A literary sensation in Hungary now available in English, György Spiró's masterwork is at once a gripping page-turner, a magiterial historical epic, and a riotous road novel. Set in the tumultuous first century A.D., Captivity recounts the adventures of Uri, a bookish, hapless young Roman Jew.

From the the Academy Award]-nominated screenwriter of "Breakfast at Tiffanys" and "The Manchurian Candidate" comes a story unavailable for almost 50 years. A New York literary agent in love with a Hollywood starlet risks his life to uncover the secret behind a Nobel Prize-winning authors lost final manuscript.

Product Description Marcus Brennan is a successful small-town lawyer on the verge of a breakdown. His wife, Schelle, thinks it’s post-traumatic stress disorder from his years as a POW in Vietnam. Planning the dedication of a memorial for Vietnam soldiers, she asks Marcus to say a few words at the ceremony, hoping the experience will help to exorcise his demons. But after agreeing to defend Estella Pritchett, a social worker accused of murdering her lover, Marcus begins a downward spiral into the murky depths of his own past–where sex is violent, where love means betrayal, and where his own memories have the power to destroy him. . . . From Publishers Weekly The author of Harry and Catherine and Absent Friends , among other distinguished literary works, Busch has reached a new level of achievement with this taut and gripping novel. Former Marine Phantom pilot Mark Brennan is a small-town attorney in upstate New York. He has a devoted wife who was active as an anti-war demonstrator, a high-school-age son who seems to be on the edge of big trouble, a daughter in New York who may have made a fatal romantic liaison, and his own demons--memories of Vietnam. Code-named Goblin, Brennan was shot down and captured by the Viet Cong. After several soul-crushing months enduring diabolical torture, he managed a bloody escape. Uncomfortable with his local-hero status and his wife's determination to perpetuate it, Brennan has an uneasy and distant relationship with his family; he lives inside his head most of the time, trying to suppress almost hallucinatory flashbacks to his desolate childhood and his later torments as a POW. But when he takes a pro bono murder case, defending a woman accused of killing her lover during rough sex, the past starts to intrude. Layer upon layer of lies and unbearable truths are peeled away as the trial progresses and Brennan succumbs to his own despair. In his disturbing, thrilling, imaginative exploration of some of the darkest sides of human experience, Busch has deftly transmuted rage and anguish into an extraordinary novel, one that packs a visceral wallop. Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal Mark Brennan was a Marine pilot who became a prisoner of the Vietcong. Now a lawyer in upstate New York, he confronts a failing marriage, a troubled son, and a dangerously seductive client on trial for murdering her lover in a motel bed. Both attorney and client suffer a dark legacy of past violence, and in both cases post-traumatic stress disorder leads to further destruction. As first-person narrator, Brennan observes that "the best defense is a good story," and his carefully wrought closing argument becomes a moving apology for his own life. Although the subplot involving Brennan's daughter (whom we encounter only via long-distance telephone) is not entirely convincing, the central narrative remains powerful. Busch's two previous works are Harry and Catherine (LJ 3/1/90) and Absent Friends (LJ 4/1/89), a collection of short stories. - Al bert E. Wilhelm, Tennessee Technologi cal Univ., Cookeville Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Kirkus Reviews ``The best defense is a good story,'' Vietnam vet/lawyer hero Mark Brennan obsessively tells himself. The disintegration of Brennan's own ``story'' through his involvement with a sex killing makes a painfully focused one for Busch (Harry and Catherine, 1990, etc.). Brennan's client, tiny Estella Pritchett, is accused of strangling almost-divorced radio-station owner Larry Ziegler during a bout of rough sex. Brennan plans to defend Estella by arguing that Ziegler's abusive behavior caused her to flash back to her abused childhood and strike out to defend herself. But he knows that Estella wasn't really defending herself: she'd already tied Ziegler to the bed at the Stone's Throw Motel--the same bed she's begun to use for her increasingly dangerous liaisons with Brennan. Drawn as he is to Estella, Brennan--already

Explores medieval French and English romances in their relation to the literary aesthetic of that vanished age as well as to the evolution of narrative. The framework of this investigation is chronological, beginning in the twelfth century with the work of Chrétien de Troyes and following through to the great Arhurian Prose Cycle and its remodelling by Sir Thomas Malory, whose mind and art the author strives constantly to elucidate. As it seeks out the meaning and design of the early masterpieces, the study transcends its chronological framework: major problems of style and technique arise that are of fundamental importance to the contemporary novel as well. Related phenomena in medieval painting, sculpture and manuscript ilumination are drawn upon to illustrate and reinforce the significance of the author's discoveries.

