Daniela Gioseffi is an American Book Award winning author of fourteen books. She's been a worldwide speaker on campuses, at book fairs, on NPR, BBC, and on The Poet and the Poem, Library of Congress' Radio Show of The National Endowment for the Arts. This book, based on her non-fiction Afterword, includes newly discovered, startling research and theory published in The Emily Dickinson Journal, Vol. X1.2. She is listed with the Dickinson Scholar's Registry, has received the John Ciardi Award for Lifetime Achievement in poetry, two New York State Council for the Arts grants in poetry, and a PEN Syndicated Fiction Award. "Gioseffi's writing is appealing... Engaging, filled with energy.... irresistible. Larry McMurty, The Washington Post. Pulitzer Prize: Terms of Endearment "Gioseffi's work overflows with poetic vision." Nona Balakian, former staff reviewer, The New York Times "... a gifted writer.... A stunning essay [afterword]. It should be a book." Galway Kinnell, Pulitzer Prize & National Book Award winning poet "Whatever Daniela does, she does well. Among other things, I'd put my life in her hands.... Dickinson is lucky Daniela took hers in her hands." Grace Paley, Former Poet Laureate of VT. NY State Fiction Award "Startlingly fresh. Animated. Voluptuous. Gioseffi's writing is mythopoeic." Mary Pradt, Library Journal "Gioseffi's writing is imaginatively rich, startling, intelligent, with a wide range of reading behind it, and relevant to the most profound issues of our times." John Logan, Former poetry editor: The Nation "I like the way your essay richly evokes the life and times of Dickinson." Robert Hass, Former Poet Laureate USA "The essay [afterword] on Dickinson is fascinating and convincing...." Alice Quinn, Director: Poetry Society of America "Daniela's is an adamant poet's world where the poem is the source of all good." Bob Holman, PBS: The United States of Poetry, and Bowery Poetry Club, NY

"In the not-too-distant future, the world is ruled by a male scientific elite. Eugenics has triumphed in this fertility dystopia; from adolescence, women are either made into "vocational mothers," or, if they have no interest in motherhood, they are sterilized by the government and become "neuters." The story introduces a young woman who rebels against this system, and a young man who resists the "happy" norm - a resistance which culminates, like the Savage's in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, in suicide"--

"Welcome to the sunlit uplands of the 21st century! Britain's avuncular Prime Minister is an ancient eldritch god of unimaginable power. Crime is plummeting as almost every offense is punishable by death. And everywhere you look, there are people with strange powers, some of which they can control, and some, not so much. Hyperorganized and formidable, Eve Starkey defeated her boss, the louche magical adept and billionaire Rupert de Montfort Bigge, in a supernatural duel to the death. At least, she has reason to hope he's dead. But though she's now in charge of the Bigge Corporation, she's not free of him yet. Through the fecklessness of her brother Imp, combined with the intricate feudal law of a tiny Channel Island, it would appear that unbeknownst to her, she was married to Bigge--and that proving his death and releasing herself from his arcane bindings will take years and cost millions. Then an emissary of the Prime Minister arrives with an offer that she absolutely can't...well, you know."--

In Between Life and Death, famed Israeli writer Yoram Kaniuk describes the four months during which he lay unconscious in a Tel Aviv hospital, hovering between the world of the living and that of the dead. Told in an arresting, dreamlike style that blends playfulness with fearless honesty, Kaniuk attempts to penetrate his own lost consciousness and understand what led him to fight for his life with such tenacity.

"Duncan Wheeler is a successful architect who savors the quotidian pleasures in life until a car accident leaves him severely paralyzed and haunted by the death of his young assistant. Now, Duncan isn't sure what there is left to live for, when every day has become a broken series of unsuccessful gestures. Duncan and his wife, Laura, find themselves in conflict as Duncan's will to live falters. Laura grows desperate to help him. An art conservator who has her own relationship to the repair of broken things, Laura brings home a highly trained helper monkey - a tufted capuchin named Ottoline - to assist Duncan with basic tasks. Duncan and Laura fall for this sweet, comical, Nutella-gobbling little creature, and Duncan's life appears to become more tolerable, fuller, and funnier. Yet the question persists: Is it enough?"--Publisher description.

