Kathi Kamen Goldmark's first novel, And My Shoes Keep Walking Back to You, earned praise from an assortment of well-known authors including Amy Tan, Maya Angelou, Scott Turow, Judy Collins, Rita Mae Brown, Carl Hiaasen, and Roddy Doyle; and received positive reviews in O, the Oprah Magazine, the Miami Herald, the San Francisco Chronicle, and other publications. Completed shortly before her untimely death from breast cancer, Goldmark's Her Wild Oats is a honky-tonk road story about two unlikely pals: A smart young woman, Arizona Rosenblatt, leaves home and her role as assistant to a high-powered Hollywood executive when she discovers her husband is having an affair with a woman from Jews for Jesus; and thirteen-year-old Otis Ray "Wild Oats" Pixlie, boy genius harmonica player. In the end, Otis Ray learns what it means to be an adult, Arizona discovers the life she wants, and they both figure out the true meaning of love and family.

"Duncan Wheeler is a successful architect who savors the quotidian pleasures in life until a car accident leaves him severely paralyzed and haunted by the death of his young assistant. Now, Duncan isn't sure what there is left to live for, when every day has become a broken series of unsuccessful gestures. Duncan and his wife, Laura, find themselves in conflict as Duncan's will to live falters. Laura grows desperate to help him. An art conservator who has her own relationship to the repair of broken things, Laura brings home a highly trained helper monkey - a tufted capuchin named Ottoline - to assist Duncan with basic tasks. Duncan and Laura fall for this sweet, comical, Nutella-gobbling little creature, and Duncan's life appears to become more tolerable, fuller, and funnier. Yet the question persists: Is it enough?"--Publisher description.

Essay - dust jacket

"It is this book that confirms Lind's status as an author of international importance."-- New York Times Sergeant Gauthier Bachmann is the perfect Nazi soldier. But after a horrifying defeat at Voroshenko, where most of his Eighth Hessian Infantry Regiment was slaughtered in a single instant, Bachmann was declared mentally unfit to serve. Incapable of accepting this judgment, and of returning to his girlfriend and a quiet life as a gold- and silversmith, Bachmann wanders the war-ravaged countryside, trying to find a way to rejoin his regiment, or any regiment, and return to the front. While trying to find his regiment and come to terms with the horrors he has seen and committed, the increasingly unstable Bachmann is manipulated by a series of figures from the war's underbelly--deserters and collaborators, corrupt officers and sexual predators--who induce him to carry out their venal missions, which they've justified against the background of institutionalized murder going on all around them. Containing dark echoes of Jaroslav Hasek's The Good Soldier Svejk , Jakov Lind's Landscape in Concrete is an "astonishing and highly original imagining of (the) dimensions of evil including sadistic cruelty, of the condition of being a victim and the madness abroad which constitutes the virtual victory of Hitler if we fail to translate survival into freedom" (Anthony Rudolf). Jakov Lind was born in Vienna and survived the Second World War by fleeing into Germany, where he disguised himself as a Dutch deckhand. Regarded in his lifetime as a successor to Beckett and Kafka, Lind was posthumously awarded the Theodor Kramer Prize in 2007. Ralph Manheim was one of the great translators of the twentieth century. He translated Günter Grass, Bertolt Brecht, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Hermann Hesse, Peter Handke, and more. In 1982, PEN American Center created an award for translation in his name.

Kahane, father of Olympia Press founder Maurice Girodias, recalls his life and his incredible publishing run in Paris from '31-39.

“The creative act par excellence.”—Denis Donoghue “ Extravaganza is the eeriest comic novel of our generation.”—Cynthia Ozick

The Law of White Spaces is composed of five compelling case studies, unified by their obsession with what Oliver Sacks has called "the quintessential human condition of sickness."

First published in 1933, Matisse Picasso and Gertrude Stein contains three prose pieces written in the stream-of-consciousness style that Stein was famous for. A modernist classic not to be missed by fans and collectors of Stein's seminal work. Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) was an American poet, novelist, art collector, and playwright who famously hosted a Paris salon frequented by the likes of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Pablo Picasso, and Ernest Hemingway. Before she was a patron to "The Lost Generation" artists, Stein was an esteemed author who influenced many 20th-century writers with her innovative and experimental prose. Other notable works by this author include: Three Lives (1909), White Wines (1913), and An Exercise in Analysis (1917). Featuring an introduction by Sherwood Anderson, this volume is an essential read for fans of Gertrude Stein's work and those with an interest in Jazz Age literature.

