In The 28th Day of Elul and Lilo's Diary Richard Elman achieved something rare in novels today: a probing self-revelation of character combined with a powerful recreation of historical truth. His achievement greatly increases with The Reckoning, in which he explores the world of pre-war Eastern European Jewry, on the edge of the Nazi holocaust. The central figure is Newman Yagodah, a man of substance living in Hungary in 1944. He is a complex man-intelligent, duplicitous, concerned with his family and his position in the town of Clig, and finding human closeness only with his mistress. Above all, he is searchingly, painfully honest with himself, and that is what gives the novel its extraordinary quality. Newman Yagodah speaks of his political and financial theories; he looks back on his life, to the young wife he married for money and yet with love; and he movingly recounts his affair with his mistress Ileana. While his days move toward disaster, he reveals himself in this reckoning of accounts, his maneuvers and deceptions and his suffering. The result is a character wholly realized and exposed, who fascinates the reader because he is altogether human. Newman Yagodah lived in Clig, Hungary, in 1944; but he lives everywhere.

"If you have any interest at all in satire, science fiction's new wave, the '60s, pop music, comic books, or the picaresque tradition of literature, this book is for you...32 years after its composition, this roaring tiger of a book still has the capacity to shock, amuse, enlighten, and provoke, more so than many a "bold, experimental novel" published just yesterday to waves of praise by the short-sighted and historically illiterate. This is a book that spits in the face of death and despair." -- Paul Di Filippo

"A luxuriously comic novel in which three awesome women of different generations raise Armageddon tempests in otherwise mild and humble familial teapots. Oldest of the volcanic trio is Malka--born in Russia and never popular ("no one would rise up to call her blessed") in New York, where she's discovered dead by her despised daughter Helen only after a half-hour of the usual one-sided conversation. And, alas, years later in California, Helen finds the spirit of Malka "Here she was back again"--in her own first-born, Marilyn: the grandmother's interior lava pit of fierce frustrations, her intelligence, scorn, and madness, "had been handed down intact and unmistakable." After all, Marilyn is horn screaming, swings the whip over her two sisters--good-natured Phyllis and meek Natalie and says she hates Helen (and means it); she's the kind of child who wouldn't clap for Tinker Bell. Marilyn is instead Daddy Lenny's girl--and with the keen aim of a stalking cheetah, she claims his total adoration. She even marries gentle CPA Ira merely because Daddy likes him, but later she shrugs off hubby and kids, pursuing her own law career. All this infuriates mama Helen, and after Lenny dies of cancer (a torment that nearly kills Marilyn too), full-scale war breaks out. Helen brings off a mating of Ira and dear, unprepossessing Natalie just when recuperating Marilyn is thinking of reacquiring him: Marilyn retaliates by ripping to pieces every one of Helen's plants. A cease-fire follows, true, yet at the close there are tiny inklings of revived sniper activity. . . Kohan's dialogue crackles; there are some marvelous originals (including a shrewd, Yiddish-accented Greek chorus in Lenny's mother); and there's a breadth of scale which admits both irony and hilarity, as giant passions are forced to play on a stage of Muppets Kohan (Save Me a Seat, 1979) is gaining in control and stature."--Kirkus

The critically acclaimed novel from a master of contemporary American fiction€”now available as an ebook A loving satire of new parenthood and its attendant joys and blunders The Golds and the Hummels live in the same wealthy Manhattan neighborhood, but as both couples prepare for the arrival of their first child, they share little in terms of parenting philosophy. The Golds plunge into natural birth without bothering to first set up a nursery. The Hummels schedule a C-section and fill out hospital admissions paperwork weeks in advance. Both couples, however, are grappling with the transformations they know parenthood will immediately bring. Set in a milieu of material excess and limitless ambition, Only Children skewers new parents who expect perfect lives, but also offers an intimate look at the trials all new parents face as they learn how to nurture.

A Book of Memories is made up of three first-person narratives- The first, that of a young Hungarian writer and his fated love for a German poet; we also learn of the narrator's adolescence in Budapest, when he experiences the downfall of his once upper-class but now pro-Communist family. A second memoir, alternating with the first, is a novel the narrator is composing about a refined Belle Epoque aesthete, whose anti-bourgeois transgressions seem like emotionally overcharged versions of the narrator's own experiences. A third voice is that of a childhood friend who, after the narrator's return to his homeland, offers an apparently more objective account of their friendship. Together these brilliantly coloured lives are integrated into a powerful work of tragic intensity.

