because their own lives are shaped by the forces of the nightmare reality in which they live."

The three stories bundled in this book are tales about war and love, about "memories keeping their cancerous hold."

Selected as one of Oprah.com's 20 Tantalizing Beach Reads Selected as a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Isabel Merton is a renowned concert pianist, whose performances are marked by a rare intensity of feeling. At the height of her career, she feels increasingly torn between the compelling musical realm she deeply inhabits, and her fragmented itinerant artist's life, with its frequent flights, anonymous hotels, and brief, arbitrary encounters. Away from her New York home on a European tour, Isabel meets a political exile from a war-torn country, a man driven by a rankling sense of injustice and a powerful desire to vindicate his cause and avenge his people. As their paths cross in several cities, they are drawn to each other both by their differences and their seemingly parallel passions-until a menacing incident throws her into a creative crisis, and forces her to reevaluate her lover's actions, and her own motives. In this story of contemporary love and conflict, Hoffman illuminates the currents and undercurrents of our time, as she explores the luminous and dark faces of romanticism, and those perennial human yearnings, frustrations, and moral choices that can lead to destructiveness, or the richest art.

How breathtakingly close we are to lives that at first seem so far away. From the civil rights struggle in the United States to the Nazi crimes against humanity in Europe, there are more stories than people passing one another every day on the bustling streets of every crowded city. Only some stories survive to become history. Recently released from prison, Lamont Williams, an African American probationary janitor in a Manhattan hospital and father of a little girl he can’t locate, strikes up an unlikely friendship with an elderly patient, a Holocaust survivor who was a prisoner in Auschwitz-Birkenau. A few blocks uptown, historian Adam Zignelik, an untenured Columbia professor, finds both his career and his long-term romantic relationship falling apart. Emerging from the depths of his own personal history, Adam sees, in a promising research topic suggested by an American World War II veteran, the beginnings of something that might just save him professionally, and perhaps even personally. As these men try to survive in early-twenty-first-century New York, history comes to life in ways neither of them could have foreseen. Two very different paths—Lamont’s and Adam’s—lead to one greater story as The Street Sweeper , in dealing with memory, love, guilt, heroism, the extremes of racism and unexpected kindness, spans the twentieth century to the present, and spans the globe from New York to Chicago to Auschwitz. Epic in scope, this is a remarkable feat of storytelling.

In this brilliant, inventive, tragic farce, Deborah Levy creates the ultimate dysfunctional kids, Billy and his sister Girl. Apparently abandoned years ago by their parents, they now live alone somewhere in England. Girl spends much of her time trying to find their mother, going to strangers' doors and addressing whatever Prozac woman who answers as "Mom." Billy spends his time fantasizing a future in which he will be famous, perhaps in the United States as a movie star, or as a psychiatrist, or as a doctor to blondes with breast enlargements, or as the author of "Billy England's Book of Pain." Together they both support and torture each other, barely able to remember their pasts but intent on forging a future that will bring them happiness and reunite them with the ever-elusive Mom. Billy and Girl are every boy and girl reeling from the pain of their childhoods, forgetting what they need to forget, inventing worlds they think will be better, but usually just prolonging nightmares as they begin to create--or so it seems--alternative personalities that will allow them to survive and conquer and punish. In the end, the reader is as bewildered as Billy and Girl--have they found Mom and a semblance of family, or are they completely out of control and ready to explode?

"It is the Saturday after the 2016 presidential election, and in a plush weekend house in Connecticut, an intimate group of friends, New Yorkers all, has gathered to recover from what they consider the greatest political catastrophe of their lives. They have just sat down to tea when their hostess, Eva Lindquist, proposes a dare. Who among them would be willing to ask Siri how to assassinate Donald Trump? Liberal and like-minded-editors, writers, a decorator, a theater producer, and one financial guy, Eva's husband, Bruce-the friends have come to the countryside in the hope of restoring the bubble in which they have grown used to living. Yet with the exception of one brash and obnoxious book editor, none is willing to accept Eva's challenge. Shelter in Place is a novel about house and home, furniture and rooms, safety and freedom and the invidious ways in which political upheaval can undermine even the most seemingly impregnable foundations. Eva is the novel's polestar, a woman who moves through her days accompanied by a roving, carefully curated salon. She's a generous hostess and more than a bit of a control freak, whose obsession with decorating allows Leavitt to treat us to a slyly comic look at the habitués and fetishes of the so-called shelter industry. Yet when, in her avidity to secure shelter for herself, she persuades Bruce to buy a grand if dilapidated apartment in Venice, she unwittingly sets off the chain of events that will propel him, for the first time, to venture outside the bubble and embark on a wholly unexpected love affair. A comic portrait of the months immediately following the 2016 election, Shelter in Place is also a meditation on the unreliable appetites-for love, for power, for freedom-by which both our public and private lives are shaped"--