"A piercing novel about the experience of a life abroad in a cultural setting not one's own: Reut is an Israeli translator in Paris with a French husband and their child. But she feels isolated and misunderstood, resulting in a sense of estrangement that explodes at a festive dinner party with affluent, intellectual friends. During the elaborate meal, she sits at the edge of her chair, alert and navigating a tangle of cultural codes with which she's never been fully at ease. Eventually, Reut gets up and leaves. Will she escape the alienation that accompanies her everywhere? Where I Am, Dana Shem-Ur's virtuoso debut, blends comedy and travelogue to examine a woman's attitudes about belonging to a man, to a culture, to language. It concerns migration and wandering, long journeys and changing landscapes. Filled with intercultural mishaps, this intimate, heartbreaking book portrays a profoundly human yearning to stop everything, to lay down one's head, and to feel-if only for a moment-at home"--

This novel is the saga in five parts of Isaac Jacob Blumenfeld, who grows up in Kolodetz, a small town near Lvov, which, when he's a boy, belongs to the Hapsburg Empire, but which subsequently belongs to Poland, Soviet Russia, Germany, and then Russia again. Isaac survives the absurdity and horror of Eastern Europe during the 20th century by pretending to be a fool. If this is an old Jewish art, then Isaac is a consummate artist. He plays the fool all his life, from his boyhood in Kolodetz shetl to the time when he is an accused war criminal in a Gulag in Siberia. Inseparable from Isaac's life and story are the Yiddish jokes and fables of Kolodetz. These and the counsel of his dear friend, the rabbi and chair of the atheist club in Kolodetz, Shmuel Ben David, sustain Isaac through two world wars, three concentration camps, and five motherlands. The book puts on record, with full art, what is perhaps the central story of the last one hundred years.

From acclaimed author Edeet Ravel comes a profound and heart-wrenching story that captures the essence of grief and hope in the midst of tragedy. Single mother Elise is completely devoted to her eleven-year-old son; he is her whole world. But that world is destroyed in one terrifying moment when her son is killed in a car accident just outside their home. Suddenly alone, surrounded by memories, Elise faces a future that feels unspeakably bleak—and pointless. Lost, angry and desolate, Elise rejects everyone who tries to reach out to her. But as despair threatens to engulf her, she realizes, to her horror, that she cannot join her son: she must take care of his beloved cat. At first she attempts to carry out this task entirely by herself, shut away from a frightening new reality that seems surreal and incomprehensible. But isolation proves to be impossible, and before long others insinuate themselves into her life—friends, enemies, colleagues, neighbours, a former lover—bringing with them the fragile beginnings of survival. Powerfully moving and deeply humane, The Cat is an unforgettable novel about the extraordinary resilience of the human spirit.

"Written in 1944 by Ben Gold, the president of the Furriers Union, this working-class, coming-of-age novel traces the family origin, immigration, and radicalization of an everyman named Avreml Broide. Mirroring Gold's own life, Avreml's story begins entangled in a complex intergenerational social and criminal community in Bessarabia just after the turn of the twentieth century. Personal dramas drive a young Avreml to New York City in his young adult years, where he finds a job in the fur industry and devotes himself entirely to his union, party, and the fight against fascism, often to the detriment of his personal life and relationships. Through strikes, dissidence, and finally on the front lines of the Spanish Civil War, Avreml's journey presents the fascinating ambiguity of subsuming the self in service to party discipline... This novel offers a powerful counternarrative to histories and narratives of Jewish immigration that emphasize materialist American dreams and upward class mobility. Your Comrade, Avreml Broide offers an enticing mix of fact and fiction to demonstrate the personal risks, revolutionary dreams, and heartaches of Yiddish-speaking American Communists."--Publisher's description.