The year is 2040. Mark Chadwick is a brilliant psychiatrist who is on the verge of a major scientific breakthrough. By combining functional imaging of the brain with computer technology, he can not only predict intentions but also decode human thought processes. It is this discovery which immediately attracts the attention of Robert Dufresne, a senior officer in Home Security who is determined to use this novel technique in the fight against the enemies of the Surveillance State. As Mark is relentlessly pursued by Dufresne, the changing relationships with his family, friends and colleagues.

The novel is about the Cambridge-educated heir of a Pittsburgh steel fortune, who, during the Cold War, turns traitor to his country and causes the death of some honorable and well-intentioned people. The main story is about how this man, short of any solid moral principles, deals with his disgrace, while the waves of shame that wash up on his family's stormy shores devastate the lives of its other moneyed members. The suspense arises from the psychologically clever and morally compelling revenge of the son of one of the men who lost his life because of the heir's treason.

Patricia Marx is one of the finest comic writers of her time, as readers of The New Yorker and fans of Saturday Night Live already know. Her fiction debut is an endlessly entertaining comic novel about one woman’s romantic fixation on her first boyfriend.

Nik Cohn's hymn to rock as myth, in all its crazed, absurd and glorious excess, I'm Still the Greatest Says Johnny Angelo was once the inspiration for David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust. Partly based on the legendary rocker PJ Proby, Johnny Angelo is the pop star to end all pop stars - narcissistic, mock-heroic and massively destructive. The novel follows his progress from warped infancy to final messianic explosion. Cohn writes in such a rich, strange prose style that its responses linger long after the book's initial impact' - Robert Holland'

Product Description Spanning four decades from the 1940s to the present and set against the backdrops of Paris, Jerusalem, Cambridge, and Toronto, this novel focuses on a sensuous female astronomer's attempt to free herself from the past From Library Journal Jumping back and forth over four decades with settings in Paris, Toronto, England, and Jerusalem, this novel blends storytelling with a dash of science and philosophy. It centers around its narrator, Nadine Santangel, orphaned when her parents are sent to concentration camps shortly after her birth in Paris in 1941. She becomes an astronomy student and teacher in Canada, but she is haunted by what happened during her early years. Wielding a not always benign influence are a half-uncle, Stefan, and a fellow student, D.B. Miller. Nadine relates events as encountered and as told to her, adding her interpretations. Although the story is not always compelling, some characterizations are oddly fascinating, and the reader can identify with Nadine's efforts to fit all the influences and incidents of her life into an understandable whole. Ellen Kaye Stoppel, Drake Univ. Law Lib . , Des MoinesCopyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.

"A breathtaking historical novel that recreates the intimate milieu around Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm from 1907 through the 1930s, a period of great human suffering and destruction and also of enormous freedom and creativity, a time when the remnants and artifices of the old word still mattered, and yet when art and the social sciences were pirouetting with successive revolutions in thought and style. Set in a time when many men in the upper classes in Europe were gay, but could not be so publicly, Jews Queers Germans revolves around three men: Prince Philipp von Eulenburg, Kaiser Wilhelm II's closest friend, who becomes the subject of a notorious 1907 trial for homosexuality; Magnus Hirschfeld, a famed, Jewish sexologist who gives testimony at the trial; and Count Harry Kessler, a leading proponent of modernism, and the keeper of a famous set of diaries which lay out in intimate detail the major social, artistic and political events of the day and allude as well to his own homosexuality. The central theme here is the gay life of a very upper crust intellectual milieu that had a real impact on the major political upheavals that would shape the modern world forever after"--

Invasion of the Body Snatchers starring Kevin McCarthy and Dana Wynter is one of the most revered films in international film history. For many critics it began the serious cycle of science fiction films that now include "Alien" and "Blade Runner." Thanks to the novel by Jack Finney, the screenplay by Daniel Mainwaring and especially the direction of Don Siegel, "Invasion" runs on television somewhere virtually every day. This original book brings together interviews with Kevin McCarthy and Dana Wynter and also includes pieces by Dean Koontz (the introduction), Stephen King (an essay); and interviews with Philip Kaufman, who directed the 1978 remake; Robert H. Solo, who produced the remake; W. D. Richter, who wrote the remake; and Abel Ferrara, who directed the 1997 remake. Packed with insights into the production of a classic film, filled with moments of humor and a few moments of angst, and as entertaining as a "behind the scenes" look at the movie business. Join us in this tribute to Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

