More than 100 years ago, Mark Twain wrote about the Jews and asked: "All things are mortal but the Jew; all other forces pass, but he remains. What is the secret of his immortality?In this seminal book, David Ben Moshe goes beyond generalities to describe how the Jews have re-established a Jewish State in an area coveted by every major power throughout history. Friedrich Nietzsche is as often misunderstood as the Jews. Ben Moshe highlights Nietzsches admiration for the Jews of the Bible, and looks into the remarkable similarity between many of Nietzsche's writings and Jewish sacred texts.

One of the funniest moments in the history of Olympia came when the South African poet Sinclair Beiles entered Girodias' office with sheets of paper adorned by Chinese characters. Telling Girodias a story about youth spent among missionaries in China, Beiles indicated his reams of parchment, and stated that they were unique erotic writings from that nation, and all he'd need to translate this phenomenal document would be some money each week for a new chapter... As it turns out, Beiles was working from an earlier translation of the 15th century erotic classic Jin Ping Mei, a work about Hsi Men (Ximen Qing) and his six wives that, with its graphic descriptions and instructions, is said to have inspired the Kama Sutra, among other books. The Jin, Ping and Mei in the title are the later three wives, and the most interesting ones for our purposes. One of those later spouses, whose name translates as Golden Lotus, is a character from the classic "Outlaws of the Marsh," delightful woman lady who poisons her ugly, smelly, not-getting-it-done first husband to marry the libertine Hsi Men, and is punished for this crime by the tiger-slaying, heroic brother of husband one. In Jin Ping Mei, Hsi Men is able to take advantage of the corrupt regime and have that heroic brother sent far, far away, while he continues to enjoy his wives and lifestyle. Beiles simplified and improved upon his translation, removing tedious interviews with court officials and drawing out some of the more intimate scenes. The work is also known, in English, as "Golden Lotus," "The Love Pagoda," "The Six Wives of Hsi Men," etc...

"Awake in the Dark is peopled by characters embarking on journeys of self-discovery; they unearth the past and the secrets that shaped them. In "The House on Kronenstrasse," a woman returns to Germany to find her childhood home; in "The Porcelain Monkey," the shocking origins of an Orthodox Jewish woman's faith are revealed; in "The Lamp," the harrowing experiences of a young woman leave her with the perfect daughter and a strange light; and in "Dark Urgings of the Blood," a patient is convinced that she shares a disturbing history with her psychiatrist"--Publisher website (December 2006).

The classic novelization of one of Broadway’s most enduring and beloved musicals, updated with a beautiful new cover. Maria is young and innocent and has never known love—until Tony. And Tony, searching for life beyond the savagery of the streets, has discovered love for the first time with her, too. But Maria’s brother is the leader of the Sharks and Tony had once led the rival Jets. Now, both gangs are claiming the same turf and with tensions rising to the point of explosion, it seems there is no way to stop a rumble. Tony promised Maria that he would stay out of it. But will he be able to keep his word or will their newfound love be destroyed by violence or even death? Evocative and unforgettable, this novelization brings out all of the depth, drama, and beauty of one of the most enduring stories in the history of American theater.

This is the tragi-comic account of one man's life through the fate of his teeth; from the loss of his first milk tooth swallowed by his father in a prison camp, to the eventual fixture of a set of dentures. Devoting each chapter to a particular tooth, the unnamed narrator charts fifty years of East European history.Having worked in numerous guises and a miscellany of trades and professions which involve journeys across the globe, our hero struggles with the demands and transformations of his body and, more importantly, his teeth. In each city he visits he seeks out dentists from his homeland. Key moments of his life and indeed the last half-century have uncanny parallels with his dental state of health. Swept up in the agitated course of history he becomes involved in secret plots and covert missions, whilst on a personal level he engages in endless affairs and ceaseless reflection on the meaning of life.The reader may follow the story according to various different sequences.

Growing up, Daniel seemed like a model son: a student activist blessed with easy charm and a fluid intelligence, who believed that he was heir to a better and brighter future. When that dream faded, he drifted from his family and into a rootless life, marked by wasted possibility.Bearing the Body begins when Daniel’s younger brother, Nathan, a medical resident in Boston, learns that Daniel has died in San Francisco. The circumstances are unclear, and the police are involved. Nathan, who suffers from chronic anger and uncontrollable compulsions, travels to New York to inform their father, Sol, of Daniel’s death. Sol is an Auschwitz survivor who has spent most of his adult energy compiling an archive of the fates of Hitler’s victims. Due in part to this obsessive research, he has lost touch with his sons. He nevertheless decides to join Nathan on a trip to the West Coast, where both men hope to learn more about Daniel’s untimely death. In San Francisco they meet Abby and her son, Ben, who were Daniel’s companions in a life that his family never knew about or shared.A moving study of isolation and its costs, Bearing the Body is a book about history and memory, about family and loss. Most of all, it is a book about the past, which, far from receding quietly, weighs ever more heavily on those who hope to leave it behind

