In his first collection of stories since Fabulous Small Jews , Joseph Epstein delivers all the pleasures his readers have come to expect: stories of ordinary men confronting the moments that define a life, told with the bittersweet humor and loving irony encompassed in the title of the book. These fourteen tales map a very particular world--Jews whose lives are anchored in Chicago--in rich, revealing detail even as they brim with universal longings: complex love affairs and unspoken rivalries, family triumphs and private disappointments. Epstein, who "happens to possess a standup comic's gift for punch lines" ( New York Times Book Review ), brings his emphatically grown-up characters to witty, rueful, and charming life. The Love Song of A. Jerome Minkoff is a marvelous collection from a master of the short form and one of the most distinctive writers working in America today.

Born in Berlin at the end of the nineteenth century, Walter Mehring inherited both his father's respect for the civilizing power of literature and his formidable library of thousands of books. Like his father, believed that books and reading were essential to progress, mutual understanding, and contentment. After having served in World War I, Mehring spent the years between the world wars as part of the exhilarating avant-garde coffeehouse culture of Europe's capitals; he himself was a poet, cabaret lyricist, and founder of the Dadaist movement in Berlin. But with the rise of fascism, Europe became a dangerous place for free-thinking artists. Mehring never envisioned that the culture of books celebrated in his father's library would be rejected by the sudden rise to prominence of the Nationalist Socialist Party. Soon, even his own books were burned by the Brownshirts and Mehring was forced to roam Europe as a literary fugitive. From a precarious exile in Vienna, he arranged for his father's books to be smuggled out of Germany, but their fate would be worse than his--while Mehring managed to slip out of Austria and avoid capture, his library was confiscated and destroyed by the Nazis in 1938. In The Lost Library: The Autobiography of a Culture , translated by Richard and Clara Winston and presented in paperback for the first time, Mehring takes the reader with him as he unpacks the crates of books in his mind, and in the process recalls what each book meant to him and his father. Writing with wit and insight, Mehring successfully compares the humanism of his father's era with the chaos of Europe at war, using his father's library as a metaphor for how the optimism of nineteenth-century progress gave way to the disorder and book-burning of the twentieth. "It is with love and not a little bitterness that the author touches on the various tomes of his father's library [and through them] on the history of man's ideas, on the magnificence of our cultural progress, . . . and on the eventual destruction of the beauty and ideals that man had been able to create. . . . Beautifully conceived and beautifully executed."-- The Atlantic "Whoever cares for books will love this book about books."-- New York Times " The Lost Library cannot be read without profit."-- Times Literary Supplement

In an age of upheaval and challenged faith, traditional heroes are hard to come by, and harder still to love, with their bloodstained hands and backs unbowed by the consequences of their actions. Through penetrating readings of key works of modern European literature, Victor Brombert shows how a new kind of hero—the antihero—has arisen to replace the toppled heroic model. Though they fail, by design, to live up to conventional expectations of mythic heroes, antiheroes are not necessarily "failures." They display different kinds of courage more in tune with our time and our needs: deficiency translated into strength, failure experienced as honesty, dignity achieved through humiliation. Brombert explores these paradoxes in the works of Büchner, Gogol, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, Svevo, Hašek, Frisch, Camus, and Levi. Coming from diverse cultural and linguistic traditions, these writers all use the figure of the antihero to question handed-down assumptions, to reexamine moral categories, and to raise issues of survival and renewal embodying the spirit of an uneasy age.

"5th Edition " In London in the 1950s, aspiring young writer John Wilmot meets successful painter Oliver Cambourne and agrees to model for him. Oliver is older, sophisticated, elegant, and wealthy, and he introduces John to another world. For the first time in his life, John has love and money more than he ever imagined. While the relationship opens many doors for John, it is also dangerous and must be kept a secret. Oliver s commitment to John is absolute and deeper than John initially realizes, but John is confused by his own feelings. He worries about the changes his affair with Oliver are causing in him and about his future security. One night, he makes a fateful decision that will have repercussions not just for him, but on the lives of everyone around him. His choice and its consequences affect not merely the future but send him looking into himself for answers. Only through time and careful introspection can he grow and move past the pain of the choice that has changed everything. A Bittersweet Dreams title: It's an unfortunate truth: love doesn't always conquer all. Regardless of its strength, sometimes fate intervenes, tragedy strikes, or forces conspire against it. These stories of romance do not offer a traditional happy ending, but the strong and enduring love will still touch your heart and maybe move you to tears. "1st Edition published by Branch Line, 1980." "2nd Edition published by Methuen Publishing, 1985." "3rd Edition published by Welbeck Press, 2009." "4th Edition published by Capuchin Classics, 2012."