My laughter came tearing out of me, child-eyed, leaping in front of your door, singing Day in the face of Night. Mildred Faintly gives power to female voices from around the world that have not received the literary recognition they deserved. With this stunning collection, Faintly presents us Styx - German-Jewish Else Lasker-Schüler's first poetry book, which in its entirety had not been published in English. Until now. The exquisite translation goes beyond a faithful line-by-line representation of the German text. It brings Lasker-Schüler to life in the nuanced and coruscating complexity that characterized her personality: irreverent, sensuous, courageous, loving, lonely, funny, facetious, earnest, while covering the wide thematic range of the only woman poet to play a major role in the Expressionist movement.

This novel holds within its pages an unusual love story that spans three decades and three continents. When Max first meets Esther, she is a young Australian girl filled with passion for life and boundless enthusiasm. His love for her continues through all the changes that take place in her life - her move from London, where they meet, to Jerusalem where she explores the Judaism that until then was just on the fringe of her life; the literary prize she wins that brings her back into his orbit; her commitment to Israel that breaks their relationship; and then finally, a coincidental meeting in the middle of a war in Lebanon. Max never stops loving Esther, even as she matures from a naive girl to a woman of depth and wisdom. Love takes many forms, and readers will experience all the complexities of emotion as they discover the ties that bind a man to a woman.

Winner of the Helen and Stan Vine Jewish Book Award and finalist for the Man Booker Prize In Far to Go, one of our most accomplished young writers takes us inside the world of an affluent Jewish family in Prague during the lead-up to Hitler's invasion of Czechoslovakia. In 1939, Pavel and Anneliese Bauer are secular Jews whose lives are turned upside down by the arrival of Hitler. They are unable to leave the country in time to avoid deportation, but they do manage to get their six-year-old son Pepik a place on a Kindertransport. Meanwhile, a fascinating and compelling present-day strand in the story slowly reveals the unexpected fates of each of the Bauers. Through a series of surprising twists, Pick leads us to ask: What does it mean to cling to identity in the face of persecution? And what are the consequences if you attempt to change your identity? Inspired by the harrowing five-year journey Alison Pick's own grandparents embarked upon from their native Czechoslovakia to Canada during the Second World War, Far to Gois an epic historical novel that traces one family's journey through these tumultuous and traumatic events. A layered, beautifully written, moving, and suspenseful story by one of our rising literary stars.

“… the shadows of death are the spices of love, and eternal life would be the school of absolute coldness. We love a being that the morrows threaten, and love her all the more as she is more threatened….” Albert Caraco was born in 1919 in Constantinople in a Jewish family established in Turkey for four centuries. He grew up in Prague, Berlin, and Paris, where he attended Janson-de-Sailly high school, and got his degree from the École des Hautes Études Commerciales. In 1939, he and his parents fled Europe to South America at the break of World War II, and settled in Montevideo after living in Brazil and Argentina, where his first books were published. Albert Caraco acquired Uruguayan citizenship and retained it for the rest of his life. Back in Paris in 1949, he started writing his immense body of work, part of which remains unpublished to this day. An ambiguous figure, Albert Caraco built nothing short of a baroque literary cathedral, rife with contradictions, yet rising from an uncompromisingly pessimistic foundation. In 1971, consistent with what he had announced recurrently in his semainiers (weekly diaries), he killed himself just a few hours after his father died. The death of his mother in 1963 was the occasion for a reckoning of his relationship with the woman he reproached for having given him birth, while praising her for forming his taste and character and uprooting the sheer possibility of consoling illusions in her only son. The result was Post Mortem, a bittersweet lament and a love poem in prose that offers a glimpse into his bleak worldview and an abstract of his works.

As the author of this gripping narrative, Rabbi Abraham J. Twerski, M.D. makes his debut as a novelist par excellence. World renowned for his self-help books, in Light at the End of the Tunnel he departs from this mode to create characters that are compelling, vulnerable, witty, curious - and most of all, palpably human. The story revolves around a secular Jew, Alan Silverman, a successful lawyer, whose professional life has earned him wealth, prestige and a reputation for invincibility. Everything is going well for him, until a dreaded disease threatens to upend his carefully built personal empire. Suddenly faced with the prospect that his life may soon end, he searches for answers to questions he had never asked before. In the process, he discovers a new element in his life - a neshamah, an eternal soul. A world closed to him in the past - an eternal world of spiritual meaning - slowly unfolds as he relentlessly pursues the purpose of his life. Challenged and enthralled by the mystical teachings of Judaism, he explores the idea of an Afterlife and, most surprisingly, discovers the fulfillment of a life well lived. With the talent of a novelist, the deep insight of a master psychologist and the Torah wisdom of his heritage, Rabbi Dr. Twerski has achieved a powerful literary breakthrough. This one-of-a-kind book is an illuminating and uplifting masterpiece.