We're living a national ideology that's invisible to us because we're inside it." "We're living a national ideology that's invisible to us because we're inside it." At the outset of his career E. L. Doctorow told Paul Levine, "History written by historians is clearly insufficient." Doctorow's novels carry out that conviction by imagining the great moments of American history--the Old West, the gilded age, the Depression, the cold war--as backdrops for tales of excruciating moral pain and injustice in America. In Conversations with E. L. Doctorow Christopher D. Morris has gathered over twenty of the most revelatory interviews with the acclaimed author of Ragtime, World's Fair, Billy Bathgate, The Book of Daniel, and other novels, plays, and short stories. Whatever the setting or time period, Doctorow's characters spark an unparalleled urgency in the novelist's recreations of history. In his work the American dream and the values his characters try to live by turn to madness and ashes. Within this collection Doctorow explores the themes of his work not only in the contexts of national and literary history but also in terms of disturbing trends in contemporary American culture. Talking about style, Doctorow discusses his experiments with shifting points of view and unreliable narrators as part of the modernist heritage to which readers have become accustomed. But he stresses that these techniques are always subordinate to the telling of a good story and the creation of memorable characters. "My portrait of J. P. Morgan in Ragtime is truer to the man's soul and the substance of his life than his authorized biography," he says. Doctorow's critical and popular success comes from the creation and re-creation of such great characters and the telling of captivating stories in which the writer serves as an independent witness to both the ideals and the corruptions that have driven our history. Christopher D. Morris has been the Charles A. Dana Professor of English at Norwich University in Northfield, Vermont, since 1996. He is also the author of Models of Misrepresentation: On the Fiction of E. L. Doctorow and regularly publishes in journals like The Ohio Review, Critique, and Film Criticism.

La Negra y Blanca is the crowning achievement of Deena Metzger's lifetime as a novelist, poet, and playwright. On the surface, it is a meditation on memory as the narrator pieces together the bright flashes of images of her life recalled, piecing them together with the intention of creating a healing matrix that reflects a life lived in search of meaning. On a deeper level, it weaves in the history and tragedy of the Conquest's ongoing political and environmental effects on Latin America through the narrator s relationship with Victor Perera, a Guatemalan-American writer and journalist who documented the destruction of the native Lacandon tribe of Guatemala by imperialistic forces. We become acquainted with La Negra, a mysterious woman who is pregnant, but who will not give birth to her child until the world is safe enough for its continued existence, and who is the centerpiece character of a natural world struggling to survive and maintain its integrity in the midst of industrialization and the decimation of the sacred forests. Metzger has created a complex novel that weaves the personal, political, global and spiritual threads of her life into a tapestry of beauty, sorrow, transcendence, and ultimately, the assurance of a world renewed by the unwavering examination of all of its component parts to create a path into a future that promises reverence for all life.

Gotz and Meyer, two noncommissioned SS officers, are entrusted with an assignment, "not a big one," but one that "requires efficiency." Their task is to transport five thousand women, children and elderly, one hundred at a time, from a concentration camp near Belgrade in a hermetically sealed truck, in which they are gassed. As Albahari's anonymous narrator, a teacher, obsessively pursues the truth of this systematic annihilation, he shares his findings with his students. Their school bus becomes that truck, and as the memory of Belgrade's lost Jewish souls is evoked, the students are bewildered. Their teacher, worn down as much by the task of making history come alive as by the toll his research has taken on him, is overwhelmed by the horror of his own imaginings. A harrowing, masterfully written story, full of compassion, irony, and lyricism.

2014 COMPTON CROOK AWARD FINALIST. The Brogardi appeared out of nowhere, and -- telegraphing their peaceful intentions -- they landed in the middle of nowhere: New York State's Catskills Mountains resorts. It was an alien invasion, of the most peaceful, friendly kind. But there had to be something sinister behind it all, right? Movie executive Jake Berman lives fiction for a living, promoting movies to the masses. He's happy, and only moderately harried. But his peaceful existence is thrown into overdrive when one of the aliens sets his sights beyond the decaying resorts of the east -- when he decides it's time to invade Hollywood Daniel M. Kimmel is a film critic and professor of film. His book on the history of FOX TV, The Fourth Network received the Cable Center Book Award. His other books include a history of DreamWorks, The Dream Team , and I'll Have What She's Having: Behind the Scenes of the Great Romantic Comedies . His collection of essays, Jar Jar Binks Must Die... and other Observations about Science Fiction Movies , was a 2012 nominee for the Hugo Award for Best Related Work. He is a past president of the Boston Society of Film Critics, and current co-chair of the Boston Online Film Critics Association. This is his first novel. " Kimmel's first novel is] a true joy... let's hope there are more to come." --Don Sakers, Analog Science Fiction and Fact "This is the book we've been waiting for from Dan Kimmel -- funny, knowing, fast paced, full of humor, and told with a big heart. An absolute joy." ---Robert J. Sawyer, Hugo Award-winning author of Red Planet Blues "Dan Kimmel's first novel is a funny and delightful tour de force that will appeal to movie fans as well as science-fiction readers." --Michael A. Burstein, John W. Campbell Award-winning author of I Remember the Future "Exceptionally funny... pretty damned spectacular... this is the funniest book of the year and one of the best debut SF novels in ages " --Chris Garcia, The Drink Tank