Crime-writer Charles Applegate decided to set his second novel in a progressive school. Taking a job at Bramley Hall to see what such a school was like 'from the inside, ' Applegate found to his dismay that he was expected to do rather more than just people-watch. And when a murder took place on his first night there, his skills as a detective writer were called upon as well. But real-life crime was to prove very different from its fictional counterpart...

"Sanford is a supreme master at squeezing the last drop of terror and excitement out of a sordid, savage situation. The story sweeps along with an ugly force that will send sensitive souls in search of smelling salts." Pittsburgh Post-GazetteA trio of vicious World War One veterans descend on the farm in the Adirondack mountains where one of them grew up and his father now lives alone. They embark on happily wreaking drunken havoc at the old man's place and in the nearby town. But when a naive, mail-order bride arrives, she ignites a tinderbox of resentment, lust, and betrayal among the men that explodes in brutal depravity, bloody violence and shocking death.This hard-boiled, literary masterpiece, back in print for the first time in sixty years, includes a new introduction by Jack Mearns, author of John Sanford: An Annotated BibliographyPreviously published as The Hard Guys and filmed as the 1971 motion picture My Old Man's Place."Sanford, not to be confused with contemporary thriller writer John Sandford, was a writer of hard edged noirs that bristle with tension and the threat of violence, when that is unleashed it's brutal and shocking. A stark portrait of humanity at its lowest ebb and a menacing atmosphere pervades the novel. This is ice cold, easily as brutal as the best passages of Cain or Hemingway." Crimetime UK"Sanford's The Old Man's Place is a carefully designed character study bursting with tension and intrigue. I found myself so emotionally invested in these characters and their raw, primal instincts. Nothing short of extraordinary. It's darkly wonderful and honest, well ahead of its time considering the 1935 publication date. Sanford possesses a rare skillset that rivals some of the best noir authors of all-time." Paperback Warrior

The Letter(TM) by Jerry Yellin confronts that quality in a novel in which two men are destined for conflict from their first meeting at age 13, continuing as one accepts his personal vision of a peaceful and inclusive God to become a rabbi while the other pursues a life of political and personal conquest that seems at first to be impossible to reconcile with his Protestant Christian faith. Religion is a comfort, if not a beacon, for Yellin's rabbi, Mark Davidson; it is a tool rather than a philosophy for Adam Flowers, a shallow politician and American Talibaptist. "As a WWII fighter pilot Jerry Yellin knows a few things about threats to humanity, and this nation. In The Letter he uses his considerable insight to strike a major blow against religious bigotry, hatred, and intolerance. If you are not concerned about the invasion of American politics by religious extremists, you will be when you finish this intriguing novel. I love the book!" -- Troy Evans Author Jerry Yellin was a WW 2 fighter pilot from Hillside, NJ. He flew P-51's over Japan from Iwo Jima. Married to Helene for 60 years, they have four sons and six grandchildren, three in America and three born and raised in Japan. Jerry is the author of the award winning historical fiction book The Blackened Canteen and his memoir Of War and Weddings. For More Info perform a Video Search "World War II: Jerry Yellin" These videos will bring Jerry's true story to life. "The hint of violence is always on the back burner, and kept me turning the page. My favorite line in the book: "This is where grown men come to cry." A deep compelling story that will keep you awake at night, wondering about the future of this planet, the human family and where we came from. I highly recommend this book. Five stars!!!" -- Kathleen Rogers, MWSA Reviewer "In his novel The Letter, Jerry Yellin tells the story of an American family divided by religion and politics, love and hate, old and new. By exposing the ramifications of one-way thinking he makes the case for religious tolerance in a personal and convincing way. A consummate storyteller, Jerry keeps us turning the pages through myriad plot twists and masterful plotting. A must read for everyone." -- Linda Egenes, author of Visits with the Amish: Impressions of the Plain Life "Most human beings have the bad habit of defining themselves by nationality, religion, or both-divisions which can lead to violent disagreements and, ultimately, death. In The Letter a powerful U.S. Senator who considers himself a Christian fundamentalist learns, after reading The Letter, that his bloodline is quite different-that he may, in fact, be just what he hates. Highly recommended for those who believe in the ultimate brotherhood of man, and for those who seek to exorcise their own demons." -- Neal Stannard: Author of Now and Then, the Movies Get it Right "The playing field that is Mark Davidson's life is be-sodded when he receives a letter from an attorney that reveals that his boyhood adversary who has grown up to become a hawkish politician is indeed his half-brother. His enemy has become his family. Does he have a duty to his brother? Does he have a duty to those who are the victims of his brother's brutal hatreds? The Letter is the novel you would expect when both religion and brotherhood engage in full combat for peace and for primacy, and yet, both must find a way to survive." A rare find with real-life messages. -- Jack Woodville London, Author of French Letters