Peter Santore, the narrator, is an American lawyer in his mid-thirties come to England to track down a certain Hilary Pennels, the daughter of a Korean War hero who died in a POW camp, the same camp in which Peter's own father turned traitor and whose informing became, perhaps, the cause of Hilary's father's death. Only Hilary's guardian, Fox himself a survivor of the camp can explain, if he will, the troubling past that haunts the now fully grown "war babies." As Frederick Busch's relentless narrative bears down upon this complexity of betrayals, the lines between exploiter and exploited become eerily blurred.

'Feinstein's triumph is to write so well that she makes Lena's predicament not only moving, in a perfunctory dismissive way, but also painful ... [she has] an accurate and acute feeling for language, and pauses, and silence.' Guardian Lena's seemingly contented family life is coming apart at the seams. Her husband Ben has been having an affair with the au pair, and as their relationship slides he retreats more and more into his work in a science lab. Sons Alan and Michael may appear happy enough, but this is far from the case - both are responding to a physical world which they alone inhabit. And Lena - desperately lost and seeking an identity of her own, both inside and outside of her family unit - increasingly finds solace at the bottom of a bottle. An exploration of just how lonely - and how magic - a marriage can be, The Circle is a poignant, poetic and incredibly assured debut novel.

A captivating novel about aging fathers and their grown daughters, childhood scars, and rewriting the script with a little help from Shakespeare, from the acclaimed author of My October . On the brink of forty, Bea Rose has lost her lover, her business, and her bearings. When the opportunity arises to work on a summer production of King Lear to be staged in various parks around Montreal, she takes it, despite her utter lack of theatre experience. Things get off to a rocky start when Bea meets the artistic director, Artie White, a childhood friend whose presence stirs up painful memories. Then, inadvertently attracting the attentions of the play's aging star, she learns that she must tread carefully among the egos and relationships of the company. At the same time, Bea's father begins behaving erratically, and her younger sister Cara discovers cracks in the foundation of an apparently perfect life. The sisters do their best to care for their beloved, demanding father, but his deteriorating condition is more than they can handle. Meanwhile, the star of Lear is also faltering amidst the confusions of age, illness, and regret. When a raucous party whirls out of control, the various forces in Bea's life collide, culminating in a violent act that could destroy more than one life. But that act also reveals how lives might be united in new ways. Tender, vivid, and powerful, Lear's Shadow is a richly satisfying meditation on love's power to bind and to liberate. It's a lyrical reminder that even in the face of grief, life's joy can be embraced.

'Runt' Rawlinson, a British assassin, is dropped by parachute into France during WWII, to kill a traitor to the Resistance. But have they given him the right man? Runt thinks not, and alerts his masters. But the message from London remains the same: Clear To Kill.

Book by Buchwald, Art

'Seated at a café table, in the syrupy warmth of out-of-season Nice, he reviewed his life and found it to be alarmingly empty.' George Bland had planned to spend his retirement in leisurely travel and modest entertainment with his friend Putnam. When Putnam dies George is left attempting to impose some purpose on the solitary end of his life. Then Katy Gibb appears as a temporary resident, perhaps even squatter, in a neighbouring apartment. Greedy, selfish, sometimes alluring, often manipulative, Katy exerts a strange influence on George, forcing him to recognize that his own careful, fastidious life has shown a distinct lack of passion and daring. As the realization takes hold, George must decide how much - or how little - he can do to transform the status quo .

All Whom I Have Loved is the haunting story of a Jewish family in Eastern Europe in the 1930s as seen through the eyes of an unforgettable nine-year-old boy. The beloved only child of divorced parents, Paul watches helplessly as his family and his world dissolve around him. At first he lives with his mother—a secular, assimilated schoolteacher, whom he adores until she “betrays” him by marrying a gentile. He’s then sent to live with his father—once an admired avant-garde artist, but now reviled by the critics as a “decadent Jew,” who drowns his anger, pain, and humiliation in drink. Paul searches in vain for a life of stability and meaning. The earthy peasant girl who briefly takes care of him, the pull he feels toward the Jews praying in the local synagogue, and his fascination with Eastern Orthodox church rituals give him only tantalizing glimpses into worlds of which he can never be a part. The fates that Paul’s parents will meet with Paul as terrified witness, and his own fate as an orphaned Jewish child alone in Europe in 1938, are rendered by Aharon Appelfeld with extraordinary subtlety and power, as they foreshadow, in the heart-wrenching story of three individuals, the cataclysm that is about to engulf all of European Jewry.