When a young girl loses her parents and comes to live as a maid at the home of her wealthy relatives, she triggers a complex series of events in the life of Hirshl Hurvitz, her young cousin, who falls in love with her

Bestselling author Santa Montefiore’s spellbinding, historical trilogy reaches its sweeping and heartwarming conclusion in The Last Secret of the Deverills. A new generation of love and war at Castle Deverill... Ireland, 1939. Peace flourishes throughout the country, but much has changed for the Deverill family. In Dublin, Martha Wallace searches for her birth mother. Given up for adoption as a baby and raised in America, Martha returns to Ireland to connect with her Irish roots. Instead, she falls in love with the impossibly charming JP Deverill, and together they uncover the truth about her family. At Castle Deverill, the humble daughter of the castle’s former cook is now Countess di Marcantonio and mistress of the Castle. Bridie is determined to make the splendid surroundings her home, but to do so she must turn a blind eye to the failings of her husband and son. Kitty has settled into her life with Robert and their two children, but when Jack O’Leary returns to Ballinakelly with a family of his own, she realizes she never forgot her first love, even though his heart belongs elsewhere. As the Second World War hovers on the horizon, the Deverills uncover a secret that will forever change their lives. The Last Secret of the Deverills is the dramatic conclusion to a stunning saga about a family caught in the sweep of history, and the ties that keep them together.

In 1975, a new group of Peace Corps volunteers landed on the island nation of Tonga. Among them was Deborah Gardner -- a beautiful twenty-three-year-old who, in the following year, would be stabbed twenty-two times and left for dead inside her hut. Another volunteer turned himself in to the Tongan police, and many of the other Americans were sure he had committed the crime. But with the aid of the State Department, he returned home a free man. Although the story was kept quiet in the United States, Deb Gardner's death and the outlandish aftermath took on legendary proportions in Tonga. Now journalist Philip Weiss "shines daylight on the facts of this ugly case with the fervor of an avenging angel" (Chicago Tribune), exposing a gripping tale of love, violence, and clashing ideals. With bravura reporting and vivid, novelistic prose, Weiss transforms a Polynesian legend into a singular artifact of American history and a profoundly moving human story.

SHORLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE 2018 NEW STATESMAN AND EVENING STANDARD BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2017 'Brilliant ... a staggering story' Robert Fox, Evening Standard, Books of the Year 'Fascinating, vast and rich ... a dramatic family memoir' Guardian Uncovering his family's remarkable and moving stories, Mark Mazower recounts the sacrifices and silences that marked a generation and their descendants. It was a family that fate drove into the siege of Stalingrad, the Vilna ghetto, occupied Paris, and even into the ranks of the Wehrmacht . His British father was the lucky one, the son of Russian Jewish emigrants who settled in London after escaping the civil war and revolution. Max, the grandfather, had started out as a socialist and manned the barricades against tsarist troops, but never spoke of it. His wife, Frouma, came from a family ravaged by the Great Terror yet somehow making their way in Soviet society. In the centenary of the Russian Revolution, What You Did Not Tell recounts a brand of socialism erased from memory - humanistic, impassioned, and broad-ranging in its sympathies. But it also explores the unexpected happiness that may await history's losers, the power of friendship, and the love of place that allowed Max and Frouma's son to call England home.

A major new collection of poems about women's lives and the closing circle of nature, from a bestselling poet. These poems celebrate the beauties of nature and the eternal cycle of love, death and birth that is being interrupted by the assault on the environment.

