A collection of Yiddish stories that give a keen sense of Jewish culture, history, humor and feeling.

"Selected by Cynthia Ozick from a dozen books written across more than fifty years, the essays and short stories gathered here constitute a summing-up of her remarkable literary career. In such classic essays as 'Who Owns Anne Frank?,' 'What Helen Keller Saw,' 'Dostoevsky's Unabomber,' and 'Transcending the Kafkaesque,' Ozick examines some of the world's most illustrious writers and their work, tackles compelling contemporary literary and moral issues, and looks into the wellsprings of her own lifelong engagement with literature. In her short stories, including 'A Hebrew Sibyl,' 'What Happened to the Baby?,' 'Dictation,' 'The Biographer's Hat,' and 'The Conversion of the Jews,' Ozick demonstrates again and again her stylistic brilliance and the originality of her distinctive interweaving of the strands of history and myth." -

It is the story of Jozsef Sondor, a tough, irreverently witty Jewish boy growing up in World War II Hungary. Jozsef carries the reader into the whirl of everyday life in war-torn Budapest, from the eve of the Holocaust in Hungary to the Russian liberation in 1945. Through his eyes, we witness history, or, as he sees it, the adult world gone mad. What is this "Jewish problem", he asks. And what can God be thinking of? Jozsef soon finds that his questions have no simple answers, but they do lead him on a journey to understanding the war, politics, religion, and, in the end, the complexity of human nature.

Remarkable prose collection from a notable Australian poet. If life is a cosmic stage where illusions are the only reality, says Jacob G. Rosenberg, it is through these illusions that we can sometimes better recognize our world, our fellows, and ourselves. Such is the author's hope in this book. The stories in the first part, Lives, explore dimensions of the human landscape. The shorter pieces that make up Embers, inspired by the midrashic tradition of biblical interpretation, investigate the eternal human drama through the prisms of scripture, history, and folklore.

These vibrant short stories are about the lives of Jewish families in New York in the mid-twentieth century. But, in Kaplan's vision, everyday life, with its complexity, disorder, and comic subtleties can never obscure a deeper reality. Her sharp-eyed, quirky children and adults are haunted by history, both individual and collective. About this book, Cynthia Ozick said, "Johanna Kaplan's first book of stories blissfully renews character as fiction's chief adventure. Other People's Lives is the source of every intelligent joy, and restores to reading its old flavor of visits busy with crisis, comedy, wisdom, dreaming, irony, redemption." Other People's Lives won the Jewish Book Award, and the Ernest Hemingway-PEN Prize in 1976.

Algorithmic Shapeshifting is the first poetry collection of Bogi Takács, winner of the Lambda award for editing Transcendent 2: The Year's Best Transgender Speculative Fiction, and finalist for the Hugo and Locus awards. The collection includes poems from the past decade and previously unpublished work. The scope of pieces extends from the present and past of Jewish life in Hungary and the United States to the far-future, outer-space reaches of the speculative—always with a sense of curiosity and wonder. “Bogi Takács is a poet of visceral exuberance and Talmudic invention. Moving as dazzlingly between genres as languages, e makes the reader eir kaleidoscope where ancient traditions, unenvisioned technologies, and children's toys tumble with ordinary, transcendent precision, imagining new ways of being and observing others signally extant. These poems draw blood and spark synapses, make dauntingly familiar and tenderly strange. You should let them change you.” Sonya Taaffe, author of Forget the Sleepless Shores “Bogi Takács's poetry is gleefully and unabashedly itself, pulling the reader through surreal worlds of visceral magic, body modification, political wit, and interpersonal devotion. Whether looking back into Talmudic history, forward into a science fictional psychic war, or sinking into the earth and growing flowers from its own eye sockets, "Algorithmic Shapeshifting" presents a voice that is consistently fresh, startling, and sincere.” Ada Hoffmann, author of The Outside