In April 1864, the Union garrison at Fort Pillow was comprised of almost six hundred troops, about half of them black. The Confederacy, incensed by what it saw as a crime against nature, sent its fiercest cavalry commander, Nathan Bedford Forrest, to attack the fort with about 1,500 men. The Confederates overran the fort and drove the Federals into a deadly crossfire. Only sixty-two of the U.S. colored troops survived the fight unwounded. Many accused the Confederates of massacring the black troops after the fort fell and fighting should have ceased. The "Fort Pillow Massacre" became a Union rallying cry and cemented resolve to see the war through to its conclusion. Harry Turtledove has written a dramatic recreation of an astounding battle, telling a bloody story of courage and hope, freedom and hatred. With brilliant characterization of all the main figures, this is a novel that reminds us that Fort Pillow was more than a battle---it was a clash of ideas between men fighting to define what being an American ought to mean.

Originally written in 1950, then revised and first published in 1992, The Dwarfs is Harold Pinter's only novel. Set in postwar Britain, The Dwarfs describes the intertwined lives and concerns of four young Londoners: Len, working at the Euston train station but fascinated by abstract mathematics; Mark, a sometime actor; and Virginia and Pete, a young couple trying to define their relationship amid the powerful, sometimes destructive forces at work among the four. In the evolution of this quadrilateral friendship and the strains it creates, Harold Pinter explores how ordinary lives are molded by the limitations and boundaries of sexuality, intimacy, and mortality. It is a world populated by dwarfs -- young people who have departed, only to leave emptiness. Funny, vivid, and haunting, The Dwarfs is a brilliantly intriguing and chillingly perceptive novel by a writer whose imagination has shaped our lives.

"1950. Thousands of Yemeni Jews have immigrated to the newly founded Israel in search of a better life. In an overcrowded immigrant camp in Rosh Ha'ayin, Yaqub, a shy young man, happens upon Saida, a beautiful girl singing by the river. In the midst of chaos and uncertainty, they fall in love. But they weren't supposed to; Saida is married and has a child, and a married woman has no place befriending another man. 1995. Thirty-something Zohara, Saida's daughter, has been living in New York City-a city that feels much less complicated than Israel, where she grew up wishing her skin were lighter, her illiterate mother's Yemeni music quieter, and that the father who always favored her was alive. She hasn't looked back since leaving home, rarely in touch with her mother or sister, Lizzie, and missing out on her nephew Yoni's childhood. But when Lizzie calls to tell her their mother has died, she gets on a plane to Israel with no return ticket. Soon Zohara finds herself on an unexpected path that leads to shocking truths about her family-including dangers that lurk for impressionable young men and secrets that force her to question everything she thought she knew about her parents, her heritage, and her own future"--

The Queen's conjurer, Doctor John Dee, is an Elizabethan mathematician, cryptographer, and mystic commissioned by Her Majesty's spymaster, Sir Francis Walsingham, to suss out a noble Count who governs an island in the English Channel. Dee's mission? Uncover treason, reveal terrorists, and unveil threats to The Crown. Embarking, Dr. Dee is accosted by an eager acolyte. The unknown teen playwright, William, has just endured his first flop-Prince Amleth. Will solicits the renowned scholar's mentorship. A winter tide sees these unlikely collaborators set sail for the Channel Islands to sleuth out sedition on Protestant England's strategic outpost. On Illyria, clues appear as Dee comes to rely on the surprising ingenuity of his young companion. Clandestine powers collide as Queen Elizabeth's spy tracks each slim lead. When Dee is brought to the brink of destruction, can his incipient discovery of Count Orsino's recusants and loyalists be thwarted?

"The literature of the twenty-first century will belong to Neuman." —Roberto Bolaño Searching for an inn, the enigmatic traveler Hans stops in a small city on the border between Saxony and Prussia. The next morning, Hans meets an old organ-grinder in the market square and immediately finds himself enmeshed in an intense debate—on identity and what it is that defines us—from which he cannot break free. Indefinitely stuck in Wandernburg until his debate with the organ-grinder is concluded, he begins to meet the various characters who populate the town, including a young freethinker named Sophie. Though she is engaged to be married, Sophie and Hans begin a relationship that defies contemporary mores about female sexuality and what can and cannot be said about it. Traveler of the Century is a deeply intellectual novel, chock-full of discussions about philosophy, history, literature, love, and translation. It is a book that looks to the past in order to have us reconsider the conflicts of our present. The winner of Spain's prestigious Alfaguara Prize and the National Critics Prize, Traveler of the Century marks the English-language debut of Andrés Neuman, a writer described by Roberto Bolaño as being "touched by grace."

Long Remember is the first realistic novel about the Civil War. Originally published in the 1930s, and out of print sincer the 50s, this book received rave reviews from the NY Times Book Review, and was a main selection of the Literary Guild. It is the account of the Battle of Gettysburg, as viewed by a pacifist who comes to accept the nasty necessity of combat, and lives an intense and skewed romance along the way.