"Written in 1944 by Ben Gold, the president of the Furriers Union, this working-class, coming-of-age novel traces the family origin, immigration, and radicalization of an everyman named Avreml Broide. Mirroring Gold's own life, Avreml's story begins entangled in a complex intergenerational social and criminal community in Bessarabia just after the turn of the twentieth century. Personal dramas drive a young Avreml to New York City in his young adult years, where he finds a job in the fur industry and devotes himself entirely to his union, party, and the fight against fascism, often to the detriment of his personal life and relationships. Through strikes, dissidence, and finally on the front lines of the Spanish Civil War, Avreml's journey presents the fascinating ambiguity of subsuming the self in service to party discipline... This novel offers a powerful counternarrative to histories and narratives of Jewish immigration that emphasize materialist American dreams and upward class mobility. Your Comrade, Avreml Broide offers an enticing mix of fact and fiction to demonstrate the personal risks, revolutionary dreams, and heartaches of Yiddish-speaking American Communists."--Publisher's description.

"The Conversation of the Three Wayfarers is a tale overheard, rather than told directly. Abel, Babel, and Cabel, the wayfarers, carry on a three-sided monologue, each reporting curious incidents-the effect is of three capers rolled into one: a steeplechase performed on a floating pontoon. But are they really three distinct individuals? Why do their lives blend in such a fantastic manner? Weiss's strikingly original prose has an impossibly contained quality, with each sentence doing a perfect double-double backflip before neatly landing. This essential rediscovered work, from the masterful and acclaimed German modernist Peter Weiss, will be a delightful discovery for readers of Kafka, Musil, and Gombrowicz"--

"In 1789 Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart visits the grave of Johann Sebastian Bach in Leipzig, looking for a sign, a signal, an answer to an enigma that has haunted him since childhood: Was Bach murdered by a famous oculist? And years later, was Handel a victim of the same doctor? Allegro follows his investigation, from the salons of London to the streets of Paris, recreating an enthralling and turbulent time, full of rogues and brilliant composers, charlatans and presumptuous nobles. Running parallel to this search is the rise of Mozart, his knowledge and fame, his trials and losses"--

Although Ruth Weiss at forty is the picture of a scholarly professor of English, she questions if the literature she escaped to in her youth has benefited her.

As with so many members of his generation, down-on-his-luck writer-filmmaker Milton Siegel has what some might call an unhealthy fixation on the TV shows, movies, books, music, and celebrities from his childhood that spanned the 1980s and 1990s. Unlike many of his generation, Milt has spent most of his life as an adult (so to speak) chronicling this same pop culture of his youth. Hey, it's a living ... sometimes. After quitting his job at a regional newspaper (or after having been fired, depending on who you ask), Milt finds himself on what becomes a quixotic quest to promote his latest pop culture history project around the country over one progressively insane and hilarious month. Throughout his many misadventures to come, Milt must contend with: a horde of salivating manic nerds, an inexplicable rash of natural disasters, clickbait-concocting media pundits, overly ambitious pseudo-celebrities, bafflingly incompetent event coordinators, a desperately hemorrhaging bank account, a super seductive stripper, ultra-competitive frenemies, and his own sense of the precarious future while being so embroiled in his childish past. In the end, it's up to Milt to make it through the month-long nomadic tour of laughter, tears, and revelations ahead without losing his mind. If he's really lucky, he might even make rent, keep his new wife from fleeing in terror, and perhaps have a little fun along the way. --from Amazon.

They Won't Let You Live is the story of two small shop-owners - one Christian, one Jewish - in 1930s London. Simon Blumenfeld's 4th and final novel, first published in 1939, critically revisits the themes evoked by Shakespeare's The Merchant Of Venice. Blumenfeld sets out to confound the reader's prejudices and expectations in a plot that does not shy away from the difficult and the disturbing. In an ever-growing atmosphere of violence in both public and private life, Blumenfeld explores how language that springs from our emotions and misapprehensions shapes our world and, indeed, how it appears to us.

"Drawing on the remarkable events of her own life, ... author and Holocaust survivor Edith Bruck tells the story of Ditke, a young Jewish girl living in Hungary during World War II"--Page 4 of cover.