We think we know what upward mobility stories are about--virtuous striving justly rewarded, or unprincipled social climbing regrettably unpunished. Either way, these stories seem obviously concerned with the self-making of self-reliant individuals rather than with any collective interest. In Upward Mobility and the Common Good , Bruce Robbins completely overturns these assumptions to expose a hidden tradition of erotic social interdependence at the heart of the literary canon. Reinterpreting novels by figures such as Balzac, Stendhal, Charlotte Brontë, Dickens, Dreiser, Wells, Doctorow, and Ishiguro, along with a number of films, Robbins shows how deeply the material and erotic desires of upwardly mobile characters are intertwined with the aid they receive from some sort of benefactor or mentor. In his view, Hannibal Lecter of The Silence of the Lambs becomes a key figure of social mobility in our time. Robbins argues that passionate and ambiguous relationships (like that between Lecter and Clarice Starling) carry the upward mobility story far from anyone's simple self-interest, whether the protagonist's or the mentor's. Robbins concludes that upward mobility stories have paradoxically helped American and European society make the transition from an ethic of individual responsibility to one of collective accountability, a shift that made the welfare state possible, but that also helps account for society's fascination with cases of sexual abuse and harassment by figures of authority. -- "Modern Language Quarterly"

"When Elaine Levine's eccentric older brother, Isaac, moves back from LA to the quiet suburb of Thornhill, Ontario, to help her care for her suddenly motherless grandchildren, he finds himself embroiled in even more neighbourhood drama than he would like. Meanwhile, a nanny, miles from her own family in the Philippines, cares for a young boy who doesn't fit in at school. In a house down the street, a young mother is given the news that her marriage is over by her mother-in-law while her husband sits silent. And a woman in mid-life contends with the task of cleaning out the house in which she grew up, while her teenage son struggles with why his dad moved out. This stunningly intimate collection of stories, which spans fifteen years in the lives of the Levine family and the other characters, is an exquisite portrait of a Jewish community, the secular and religious families who inhabit it, and the tensions that exist there, by a writer with a keen eye for detail, a gentle sense of humour, and an immense literary talent."--

Paul Ableman's modern masterpiece was first published by the Olympia Press of Paris in 1958, to instant acclaim. The narrator of I Hear Voices is a young schizophrenic who transports himself, and the reader, through a wondrously transfigured city where the real and the fantastic blend together in a seamless enchantment. The continual stream and buzz of events is often comical, occasionally wrenching, and always unpredictable. Encounters with Miss Carpet, The Commissioner, Merkitt and Mrs Oil, among others, are filled with poignant satire and disquieting honesty in this vision of the fragmentation of contemporary life. This Faber Finds edition of I Hear Voices includes a preface by Margaret Drabble: her obituary for Paul Ableman, who died in 2006. 'The book, not excluding Lolita , which gave me the greatest pride and pleasure to publish.' Maurice Girodias 'A strikingly fresh and original work of art... The writing is brilliant; both terrifying and hilariously funny.' Philip Toynbee, Observer 'Subtle, humorous, clinically authentic.' Times Literary Supplement

Though best known for his editing and posthumous publication of his friend Franz Kafka's writing, Max Brod was a major novelist in his own right. Tycho Brahe's Path to God , widely considered his finest work and viewed by many as a small masterpiece, concerns the relationship between the great Danish astronomer and the younger, intellectually superior Johannes Kepler. Brod's representation of this complicated relation grew out of his acquaintance with the young Albert Einstein, reproduces his struggles with the Expressionist poet Franz Werfel, and strangely anticipates the most famous act Brod would ever perform: publishing Kafka's writings without his permission. As Brahe attempts to create a diplomatic compromise between the old Ptolemaic system of planetary motion and its modern, Copernican revision, Kepler discards the principle of compromise root and branch. Their conflict thus becomes an emblem of the struggle between a weakened tradition and a self-conscious modernity. The novel manages to convey the intimate, emotional reality of a seventeenth-century political conflict as well as the psychological, political, and artistic turmoil of Brod's own time. This revival of the richly allusive and deeply resonant Tycho Brahe's Path to God is a true literary event.

In this newly discovered "third" of a book by one of the most influential literary critics of the postwar period, an elderly poet and novelist turned distinguished mathematical physicist embroils himself in a principled but somewhat absurd conflict, complicating the lives of his admirers. These memorable characters include a beautiful short-story writer; the director of a private foundation and a compromised man of letters; the headmaster of a private school; a wealthy, progressive couple; an au pair from the foundation director's household; and an untried literary man from the Midwest, drawn from Lionel Trilling's own life experiences. The Journey Abandoned was supposed to be a novel about the anomalies of heroic action in a conformist age. Instead, it presents an extremely personal portrait of the life of letters in America.