The purpose of this study is to find out how and why the "poetics of fiction" arose, its sources, and the materials from which it was created. A series of cultural choices made in archaic and classical Greece produced a clash between the traditional "poetics of truth", which derived poetry from divine inspiration and in the last analysis did not construe the poem as a work of art at all, and the new "poetics of fiction", which derived poetry from art. The eventual succession of the latter, culminating with the Poetics of Aristotle, amounted to an aesthetic revolution because, as a result of it, literary fiction, which since then has become a necessary framework for both the theory and practice of literature in Western tradition, was for the first time separated from non-fiction and given a status of its own.

A nineteenth-century epistolary novel about a vengeful woman, available to modern readers for the first time. In The Passions (1811), Countess Appollonia Zulmer, beautiful, rich, and popular, can have any man she wants, at least until she meets Count Wiemar, who rejects her in favor of Julia, a simple and obedient woman. Despondent and then furious, Appollonia vows revenge on the couple, leading to madness, suffering, and death. An epistolary novel about the destructive power of emotion, The Passions offers new insights into early feminism, romance, and early nineteenth-century religion. It is an engrossing, powerful work of literature, featuring one of the most memorable female villains of all time. This edition makes the engrossing novel available to modern readers for the first time.

In an insightful and original meditation on the writer's craft that is by turns descriptive and prescriptive, Delbanco explores how literary virtuosity is achieved, how the writing of fiction can be taught, and the way literature functions for writer and reader equally. The book includes a novella called "The Lost Suitcase," revolving around a famous anecdote about Hemingway's early work and how it came to be lost.

In Roman Eyes, Jas Elsner seeks to understand the multiple ways that art in ancient Rome formulated the very conditions for its own viewing, and as a result was complicit in the construction of subjectivity in the Roman Empire. Elsner draws upon a wide variety of visual material, from sculpture and wall paintings to coins and terra-cotta statuettes. He examines the different contexts in which images were used, from the religious to the voyeuristic, from the domestic to the subversive. He reads images alongside and against the rich literary tradition of the Greco-Roman world, including travel writing, prose fiction, satire, poetry, mythology, and pilgrimage accounts. The astonishing picture that emerges reveals the mindsets Romans had when they viewed art--their preoccupations and theories, their cultural biases and loosely held beliefs. Roman Eyes is not a history of official public art--the monumental sculptures, arches, and buildings we typically associate with ancient Rome, and that tend to dominate the field. Rather, Elsner looks at smaller objects used or displayed in private settings and closed religious rituals, including tapestries, ivories, altars, jewelry, and even silverware. In many cases, he focuses on works of art that no longer exist, providing a rare window into the aesthetic and religious lives of the ancient Romans.

"Century 21," a time machine in literary form, ignores the unity of time, space, and character. This tragicomical idyll of the future past mixes ancient and modern genres: Platonic dialogue and nineteenth-century romance, reportage and science fiction. At the book's core are two sisters, Ann Kar, a writer and survivor, and Carol, a suicidal artist. Considering herself a lunatic, Carol dreams about escaping from the earth to the moon (luna) and about the moon scholar, a lunar archeologist, who a thousand years after her death, while reconstructing terrestrial life, discovers the traces of her existence, falls in love with her, and begins to write about her - and his - erotic adventure. The result is a novel where Anna Karenina writes about Simone Weil, where Joseph Conrad meets Malcolm Lowry in Mexico, where Goethe presides over a literary institute made up of such members as Italo Svevo and Sextus Propertius, and where Djuna Barnes, dying from AIDS, visits Moses Maimonides in Japan. Ewa Kuryluk is fascinated by the repetition of the same situations and types, yet she's after her contemporaries who are starved for affection, lost in transit, ready to slip into somebody else's skin, and speaking in English, their second language, with a heavy accent. "Century 21" is a profoundly moving and original work.

The revelation that a long forgotten novel first published anonymously in 1834 is the work of Benjamin Disraeli and his sister Sarah is an exciting literary event. Newly discovered letters between brother and sister prove without doubt that it was written jointly by them. We do not have to look far for the reason for their secrecy. The vividly described election which forms the centrepiece of the story is clearly based on Disraeli's recent experiences as an unsuccessful candidate in two elections at High Wycombe. His political career had a long way to go and the last thing he wanted was to jeopardize it by revealing his motives in the past or his hopes for the future. The hero, Aubrey Bohun, has, like Disraeli, recently returned from mysterious travels in the East, but unlike him has his own castle and an income of £30,000 a year. Bohun obviously contains an element of wish fulfilment and allows the authors to incorporate in the novel elements of wish fulfilment and allows the authors to incorporate in the novel elements of a popular genre known in its day as 'silver fork' fiction – revelations of high life. Although there is much of this and of melodrama too, there is also some splendid social irony. Michael Foot says 'the volume is quite fit to takes its place in the true Disraeli canon and contains many gems which add fresh gleams to the portrait of Disraeli himself.' Two appendixes explain the literary detection that proved the book's authorship and the parallels between the politics of Aubrey Bohun and Disraeli.