Marcel Schwob (18671905) was one of the key symbolist writers, standing in French literature alongside such names as Stphane Mallarm, Octave Mirbeau, Andr Gide, Lon Bloy, Jules Renard, Rmy de Gourmont, and Alfred Jarry. His best-known works are Double Heart (1891), The King In The Gold Mask (1892), and Imaginary Lives (1896). Imaginary Lives contains twenty-two mythopoeic literary portraits of figures from ancient history, art history, and the history of crime and punishment. From demi-gods, sorcerers, incendiaries, wantons and philosophers of the ancient world, to the "poet of hate" Cecco Angiolieri and the painter Paolo Uccello, through to the pirates William Kidd and Major Stede-Bonnet, and finally Burke and Hare, the serial killers; Schwob presents a vivid array of characters who display all that is macabre, deviant and magnificently terrifying in human beings and in life. In Imaginary Lives, Schwob has created a "secret" masterpiece that joins other biographical glossaries such as Jorge Luis Borges' A Universal History Of Infamy and Alfonso Reyes' Real And Imagined Portraits in the pantheon of classic speculative fiction, of which Schwob's book is the dark progenitor. Livid with decadent imagery, Imaginary Lives resonates loudly today with its themes of temporality, myth, violence and sexuality, and stands as a major work of the fin-de-si]cle. Solar Nocturnal presents classic literature and art by key forerunners of modernism.

This masterpiece novel -- by the internationally acclaimed, young South African writer Damon Galgut--about E.M. Forster, his life, struggles with homosexuality, and the writing of his universally loved novel A Passage to India will call to mind the international success of Colm Toibin's The Master . For readers of Colm Toibin, Ian McEwan, and J.M. Coetzee. In 1912, the SS Birmingham approaches India. On board is Morgan Forster, novelist and man of letters, who is embarking on a journey of discovery. As Morgan stands on deck, the promise of a strange new future begins to take shape before his eyes. The seeds of a story start to gather at the corner of his mind: a sense of impending menace, lust in close confines, under a hot, empty sky. It will be another twelve years, and a second, and much longer time spent in India, before A Passage to India , E.M. Forster's most beloved work of literature, is completed. During these years, Morgan will come to a recognition of his homosexuality and of the infinite subtleties and complexities of human nature. Arctic Summer is an intimate portrait of the man who became one of Britain's finest novelists, his struggle to find a way of living and being, and a stunningly vivid evocation of the mysterious alchemy of the creative process. Galgut animates the literary times in which Forster lived with encounters with some of the writers of the day, including Virginia and Leonard Woolf and D.H. Lawrence . Galgut also brilliantly and poignantly describes Forster's two closest relationships, enduring and sadly unfulfilled. Arctic Summer is a literary masterpiece, by one of the finest writers of his generation."

Historical novel about the struggles of the German Communist anti-Hitlerian networks from 1937 to the end of World War II.

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.

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."

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.

Lucy Derrick is a young woman of good breeding and poor finances. After the death of her beloved father, she is forced to maintain a shabby dignity as the unwanted boarder of her tyrannical uncle, fending off marriage to a local mill owner. But just as she is on the cusp of accepting a life of misery, events take a stunning turn when a handsome stranger--the poet and notorious rake Lord Byron--arrives at her house, stricken by what seems to be a curse, and with a cryptic message for Lucy. Suddenly her unfortunate circumstances are transformed in ways at once astonishing and seemingly impossible. With the world undergoing an industrial transformation, and with England on the cusp of revolution, Lucy is drawn into a dangerous conspiracy in which her life, and her country's future, are in the balance. Inexplicably finding herself at the center of cataclysmic events, Lucy is awakened to a world once unknown to her: where magic and mortals collide, and the forces of ancient nature and modern progress are at war for the soul of England . . . and the world. The key to victory may be connected to a cryptic volume whose powers of enchantment are unbounded. Now, challenged by ruthless enemies with ancient powers at their command, Lucy must harness newfound mystical skills to prevent catastrophe and preserve humanity's future. And enthralled by two exceptional men with designs on her heart, she must master her own desires to claim the destiny she deserves. " The Twelfth Enchantment" is the most captivating work to date of a master literary conjurer. "From the Hardcover edition."

A seductive and intriguing journey from the humble Persian Jewish quarter to the fascinating world of shahs, soothsayers, eunuchs, and sultanas, "Harem" follows three generations of strong-willed and cunning women: Rebekah -- a poor girl married to the abusive blacksmith, Jacob the fatherless -- who emerges from her disastrous match with a mysterious brand between her breasts; Gold Dust, Rebekah's treasured daughter, who enters the opulent and perilous world of the harem and captivates the shah with her singing bones; and Gold Dust's daughter, the revered and feared albino princess Raven, who will one day rule the empire.Rich in visual imagery, "Harem" vividly depicts the exotic bazaars and dangerous alleys of the city and palace chambers brimming with conspiracy and betrayal -- as well as love and redemption. A skillfully crafted, intricately textured novel, "Harem" represents the beginning of a remarkable literary career.