This stunning departure for the beloved author of The Chosen and My Name Is Asher Lev is a powerful story of love and war in Korea. An old peasant farmer and his wife are fleeing the Chinese during the Korean War when they come across a wounded boy who, they believe, has magical powers.

The author of the widely syndicated "Uncivil Liberties" column ruminates on everything from Fidel Castro to the calorie count of his favorite food. "Trillin is a curmudgeon's curmudgeon".--People.

Depicts various episodes in the life of artist Arthur Fidelman who left the Bronx to pursue his career in Italy--Novelist.

"In her nonfiction books (Letters from a War Zone) and her first novel Ice and Fire) Dworkin established a reputation as a provocative writer of feminist literature. She gives her own name to the protagonist/narrator of this powerful, almost frenzied, admittedly autobiographical novel that chronicles her life and sexual victimization. "Andrea" gets her first taste of sex at age nine when she is molested in a movie theater. A rebellious teenager, she hangs out in Greenwich Village, idolizes Allen Ginsberg and is swept up into the peace movement. Penniless, streetwise but not street-smart, Andrea is continually and brutally raped by lovers, acquaintances, strangers. The novel's unparagraphed prose--like Andrea, intense, jumpy, impassioned--brilliantly captures the narrator's mental and physical degradation. As her life disintegrates, she repeats three facts--her name, her place of birth and the poet Walt Whitman's address in Camden, N.J., on a street where she was born--as a mantra anchoring her to reality. The most sexually graphic and horrifying scenes involve her marriage to a European revolutionary who abuses and burns her as she desperately tries to be a good bourgeois housewife. It is no wonder that the novel's ending finds Andrea committed to the women's movement. While Andrea's high-pitched voice is at first hard to take, its vehemence and candor build to a convincing indictment of a society that tolerates violence against women."--Publisher'sWeekly via amazon.com.

By turns hilarious and alarming, "American Mischief" is an ambitious attempt to define the disorders of American culture. Originally published in 1970, the novel takes on sexual anarchy, political madness, the collapse of monogamy, and above all the high cost of extreme behavior. These aspects of American culture are richly illustrated by the novel's two protagonists: Professor Bernard Kovell, a supreme and comical narcissist who dotes on lofty analogies while performing very low acts, and Lenny Pincus, a young radical fishing for more trouble than he can handle.

Clarinetist Ike Morphy, his dog Herbie Mann, and a pair of pigeons who roost on his air conditioner are about to be evicted from their apartment on West 106th Street, also known as Duke Ellington Boulevard. Ike has never had a lease, just a handshake agreement with the recently deceased landlord; and now that landlord’s son stands to make a killing on apartment 2B. Centering on the fate of one apartment before, during, and after the height of New York’s real estate boom, Ellington Boulevard ’s characters include the Tenant and His Dog; the Landlord, a recovered alcoholic and womanizer who has newly found Judaism and a wife half his age; the Broker, an out-of-work actor whose new profession finally allows him to afford theater tickets he has no time to use; the Broker’s New Boyfriend, a second-rate actor who composes a musical about the sale of 2B ( “Is there no one I can lien on if this boom goes bust?” ). There’s also the Buyer, a trusting young editor at a dying cultural magazine, who falls in love with the Tenant; the Buyer’s Husband, a disaffected graduate student taken to writing bawdy faux-academic papers; and the Buyer’s Husband’s Girlfriend, a children’s book writer with a tragic past. With the humor and poignancy that made Langer’s first novel, Crossing California, a favorite book of the year among critics across the country, Ellington Boulevard is an ode to New York. It’s the story of why people come to a city they can’t afford, take jobs they despise, sacrifice love, find love, and eventually become the people they never thought they’d be—for better and for worse.