Oskar, a survivor of the Holocaust, is a man of little faith. Despite his inability to find answers, he persists in asking questions that all human beings have a right to ask. He encounters diverse characters, such as Bella, a New York prostitute, mystic Martin Buber, and an anti-Semitic high school teacher on the Canadian prairies. Strong language.

"Here is a singular story of survival, an earthly miracle wrought by family devotion, gardens, horses, guts. A compelling read."—Carolyn Heilbrun In July 1998, when Maxine Kumin's horse bolted at a carriage-driving clinic, she was not expected to live. Yet, less than a year later, her progress pronounced a miracle by her doctors, she was at work on this journal of her astonishing recovery. She tells of her time "inside the halo," the near-medieval device that kept her head immobile during weeks of intensive care and rehabilitation, of the lasting "rehab" friendships, and of the loving family who always believed she would heal. "[S]he resonates wisdom while announcing a triumph of body and soul."—Anne Roiphe, New York Times Book Review "Maxine Kumin brings the sensitivity and imagination of a poet to her extraordinary ordeal."—Richard Selzer, author of Mortal Lessons: Notes on the Art of Surgery "From a singular experience she has created a lesson that is universal, which, it seems to me, is the essence of being a poet."—Abraham Verghese, author of The Tennis Partner

A biography that doesn’t quite exist, about a violinist who can’t be found, as told by people who don’t agree on much. Novelist Geoff Berner has been tasked with writing a biography of DD, a mysterious, charismatic, chimerical musician who has, it seems, dropped off the face of the earth. In the course of his search for DD, Berner interviews her friends, ex-bandmates, ex-lovers, and others. They paint such variable portraits of her that each successive attempt to describe her casts doubt on the previous testimony. As his project is taken over by the lively, infuriating, entertaining tales, a wounded, gifted, and complex DD starts to emerge from all the eyewitness accounts and swear-to-God true stories. Who is DD? Where did she go? And why didn’t that book get written? Travel through a world of knockabout musicians and chancers, on the trail of an inimitable artist who truly lives in the moment, for better or worse.

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.

Even before his birth, Johnny Baker's life is in danger. His mother breaks the law when she has her fertilized egg endowed with genes that will give her son the potential to become a visual artist. Born in 2038, John Firth Baker is the first genetically engineered artist. At the age of nineteen, at the threshold of his career, he is murdered. Now, ten years after his death, Baker has become famous. An art curator has organized a show of his work, and his biography-culled from journals, e-mails, and interviews with those who knew him best-is published. The Song of the Earth is this "biography." It presents a powerful and haunting portrait of an artist as a young man in the twenty-first century. Baker is born into a world transformed by technology: genetic profiles, space travel, and controlled housing communities are commonplace. Global warming has altered the environment. A planetary gender war is raging, familial structures are shattered, and new religions contend with the old. Yet human needs remain the same: the search for love, the desire for approval, the longing for fame, and the quest for knowledge. The Song of the Earth is a hypnotic novel about our desire to control our destinies, our yearning for immortality, and the very human impulse to create art. With prose, poetry, and images, Nissenson tells an original tale that brilliantly captures the experience of another time and place.

used book, biography

Cowan, Paul

Hafftka began writing Conscious/Unconscious in 1973 and completed it in 2006. Conscious/Unconscious is a book of short stories narrated in the first person, weaving an inner life made real by paradoxes and conflicting drives. The 27 drawings created for this book add another dimension to the written words. Hafftka is a visual artist represented in the permanent collections of The Metropolitan Museum, The NY MoMA, The Carnegie Museum of Art, The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Brooklyn Museum, and other museums. He has had one-man shows at numerous galleries in the U.S and abroad.

One may contend that "Replenishing Jessica" is neither a novel nor an essay, but one cannot deny it is prose. After all, a poet wrote it and he put into is such a phrase as, "He wrapped his dreams in a sigh," which is good even if it does not belong in this novel..." So wrote a critic contemporary of Maxwell Bodenheim in December 1925. Shortly afterwards, the novel was yanked from bookshelves and repressed for reasons of obscenity. It would be almost four years later that Replenishing Jessica would finally be cleared of its charges by a New York judge and available for sale. A new edition was published by Boni & Liveright and sold in excess of 10,000 copies mere days after its revival. Success had landed on Bodenheim's doorstep, but would only last a short while before he was once again at the cusp of personal and financial failure. Replenishing Jessica fell out of print in the early 1950s and has since been forgotten in the annals of Depression-era American literature. Though Bodenheim wrote the novel with its suggestive title in order to turn a quick buck, he managed to also instill into the book a magical realism accurately capturing the sights and sound of Jazz Age New York. Now reprinted for the first time in over 70 years, Bodenheim scholar, Paul Maher Jr., has researched and edited a new edition of Replenishing Jessica for the 21st-century complete with an extensive introduction tracing the history of the book and a biography of Bodenheim between 1925 to 1928.

This rare text contains a tragedy that details an injured WWI veteran s endeavours to assimilate back into normal life. Written by the German revolutionary playwright Ernst Toller during his time spent in the prison-fortress of Niederschoenenfeld, this fascinating and engaging play is a must-have for fans of his work and collectors of antiquarian literature. This scarce text was originally published in 1922 and is proudly republished here with a new prefatory biography of the author. Ernst Toller (1893 1939) was a German playwright best known for his seminal expressionist plays. This text has been elected for republication due to its immense literary value and in the hope that it will continue to be read and studied for generations to come."

Book by Fraser, James