"Dr. Adriaan" by Louis Couperus delves into the intricate world of family and domestic life, offering a compelling character study within the framework of psychological fiction. Couperus masterfully explores the complexities of relationships, revealing the subtle tensions and unspoken dramas that simmer beneath the surface of everyday interactions. A timeless exploration of families, this literary work offers a deep dive into the psychological landscape of its characters. Through nuanced prose, Couperus examines the enduring themes of human connection and the subtle yet powerful forces that shape our lives within the family unit. "Dr. Adriaan" remains a resonant and insightful portrayal of the human condition, showcasing the author's skill in capturing the nuances of familial bonds. This meticulously prepared edition preserves the original text for readers to experience Couperus's vision. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

"Lupoff writes with intelligence, humor, wisdom, and a zest for life. He had a lot of fun writing this book, and it shows; because of it, we have a lot of fun reading it."Joe Gores, author of Hammett Where Memory Hides is a guided tour through the life and career of mystery and science fiction's most versatile practitioner. Richard A. Lupoff has been a professional author for six decades, and a life-time fan of everything from pulp magazines to comic books, science fiction and mystery, and more. As the extensive bibliography (included in this book) demonstrates, Lupoff's credits run the gamut of fiction, nonfiction, mainstream publishing, and fan journals. In the 1960s, he penned All In Color For a Dime , a foundation-laying work for modern comic book fandom, and Edgar Rice Burroughs: Master of Adventure , a study of Tarzan's creator. The Comic Book Killer and Marblehead are among his best-known novels. His short story 12:01 PM , filmed twice in the 1990s, added a new sub-genre to science fiction and spawned a legion of imitators. In Where Memory Hides , Lupoff regales readers with triumphs and tribulations from his six-decade plus career. He also offers insights on writing, haggling with agents, and literary criticism of authors such as Dashiell Hammett, H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and many others. This autobiography is available in two editions -- a standard trade paperback edition, and a paperback collector's edition with color graphics throughout. "... (Lupoff's) books and stories, I can testify, having read a great many of them and published some myself, almost unfailingly display not only his intelligence and perceptivity, but also the grace and charm of his wit, the skill of his narrative technique, and the exemplary individuality of his ideas. That is to say, he's a damned good writer."Robert Silverberg, author of The Book of Skulls "... Although in his 80s, Lupoff still writes with the enthusiasm of a young fan ..." Publisher's Weekly

In a novel that’s part comic mystery, part political satire, and part case vignette, a psychiatrist reviews his involvement with a narcissistic national leader who has turned up dead on the consulting room couch. When Peter D. Kramer wrote about his work with psychiatric patients in books like Listening to Prozac and Should You Leave? , Joyce Carol Oates said, “To read his prose on virtually any subject is to be provoked, enthralled, illuminated.” When Kramer switched to fiction, Publishers Weekly wrote, “The depth, quality, and ambition of Kramer’s prose will surprise those expecting a superficial crossover effort.” In his new novel, Death of the Great Man , Kramer uses those literary skills to introduce readers to an unforgettable character, Henry Farber, a well-meaning psychiatrist forced into hiding when the nation’s chief executive—a narcissistic autocrat in his disastrous second term—is found dead on the consulting room couch. From an isolated bungalow, Farber sets out to clear his name while offering an intimate view of a flawed populist leader. What begins as comic mystery and political satire matures into a moving journey of self-exploration and a commentary on the fate of truth-telling in an era when lying has become a norm in public life.

American Guy examines American norms of masculinity and their role in the law, bringing a range of methodological and disciplinary perspectives to the intersection of American gender, legal, and literary issues. The collection opens with a set of papers investigating "American Guys"--The heroic nonconformists and rugged individualists that populate much of American fiction. Diverse essays examine the manly men of Hemingway, Dreiser, and others, in their relation to the law, while also highlighting the underlying tensions that complicate this version of masculinity. A second set of papers examines "Outsiders"--men on the periphery of the American Guys who proclaim a different way of being male. These essays take up counter-traditions of masculinity ranging from gay male culture to Philip Roth's portrait of the Jewish lawyer. American Guy, a follow-up to Subversion and Sympathy, edited by Alison L. LaCroix and Martha C. Nussbaum, aims at reinvigorating the law-and-literature movement through original, cross-disciplinary insights. It embraces a variety of voices from both within and outside the academy, including several contributions from prominent judges. These contributions are particularly significant, not only as features unique to the field, but also for the light they throw on the federal bench. In the face of a large body of work studying judicial conduct as a function of rigid commitment to ideology, American Guy shows a side of the judiciary that is imaginatively engaged, aware of cultural trends, and reflective about the wider world and the role of the law in it. -- from dust jacket