“Jewish stories,” writes Adam Biro, “resemble every people’s stories.” Yet at the same time there is no better way to understand the soul, history, millennial suffering, or, crucially, the joys of the Jewish people than through such tales—“There’s nothing,” writes Biro, “more revelatory of the Jewish being.” With Is It Good for the Jews? Biro offers a sequel to his acclaimed collection of stories Two Jews on a Train . Through twenty-nine tales—some new, some old, but all finely wrought and rich in humor—Biro spins stories of characters coping with the vicissitudes and reverses of daily life, while simultaneously painting a poignant portrait of a world of unassimilated Jewish life that has largely been lost to the years. From rabbis competing to see who is the most humble, to the father who uses suicide threats to pressure his children into visiting, to three men berated by the Almighty himself for playing poker, Biro populates his stories with memorable characters and absurd—yet familiar—situations, all related with a dry wit and spry prose style redolent of the long tradition of Jewish storytelling. A collection simultaneously of foibles and fables, adversity and affection, Is It Good for the Jews? reminds us that if in the beginning was the word, then we can surely be forgiven for expecting a punch line to follow one of these days.

Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, was--as Nicholas Delbanco writes--"world famous in his lifetime," yet now he has been "almost wholly forgotten." Like Delbanco himself, Sally Ormsby Thompson Robinson--the narrator of this novel and the Count's fictional, last-surviving relative--is "haunted" by one of history's most fascinating and remarkable figures. On par with Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, Count Rumford was, among many other things, a politician, a spy, a philanthropist, and above all, a scientist. Based on countless historical documents, including letters and essays by Thompson himself, The Count of Concord brings to life the remarkable career of Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford.

A young Canadian marches over the Pyrenees and enters into history by joining the International Brigades--men and women from around the world who volunteered to fight against fascism in the Spanish Civil War. This new edition of Ted Allan's novel, This Time a Better Earth, reintroduces readers to the electrifying milieu of the Spanish Civil War and Madrid, which for a short time in the 1930s became the epicentre of a global struggle between democracy and fascism. This Time a Better Earth, first published in 1939, tells the story of Canadian Bob Curtis from the time of his arrival in Spain and the idealism and trials of the international volunteers. Allan's novel achieves the distinction of being both a work of considerable literary and historical significance and a real page-turner. This is the first installment of a series of titles to be published in the Canadian Literature Collection under the Canada and the Spanish Civil War banner. This is a large-scale project devoted to the recovery and presentation of Canadian cultural production about the Spanish Civil War (spanishcivilwar.ca), directed by Bart Auteur and Emily Robins Sharpe. A young Canadian marches over the Pyrenees and enters into history by joining the International Brigades--men and women from around the world who volunteered to fight against fascism in the Spanish Civil War. Published in English.

Loosely based on the Haitian slave insurrection of 1791, Babouk is a biting account of colonialism at its peak. By using the imagination of the novelist to fill in the gaps in the historical record, Endore is able to show us how slavery felt to the slaves who experienced it. His novel is rare for its depiction of the shared history of the slaves and its attention to the variety of the slave experience. It provides the reader with a vivid history of Haiti and a compelling account of slavery and rebellion.

The first book in an exciting new Victorian murder mystery series featuring a young female detective In 19th century Brighton, England spirit mediums are all the fashion--especially Miss Eustace, a psychic who claims to produce apparitions of the dead, and oleaginous Mr. Bradley, a self-proclaimed spirit healer. Diminutive Mina Scarletti, a writer of horror stories, is sure that her widowed mother and friends are in the hands of cheats and extortionists so she enlists the help of Daniel Hamid, an Anglo-Indian doctor, her charming but disreputable brother, Richard, and Richard's mistress, Nellie, to expose the frauds. But the scheming criminals have spread their nets wide, and dramatic s�ances easily convince and captivate the vulnerable, including Daniel's disabled sister Eliza. When Mina's determined campaign backfires she only succeeds in adding to Miss Eustace's fame. With chaos reigning in the Scarletti house, Mina and Richard must turn to desperate methods to outwit the illusionists and reveal the truth.

