The People from Heaven , John Sanford's most ambitious and searing novel, completes his Warrensburg Trilogy, digging beneath the bucolic surface of a small-town to expose the hatred at its core. "A sacred book, majestic in its rebukes of those who violate the breath and origin of humanity while professing faith and going through the motions of holiness." Carl Sandburg The people of Warrensburg are divided by the arrival of a nameless Black woman. Her few allies call her America Smith, while the town's most prominent citizens try to drive her out. This clash results in rape and murder. Sanford punctuates this spare plot with poetic episodes from the nation's past, rooting the characters' actions in the violence of the nation's founding. He tells the story with an artistry of language that led the Cambridge Companion to Jewish American Literature to describe him as America's "most outstanding neglected novelist." This new edition of Sanford's literary masterpiece features an introduction by Jack Mearns, author of John Sanford: An Annotated Bibliography. The other books in the trilogy are Make My Bed in Hell and The Old Man's Place. John Sanford (1904-2003) was a screenwriter and author who wrote 24 books. A one-time member of the Communist Party, he and his wife, the ground-breaking screenwriter Marguerite Roberts, refused to testify to the House Un-American Activities Committee, and were blacklisted in Hollywood for nearly a decade. "Only a warm-hearted and perceptive author who believes in the potential worth of humanity could have conceived the powerful conflicts, the trenchant syllables here. The fact that it succeeds in provoking an examination of national conscience as well as of person attitude also suggests its worth." New York Herald Tribune "Sanford's technique is arresting and every page has a savor and quality of its own." The New Republic

Excerpt from The Master: A Novel Despite its long stretch of winter, in which May might wed December in no incompatible union, 'twas a happy soil, this Acadia, a country of good air and great spaces; two-thirds of the size of Scotland, with a population that could be packed away in a corner of Glasgow; a land of green forests and rosy cheeks; a land of milk and molasses; a land of little hills and great harbors, of rich valleys and lovely lakes, of overflowing rivers and oversurging tides that, with all their menace, did but fertilize the meadows with red silt and alluvial mud; a land over which France and England might well bicker when first they met oversea; a land which, if it never reached the restless energy of the States, never retained the Old World atmosphere that long lingered over New England villages; save here and there in some rare Acadian settlement that dreamed out its life in peace and prayer among its willow-trees and in the shadows of its orchards. At Minudie, at Clare in Annapolis County, where the goodly apples grew, lay such fragments of old France, simple communities shutting out the world and time, marrying their own, tilling their good dyke land, and picking up the shad that the retreating tide left on the exposed flats; listening to the Angelus, and baring their heads as some Church procession passed through the drowsy streets. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.

Taking its name from Bach's Goldberg Variations, as well as inspiration from its formal structure, this work hybridizes breezy philosophical meditation and fragment-based novel. Most of the diffused story takes place in nineteenth-century England, where a Jewish writer by the name of Goldberg is commissioned by an incessantly thoughtful insomniac to create a story each day to be told that night, hopefully thus assuaging the man's sleeplessness.