In this volume, Jules Chametzky has gathered his very personable stories and reminiscences of some of the many writers he has met or known as he writes, some fleetingly, a few more intensely over the course of his more than half a century in the business of reading, writing, and talking about literature, of teaching and editing. Not only do those writers emerge as the complicated and fascinating human beings they are, but we also come to know Jules himself, a warm and gracious storyteller. Praise for Out of Brownsville: NO STUDENT of American Jewish writing needs to be reminded that Jules Chametzky is one of its pioneers. A founding editor of the influential Massachusetts Review, he is perhaps especially noted for his study of the fiction of Abraham Cahan. He now caps a distinguished career as critic, editor, and teacher with this delightful volume of memoirs. It is astonishing to know how many of the shapers of literature in America Chametzky knew not merely as subjects met in passing but understood as artists. Readers and scholars will, of course, find their own favorites among the individual memoirs, but beyond the perceptiveness of the recollections and the shrewd assessments in them, there emerges Jules himself, warm, gracious, accepting, modest about his own achievements, which he scarcely mentions. One closes the book with a sense of regret that it has ended and with a feeling how good it was for those who met Jules and enjoyed, however briefly, his friendship. Joseph C. Landis, Editor, Yiddish-Modern Jewish Studies, Professor Emeritus of English, Queens College, CUNY WOVEN INTO these lively portraits and reminiscences of others are not only sudden illuminations of the characters portrayed and of the fleeting moments captured here, but also insights into the fragility of life, the power to create, and the strange magic of human encounters that make Jules Chametzky s memoir so touchingly social and pleasurable to read. Werner Sollors, Henry B. and Anne M. Cabot Professor of English Literature and Professor of African and African American Studies, Harvard University LEGENDARY EDITOR Jules Chametzky s book is autobiography at its cleanest: one s life through the eyes of others. His astute, personable dispatches are a map of Jewish intellectual trends in the United States in the second half of the twentieth century. Ilan Stavans, Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture (Spanish), Amherst College ACCORDING TO the Jewish Midrash, the Book and the Sword came wrapped together, with a message: Regard what is written in the book, or be delivered to the sword. Jules Chametzky s love of books and their very human creators is expressed in this cultural memoir with affection and marvelous charm, yet there is also a tone of urgency, from a man who has dedicated his life to keeping the book open and the sword sheathed. Lawrence Bush, Editor, Jewish Currents About the Author: Jules Chametzky is Professor of English, emeritus, at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, where he taught from 1958 until 2004. He was a founder of The Massachusetts Review, of which he is Editor, emeritus, after 27 years as senior co-Editor. Chametzky has published numerous articles and reviews on Jewish American and American literature in popular and academic journals. His major publications include From the Ghetto: The Fiction of Abraham Cahan; Our Decentralized Literature: Cultural Mediations in Selected Jewish and Southern Writers; the Penguin edition of Abraham Cahan s The Rise of David Levinsky. He co-edited Black and White in American Culture: Ten Years of The Massachusetts Review; and Jewish American Literature: A Norton Anthology. Chametzky is the father of three sons and was married for 52 years to the late poet Anne Halley.

Howard Fast's life, from a rough-and-tumble Jewish New York street kid to the rich and famous author of close to 100 books, rivals the Horatio Alger myth. Author of bestsellers such as Citizen Tom Paine, Freedom Road, My Glorious Brothers, and Spartacus, Fast joined the American Communist Party in 1943 and remained a loyal member until 1957, despite being imprisoned for contempt of Congress. Gerald Sorin illuminates the connections among Fast's Jewishness, his writings, and his left-wing politics and explains Fast?s attraction to the Party and the reasons he stayed in it as long as he did. Recounting the story of his private and public life with its adventure and risk, love and pain, struggle, failure, and success, Sorin also addresses questions such as the relationship between modern Jewish identity and radical movements, the consequences of political myopia, and the complex interaction of art, popular culture, and politics in 20th-century America.

"She is a shimmering, melancholy angel, flown from Paradise to save him from the suburbs of hell. He an accountant, dreaming of a white Christmas, a little garden and someone to love. A storm of romance and slapstick, of heavenly and earthly delights, in this dystopian philosophical poem about individual freedom and the search for the good life."--Back cover

A wry and beautifully observed memoir about coming of age in the era of conceptual art. Growing up in the suburbs—confused about his sexuality, about his consumer-oriented world, about the death of his older brother—Bernard Cooper falls in love with Pop art and sets off for the California Institute of the Arts, the center of the burgeoning field of conceptual art, in this beguiling memoir. The most famous, and infamous, artists of the time drift through the place, including Allan Kaprow and John Baldessari, not to mention the student who phones the Identi-Kit division of the Los Angeles Police Department and has them make a composite drawing of the Mona Lisa . My Avant-Garde Education is at once an artist's coming-of-age story and a personal chronicle of the era of conceptual art, from a writer "of uncommon subtlety and nuance" (David Ulin, Los Angeles Times ). It is a record of the wonders and follies of a certain era in art history, always aware that awakening to art is, for a young person, inseparable from awakening to the ever-shifting nature of the self.