Ivan Klima was in the United States when Russian tanks entered Prague in 1968 but, against the advice of friends and colleagues, he returned home. He became a dissident, writing books (never officially published) that were invariably inspired by Czechoslovakia's repressive regime. But what happens to a rebel artist when there is nothing left to rebel against? This question indirectly informs Klima's powerful new novel - his most important and far-reaching fiction to date. Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light describes life before, during, and after the Velvet Revolution of 1989. It is the story of Pavel, a middle-aged television cameraman working uneasily within the boundaries set by the regime, who dreams of one day making a film - a searing portrait of his times - that the authorities will never allow. But after the collapse of communism, Pavel finds he is unprepared for this new world of supposedly unlimited freedoms. He never quite gets around to making that searing portrait of his times; his time, his day, is taken up instead with lucrative small jobs - a TV spot, a commercial, a porn film ... Waiting for the Dark, Waiting for the Light is a masterful novel that focuses on the most pressing issue confronting the individual in the former Soviet bloc countries today: how to live one's life when one is truly free. Written with humor and compassion, it is powerful, provocative, and certain to further the reputation of Ivan Klima as a brilliant and original writer of international stature.

Winner of the Runners-up Prize for the American Book Award for 1985, this is a novel about America in its youth. The story takes place in 1811-12 in a frontier settlement in Richland County, Ohio, and is told through the diary of Thomas Keene -- an educated New Englander tormented by his past. The heart of the narrative is Tom's love for Fanny, a young widow, and his obsession with John Chapman, the half-crazed mystic who became known as Johnny Appleseed. Tom is not only a terse, powerful diarist, but also an artist, whose poems and paintings illuminate the text. The journal reveals every aspect of the American pioneering experience, and Tom's own spiritual journey. In the presence of violence and death, struggling with the dark aspects of sex, he saves himself through art and love. ISBN 0-06-015143-9 :

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.

Ted and Maisie's parents moved to the community of Blackberry Mountain in upstate New York full of hope for the future; they would live a wholesome life rooted in the natural world, free from social constraints and the ugly urban climate of the early seventies. But all this changes when Maisie, age fifteen, stands poised at the top of a waterfall on the 4th of July and looks down over her family and friends before plunging headfirst into the shallow pool, doing herself injuries that will mark them all forever. "The sins of parents are visited on their children in this superb new novel. . . a stinging social and cultural portrait of a time, a place and a generation whose highflown ideals masked a weak moral fiber.. . . While he is writing about the death of dreams, he provides a satisfying ending that is a healthy antidote to much current fiction in which cynicism triumphs over faith and moral turpitude over justice."

Psychologist Alexander Lescziak savors a life of quiet sophistication on Manhattan's Upper West Side, turning a blind eye to the past of his Polish émigré parents. Then a new patient declares that he is the doctor's half-brother, the product of a union between Lescziak's Jewish mother and a German prisoner of war. The confrontation jolts Lescziak out of his complacency: suddenly, his failing marriage, his wife's infatuation with his best friend, and the disappearance of his young lover and suicidal patient, Nella, close in on him. Lescziak escapes into the recesses of his imagination, where his mother's affair with the German prisoner comes to life in precise, gorgeous detail. The novel unfolds into a romance set in England's Lake District in wartime, as Busch shows how our past presses on the present.