“I am Sonya Vronsky, professor of mathematics at Tel Aviv University, and this is the story of a day in late August. On this remarkable day I kissed a student, pursued a lover, found my father, and left my brother.” So begins A Wall of Light , a novel which chronicles a single day in the life of Sonya, a thirty-two-year-old deaf woman about to break out of her predictable routine. Sonya lives in Tel Aviv with her protective half-brother, Kostya; their household has dwindled from five to two. Anna, their mother, is now in a nursing home and Noah, Kostya’s son, is living in Berlin. Kostya, wracked with guilt for the tragedies that have befallen Sonya, also grapples with the memory of his wife, Iris, a lawyer murdered in the course of a dangerous investigation seventeen years earlier. As we move through Sonya’s day, Noah and Anna narrate their stories as well. Noah’s journal entries cover the years 1980-1993, and Anna’s letters to Andrei, her married lover in Russia, are written in 1957, after Anna has emigrated to Israel to build a new life for herself and her son, Kostya. While Sonya’s story moves rapidly through the events of a single day, Noah and Anna’s voices take the reader back in time, filling in the circumstances that have led Sonya to this pivotal moment. We learn that Sonya has already endured two catastrophes. At age twelve, a medical mishap leaves her deaf, and at eighteen, while studying at university in Beersheba, Sonya is assaulted by two hoodlums. Throughout the novel, Sonya’s experiences, instigated by both human error and human evil, are echoed by the larger, political violence that haunts modern Israel. While Noah’s and Anna’s voices shed light on Sonya’s journey, they also provide insights into the political and cultural fabric of Israel from the mid 1950s to the present. Noah’s journal entries, starting with his tenth birthday and ending shortly after his army service, map his coming of age. We see him wrestling with his sexual identity and first sexual encounters, the fallout from his mother’s leftist politics, and his own conscription to the army. Anna’s secret letters to Andrei offer an outsider’s perspective on the new Israeli state. The remarkable events of Sonya’s day are set in motion when her brother gives her an antihistamine. Overcome with sleepiness, she dismisses her morning class early, asking only one student, Matar, to stay behind. She wants to understand what lies behind his unusual expression. He answers that he has been involved in war crimes, and surprises Sonya by kissing her. Sonya feels that she has been roused from a long slumber and as the novel progresses we see the ways in which her awakened desire shapes her choices. She decides to take a taxi home from the university and impulsively invites the taxi driver inside and seduces him. He complies, but when she tells him she’s deaf, he flees in confusion. Sonya is convinced that she has fallen in love with him, and decides to pursue him. She solicits her brother’s help and sets out to find her lover. Sonya’s search gains in intensity and purpose as she travels to East Jerusalem. There she encounters the walls that prevent Palestinians from moving freely through the West Bank. After an Alice in Wonderland -like journey past numerous obstacles, Sonya finally makes it to her lover’s house. This second encounter leads Sonya to a central revelation: the identity of her father. As this day of awakened desire and dispelled secrets closes, Sonya is able to step out from under the protective wing of her brother into a life that reflects both the ambiguity and uncertainty of contemporary Israel and her own personal possibilities.

La Negra y Blanca is the crowning achievement of Deena Metzger's lifetime as a novelist, poet, and playwright. On the surface, it is a meditation on memory as the narrator pieces together the bright flashes of images of her life recalled, piecing them together with the intention of creating a healing matrix that reflects a life lived in search of meaning. On a deeper level, it weaves in the history and tragedy of the Conquest's ongoing political and environmental effects on Latin America through the narrator s relationship with Victor Perera, a Guatemalan-American writer and journalist who documented the destruction of the native Lacandon tribe of Guatemala by imperialistic forces. We become acquainted with La Negra, a mysterious woman who is pregnant, but who will not give birth to her child until the world is safe enough for its continued existence, and who is the centerpiece character of a natural world struggling to survive and maintain its integrity in the midst of industrialization and the decimation of the sacred forests. Metzger has created a complex novel that weaves the personal, political, global and spiritual threads of her life into a tapestry of beauty, sorrow, transcendence, and ultimately, the assurance of a world renewed by the unwavering examination of all of its component parts to create a path into a future that promises reverence for all life.

Book jacket/back: In this beloved novel of immigrant life in Brooklyn, David Fuchs speaks to us in a distinctive, affecting voice. He evokes the special, marvelous qualities of the Jewish-American experience by creating characters and conflicts whose idiom and flavor he catches with uncanny precision. This is an exceptional novel about ordinary people. Each of the central characters lives in the same tenemant building in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn. This single building is a miniature of the teeming, dynamic community of which it is a part. It is inhabited by solitary souls and families. These people are students, idlers, shopkeepers, mothers, hustlers, lovers and husbands. Fuch's vivid, sharply observed prose folds these separate lives into a full-blooded human comedy. The story he tells reveals people living their lives with all the twists and dodges, the puzzles, the contradictions, the idiocies and the wonderful moments. In short, the busines of living, the banquet of life.