Rabbi Ben Kamin has written a definitive personal expression about race, coming of age in the 1960s, a forbidden friendship, and his personal love for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. This is a story that spans a four-decade search for a lost high school chum, a deep misunderstanding, and a coming to terms with an America painfully evolving from the blood of MLK to the promise of Barack Obama. The book is a remembrance of Kamin's life at Cincinnati's notorious Woodward High School, a microcosm of the 1960s and of America itself.

'Enlightening ... Funny, smart, original and provocative ... It is hard to imagine the stalwarts of Mock the Week recognising the Druze militia leader Walid Jumblatt in a London cinema' NEW STATESMAN 'Few standups have come close to capturing a fraction of this creative energy in a book ... Alexei Sayle is an exception' GUARDIAN "What I brought to comedy was an authentic working-class voice plus a threat of genuine violence - nobody in Monty Python looked like a hard case who'd kick your head in." In 1971, comedians on the working men's club circuit imagined that they would be free to continue telling their tired, racist, misogynistic gags forever. But their nemesis, a nineteen-year-old Marxist art student, was slowly coming to meet them... Thatcher Stole My Trousers chronicles a time when comedy and politics united in electrifying ways. Recounting the founding of the Comedy Store, the Comic Strip and the Young Ones, and Alexei's friendships with the comedians who - like him - would soon become household names, this is a unique and beguiling blend of social history and memoir. Fascinating, funny, angry and entertaining, it is a story of class and comedy, politics and love, fast cars and why it's difficult to foul a dwarf in a game of football.

Judith Merril was a pioneer of twentieth-century science fiction, a prolific author, and editor. She was also a passionate social and political activist. In fact, her life was a constant adventure within the alternative and experimental worlds of science fiction, left politics, and Canadian literature. Better to Have Loved is illustrated with original art works, covers from classic science fiction magazines, period illustrations, and striking photography.

"In March 1953, four women meet in Room 408 of Moscow's deluxe Metropole Hotel. They have gathered, not altogether willingly, to reminisce about Vladimir Mayakovsky, the poet who in death had become a national idol of Soviet Russia. In life, however, he was a much more complicated figure. Each of these ladies loved Mayakovsky in the course of his life, and as they piece together their memories of him, a portrait of the artist emerges. From his early years as a leader of the Futurist movement to years as a propagandist for the Revolution, to the censorship battles that turned him against the State, Mayakovsky is revealed as a passionate, complex man who lived at the center of history and fought to hold onto his ideals even in the face of a world changing for the worse. The Mayakovsky Tapes is an ambitious, impressive novel that captures the tumultuous life of one of the most significant writers of the Soviet era"--

Nothing is as it seems at Wood Norton. A Zeppelin on a midnight flight over the English coast nearly crashes, leaving behind its observation car-and a Homberg hat. A mysterious stranger who appears from nowhere bearing news of Lady Cranston's brother, who languishes as a German prisoner of war. And Sir Henry Cranston, who refuses to come out of retirement at a time when his country is in need, but prefers instead to spend his time fishing. The fate of nations and of two lovers separated by war depends on discovering the secret of... The Zeppelin's Passenger!

Harry Golden greatly admired and loved Carl Sandburg, and the feeling was indeed mutual. Toward the end of his life, Sandburg shared his papers, letters, photographs, and memories with Golden. Combining these materials with his own recollections, Golden reconstructs the life of his closest friend. His anecdotal account is both an engaging portrait of Sandburg and a tribute to their friendship. Generations of Sandburg's devoted readers will want to own this very personal biography.

Long before Stonewall, young Air Force veteran Edward Field, fresh from combat in WWII, threw himself into New York’s literary bohemia, searching for fulfillment as a gay man and poet. In this vivid account of his avant-garde years in Greenwich Village and the bohemian outposts of Paris’s Left Bank and Tangier—where you could write poetry, be radical, and be openly gay—Field opens the closet door to reveal, as never been seen before, some of the most important writers of his time. Here are young, beautiful Susan Sontag sitting at the feet of her idol Alfred Chester, who shrewdly plotted to marry her; May Swenson and her two loves; Paul and Jane Bowles in their ambiguous marriage; Frank O’Hara in and out of bed; Fritz Peters, the anointed son of Gurdjieff; and James Baldwin, Isabel Miller (Patience and Sarah), Tobias Schneebaum, Robert Friend, and many others. With its intimate portraits, Field’s memoir brings back a forgotten era—postwar bohemia—bawdy, comical, romantic, sad, and heroic.