Esther, seventeen years old, wild and rebellious, is sent from Israel to Cameroon to stay with her hardheaded uncle Sicourelle, who is charged with straightening her out. But Esther resists her uncle's plans for her future-which include marriage to a cousin-and in the privileged indolence of postcolonial Africa, she looks to the past instead. Using sepia portraits and scraps of letters, Esther pieces together the history of her family, a once-grand Egyptian-Jewish clan, and its displacement from Cairo in the 1950s to Israel, West Africa, and New York. As the worn photographs yield their secrets, Esther uncovers a rich tale of wives and ex-wives; revolving mistresses and crushing marriages; intrigues and disappointments; poignant contrats between the living past and the dead present. In sensuous, inventive prose, Matalon penetrates the mysteries of cultural exile and family life to produce a first novel that is mature, authentic, and deeply moving.

"Judith Arcana's remarkable feat in Hello. This is Jane. is to paint, tile by tile, a complex mosaic of compelling linked stories- children's playgrounds and adult tattoo parlors, ill-advised lovers and underground abortion activists. In the mainstream and on the edges, you'll feel the urgency of the struggle for reproductive justice as you turn these pages." -Cindy Cooper, Founding Director of Words of Choice and The Reproductive Freedom Festival, Judith Arcana has taught and written about motherhood and reproductive justice for decades. The prose and poetry of Our Mothers' Daughters, Every Mother's Son, and What if your mother are feminist classics. The stories in this new collection, rooted in her experience as a Jane in Chicago's pre-Roe v. Wade underground abortion service, were written as the United States has moved relentlessly into constraining motherhood and denying reproductive justice. By necessity, these stories reach from the past into the future, offering history and hope. "I'm profoundly grateful to Judith Arcana for writing these vital, electrifying stories. With abortion rights in America being stripped away-state by state, clinic by clinic-we need to hear from those who've fought this battle before. Arcana is a Jane; her work in the pre-Roe abortion underground has provide the seeds for her fiction, stories rooted in essential history to spark action in our terrifying present." -Leni Zumas, Author of Red Clocks

"In the course of an impressive career as a writer, Herbert Gold has demonstrated many gifts, among them his talent for mak-ing high drama of ordinary events, ordinary people." - Chicago Tribune Book World "Gold...has a sharp eye for detail."- The Washington Times Magazine "Not just a good book, but a great one."- Daily Mail (London) "Herbert Gold... gives his stories a wry, bright air of wonder...he is a born storyteller."- New York Times "One of the most gifted writers in America."- Detroit Times Important writers are expected to gather together collections of their shorter works-the obligatory book of stories or essays. In this collection, Herbert Gold discards convention, and instead combines fiction and non-fiction themes that have been important to him as a writer and social thinker. This "interchange between fact and fiction," as Gold writes, "presents the picture of an American mind wrestling with the American mentality." And that mind ranges wide: from the miseries of Haiti to the disasters of Biafra; from the new universities and the beatniks and hippies of San Francisco in the 1960s to the literary life and encounters with random violence, love, death, and sexuality in the present. Portions of this book have been published in periodicals as varied as Esquire and Look , Hudson Review , and Tri-Quarterly , and some appear here for the first time. For this edition, Gold bridges the sections with new introductions, which link the specific works, the times, and his life. The book includes the savage and moving story "A Death on the East Side," and his meditation on the doom of Biafra and the meaning of its fate. He has added two new essays, "King of the Cleveland Beatniks," about his brother, and "Quality Time with Sonny Barger," about the former president of the Hell's Angels Oakland Chapter. These show his consistent interest in what many would see as the margins of social life. Of the title, the author writes: " The Magic Will " seeks to make the real world unreal and magical, and the unreal and magical world practical and real." Amusing, touching, playful, ultimately deeply serious, this book by Herbert Gold further illuminates the mind and heart of a superb writer. It will be a joy to those interested in the humanities, as well as cultural history and social awareness in the broadest sense. Herbert Gold is a novelist, short story writer, essayist, and occasional journalist, who has made his living as a writer for fifty years.

A humorous collection of love stories from an award-winning author who has been called "a compassionate and witty satirist" ( Kirkus Reviews ). From Holocaust survivors to Yiddish artists, a petty thief and a Polish shiksa with a passion for Jewish history, what unites the delectable characters in Curt Leviant's witty collection of romantic tales is the universal desire for love and admiration. With settings as various as the Deep South, Boston, New York, Italy, Israel, each story is a wry look at romantic pursuit, each relationship as unique as the lovers themselves. Whether or not love succeeds for Leviant's all-too-human characters, the journey is always filled with humor and heart.