This award-winning novel is "a delightful, inventive tale" about the pursuit of love and literary fame from "a compassionate and witty satirist" ( Kirkus Reviews ). It's the opportunity of a lifetime for middle-aged Ezra Shultish--a chance to the meet his literary hero, Nobel Laureate Bar Nun, a writer Ezra has worshipped for most of his career as a teacher and translator. Hoping to get a recording of the author reading his story, The Yemenite Girl , Shultish travels to Israel, where he finds himself pursuing his own Yemenite girl, as well as the elusive author. But will Ezra get the girl--or his own glimpse of literary fame? Winner of the Edward Lewis Wallant Book Award, The Yemenite Girl is Curt Leviant's comic novel on the nature of celebrity and the relationship between life and art. "Shultish is a man with a life of his own. . . . And the celebrity, too, is remarkably drawn. . . . [The book] is done with great tact, feeling, and skill." --Saul Bellow, Pulitzer Prize- and Nobel Prize for Literature-winning author "A passionate story . . . The charm of the text and the intensity of the subtext is what keeps the pages turning." -- The New York Times Book Review "Good comic writing and satire on the Hebrew literary scene with its jealous politicking for literary prizes." -- The Washington Post

Seventeen-year-old Elizabeth Stein returns from a year of madness to discover that everything she’s ever known is falling apart, leaving her to fight for happiness in a life filled with confusion and turbulence as she untangles the mysteries of the past in this “beautiful and significant book about love” ( The New York Times). Seventeen going on thirty, Elizabeth Stein has just survived three suicide attempts and a stint of treatment in numerous mental hospitals. Returning to the mother that everyone desires and a father sliding into alcoholism, as well as two lovers and all the freedom in the world, she is unsure how to move forward with scars on her wrist, scars on her soul, and all of life’s problems dancing in her head. In this rich and sensual novel, as timeless as Catcher in the Rye and as moving as Ordinary People , Elizabeth sets out on a journey of discovery, courage, hope, and fear. After a year when the loneliness and pain seemed to have no end, she is back in the world again. Now is the time when she must search for the meaning in the madness, all while fighting for happiness and facing the future for the first time on her own.

When Claire, the author of a novel about love among young CIA trainees, receives an e-mail from an Iranian admirer who wants to obtain a copy of her work, she agrees to meet him, but soon learns that someone is intercepting their communications.

Boris Akunin has been hailed as Russia's answer to both Agatha Christie and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle for his beloved Fandorin mystery series. After five years spent abroad building up a business as something of a private investigator, the handsome, stuttering Fandorin is back in Moscow--and in for a case that entangles him with the highest echelons of Romanov royalty. Grand Duke Georgii Alexandrovich arrives in Moscow with three of his children for the coronation of Tsar Nicholas II, who is fated to become the last Emperor of Russia. During an afternoon stroll in the park, Georgii's daughter Xenia is dragged away by bandits, only to be rescued by an elegant gentleman and his Japanese sidekick. The passing heroes introduce themselves as Erast Petrovich Fandorin and Masa, but panic ensues when the party realizes that four-year-old Mikhail has been snatched in the confusion. A ransom letter arrives from an international criminal demanding the handover of the Count Orlov, an enormous diamond on the royal scepter which is due to play a part in the coronation. Can the gentleman detective find Mikhail in time? The Coronation is a fantastically entertaining and deftly plotted take on the hostage novel, not to be missed.

New edition of B. H. Friedman's critically-acclaimed 1964 serio-comic novel. Yarborough is the story of well-to-do bridge prodigy Arthur Skelton and his futile search for some system to give his life meaning. The novel takes its title from the game of bridge. A "yarborough" is a "nothing hand," a hand that contains no card above a nine.

A novel based on the life of Hannah Arendt.

To read Brookner is to be reminded of fiction’s potential to stun, with full, complex characters in a richly imagined world, as she draws on her insights into human nature to explore the strained, yet enduring friendship of two women. – Publishers Weekly (starred). Brookner again chronicles with surgical precision lives distorted by temperament and circumstance. – Kirkus Reviews. Elizabeth and Betsy have known each other since they were schoolgirls. When they meet again later in life, one is safely married and the other most unsafely partnered. Together, they discover that despite their different lives, they still have in common the capacity for making dangerous choices. In this masterly new novel, Anita Brookner gives us an exquisite story about how our life choices can both reflect the past and direct the future, as she weaves an impeccably crafted tale of two women.

Product Description A vivid account of the maturing of a young Jewish girl in a prairie community of the 1920s that ultimately claims her as her own. Review ... a stunning vivid novel -- The Jewish Post and News About the Author Linda Ghan grew up in southern Saskatchewan and was educated at the Universities of Saskatchewan and Regina. After receiving her MA she pursed a career of teaching and writing in Jamaica. She moved to Montreal where she produced, hosted and wrote for radio and taught creative writing at Concordia University. She served in a number of posts in the literary community and is now in Japon as head of Canadian Studies at Ibaraki University, Mito, Japon.