In "One Basket" by Edna Ferber, readers are treated to a collection of short stories that provide a delightful glimpse into the lives of various characters. Through Ferber's skillful storytelling, these tales explore the intricacies of human relationships, dreams, and the intricacies of daily existence. The book's narrative diversity spans from the bustling streets of New York City to the quiet rural settings, making each story a unique experience. Themes of love, ambition, and personal growth are woven throughout, painting a vivid picture of American life in the early 20th century. Edna Ferber's masterful prose captures the essence of the human spirit, offering a rich and emotional reading experience for all.

Critics in Britain are already raving about Charlotte Mendelson’s excoriatingly funny yet deeply humane novel about a glamorous London family that happens to be falling apart. The Rubins are the perfect family. They’re wonderfully happy and very glamorous. The mother, Claudia, is the ultimate Jewish a powerful rabbi known for her charm, brains, and determination. Now this dynastic Jewish family is getting ready to marry off the perfect eldest son. History, community, and even gastronomy unite the guests lucky enough to attend this joyous occasion. But when the groom -- one minute before exchanging vows -- bolts with the wrong woman, the myths that have defined this family take on darker overtones. Mendelson’s astonishing eye for detail, as well as her just-right balance of plot and character, makes the unfolding of this story an uncommon treat. In a marvelously compressed style that also bursts with life, she reveals how all four adult Rubin children, and their parents, struggle with huge secrets, sexual frustration and sexual experimentation, and many betrayals. Charlotte Mendelson opens a window on a realm rarely explored in British the complicated world of English Jewry. But to watch this seemingly blessed family drastically, disastrously fall apart before regaining balance is to understand that their struggles -- like all of ours -- are universal ones.

"Katz lives up to her first novel's potential in this moving, funny, wholly original picaresque about a nice Jewish girl. . . . The pasts and common destiny of two remarkable women--related with perfect timing in Sofia's convincing Yiddish-tinged English--come together beautifully in this nicely crafted, emotionally satisfying, and well-researched historical fiction."-- Publishers Weekly " The Escape Artist , a brilliant work of historical fiction . . . fast-paced and gorgeously written novel" -- Liberty Press Set in the brothels and gangster dens of Jewish Buenos Aires at the beginning of the twentieth century, The Escape Artist catapults us into the lives of Sofia Teitelbaum and Hankus Lubarsky. Sofia, a nice Jewish girl from Poland, is lured away from home by Tutsik Goldenberg, a wealthy traveling businessman who claims to be a lonely Argentine diamond merchant in search of a wife. Upon arriving in Buenos Aires, Tutsik dumps Sofia at his sister's brothel. Hankus, also a nice Jewish girl from Poland, is passing as a man. Having escaped the pogroms of Poland that killed her family, she lives her life as a handsome and mysterious magician and escape artist. When Tutsik spots the talented juggler and acrobat Hankus he envisions success as his manager, seeing Hankus as the means to get out from under his sister's thumb. Sofia and Hankus fall in love and their attempts to walk the tightrope of love, freedom, and independence are quickly put to the test. Sex, deception, magic, and love are the main ingredients of this tour de force novel by Lambda Literary Award winner Judith Katz. In The Escape Artist , Katz reveals that all human interactions consist of love and hate, deception and candor, altruism and self-interest. This is as true in our lives today as it was in an immigrant community at the turn of the last century. Judith Katz is the author of two published novels, The Escape Artist and Running Fiercely Toward a High Thin Sound , which won a Lambda Literary Award for Best Lesbian Fiction. She has received Bush Foundation, McKnight Foundation, and National Endowment fellowships for fiction.

In France, on the eve of the Revolution, a young man named Claude Page sets out to become the most ingenious and daring inventor of his time. In the course of a career filled with violence and passion, Claude learns the arts of enameling and watchmaking from an irascible, defrocked abbé, apprentices himself to a pornographic bookseller, and applies his erotic erudition to the seduction of the wife of an impotent wigmaker. But it is Claude's greatest device-a talking mechanical head-that both crowns his career and leads to an execution as tragic as that of Marie Antoinette, and far more bizarre. Hailed by critics for the shimmering brilliance of its inventions and its uncanny fidelity to the textures of the past, A Case of Curiosities places Allen Kurzweil securely in the ranks of the finest literary artists of our time.

Herod: A Biography is a book written by Jacob S. Minkin that explores the life and legacy of one of the most notorious figures in biblical history, Herod the Great. The book provides a detailed and comprehensive account of Herod's life, from his rise to power in Judea to his death and the aftermath of his reign. Minkin draws on a wide range of historical sources, including ancient texts, archaeological evidence, and modern scholarship, to paint a vivid portrait of this complex and often controversial figure. The book covers Herod's many accomplishments, including his impressive building projects and his efforts to modernize Judea, as well as his many personal flaws and failures. Minkin also explores the political and religious context of Herod's reign, including the tensions between the Jewish people and their Roman rulers, and the various factions and power struggles that shaped the region during this time. Overall, Herod: A Biography is a fascinating and insightful look at one of the most intriguing figures in ancient history, and a must-read for anyone interested in biblical history, ancient politics, or the complexities of human nature.This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the old original and may contain some imperfections such as library marks and notations. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions, that are true to their original work.