Partially autobiographical, this translation of the Spanish Patas de Avestruz is a masterpiece of introspective, linguistically innovative fiction about the relationship between two sisters--one severely handicapped, the other gifted yet overlooked. Mariana is four years older than her sister Alcira, but Mariana is seriously disabled and slowly dying. Conveying the experience of a physically messy process, this account points out the flaws in adult society through the point-of-view of its child protagonist. At its core, the novel is about the abuse of power and its consequences--whether that abuse is by a government, a parent, or a child.

Claper is a novel of Venezuelan Jewish life originally published in Spanish in 1987. Narrated by a father, a first-generation emigrant from Eastern Europe, and his daughter, a second-generation Jewish Venezuelan, it tells a classic story of the twentieth-century Jewish experience, of Old World struggles for economic survival and New World struggles for acceptance and independence. The novel's appeal lies in the author's success in rendering two diverse voices convincingly, and in so doing representing a range of immigrant and post immigrant experiences.

DuckBob Spinowitz has a problem. It isn't the fact that he has the head of a duck-the abduction was years ago and he's learned to live with it. But now those same aliens are back, and they claim they need his help! Apparently creatures from another reality are invading the universe, and only DuckBob can reset the device that maintains the barrier between dimensions. He reluctantly agrees to help, but how can a man whose only talents are bird calls and bad jokes, and whose only work experience is punching random buttons on a computer in a standard cubicle, be expected to save the universe? No Small Bills is the hilarious new science fiction novel from award-winning, bestselling author Aaron Rosenberg, who has written books for Eureka, Star Trek, WarCraft, and many others, and is also the author of the rousing Dread Remora space-opera series for Crossroad Press.

Francis Bret Harte (1836-1902) was a prolific American author and poet, best remembered for his accounts of pioneering life in California. The spirit of Dickens breathes through the poems and stories of Bret Harte just as the spirit of Bret Harte breathes through the poems and stories of Kipling.

We're living a national ideology that's invisible to us because we're inside it." "We're living a national ideology that's invisible to us because we're inside it." At the outset of his career E. L. Doctorow told Paul Levine, "History written by historians is clearly insufficient." Doctorow's novels carry out that conviction by imagining the great moments of American history--the Old West, the gilded age, the Depression, the cold war--as backdrops for tales of excruciating moral pain and injustice in America. In Conversations with E. L. Doctorow Christopher D. Morris has gathered over twenty of the most revelatory interviews with the acclaimed author of Ragtime, World's Fair, Billy Bathgate, The Book of Daniel, and other novels, plays, and short stories. Whatever the setting or time period, Doctorow's characters spark an unparalleled urgency in the novelist's recreations of history. In his work the American dream and the values his characters try to live by turn to madness and ashes. Within this collection Doctorow explores the themes of his work not only in the contexts of national and literary history but also in terms of disturbing trends in contemporary American culture. Talking about style, Doctorow discusses his experiments with shifting points of view and unreliable narrators as part of the modernist heritage to which readers have become accustomed. But he stresses that these techniques are always subordinate to the telling of a good story and the creation of memorable characters. "My portrait of J. P. Morgan in Ragtime is truer to the man's soul and the substance of his life than his authorized biography," he says. Doctorow's critical and popular success comes from the creation and re-creation of such great characters and the telling of captivating stories in which the writer serves as an independent witness to both the ideals and the corruptions that have driven our history. Christopher D. Morris has been the Charles A. Dana Professor of English at Norwich University in Northfield, Vermont, since 1996. He is also the author of Models of Misrepresentation: On the Fiction of E. L. Doctorow and regularly publishes in journals like The Ohio Review, Critique, and Film Criticism.

"A new critical edition of Joanna Russ's 1980 feminist novella On Strike Against God, supplemented with additional materials from Russ's archive. An introduction by Russ scholar Alec Pollak opens the edition, essays by contemporary writers Jeanne Thornton and Mary Anne Mohanraj grapple with Russ's enduring influence on feminist authors today, and an interview with Samuel R. Delany reflects on Delany's decades-long correspondence with Russ"--