"Episodes from the young life of Annie John, aged 10 to 17, as she grows up on the Caribbean island of Antigua. This is a magical coming-of-age tale, ripe with the special ambience of its tropical setting and sustained by Annie's far from naive awareness of the world around her. Death, illness, and poverty intrude on the narrator's perceptive sensilibity from time to time, but even these experiences instruct her and expand her understanding of life and its shifting reality. Although Annie leaves Antigua at the end of the novel for a new role as a student in England, the hollowness she feels at her departure is balanced by the new self that awaits her as she begins the search for her own identity. A poetic and intensely moving work from the author of At the Bottom of the River. (Reviewed April 1, 1985)"--Booklist Review.

Alfred Kazin burst onto the American literary scene in 1942, when his first book, "On Native Grounds," announced the arrival of an important new literary critic. "A Walker in the City," his second, signaled the other direction his career would follow: author of several intense, intimate, and lyrical memoirs. Years later he would admit how he struggled writing it. He thought he wanted to concentrate on New York itself, describing a series of walks around the city. But what emerged was the story of his own boyhood encounters with it, starting from Brownsville, the Brooklyn Jewish neighborhood of his birth, then stretching out to alluring, mysterious Manhattan and from there to the world. Each walk is simultaneously a journey out and a journey in: outward, from the neighborhood to the land beyond, the great, electric, canyoned streets of the city; inward, into his own soul, as it grows and falls in love with books and language and literature, with music and metaphysics and politics, with the city and the country and the world and rapturously tries to take them all in.

"The novel is more than an important literary work and cultural document. It forms part of the traditional ritual of renewal of the American Way." -Sam B. Girgus "It is one of the best fictional studies of Jewish character available in English, and at the same time an intimate and sophisticated account of American business culture." --Isaac Rosenfeld The Rise of David Levinsky, written by the celebrated founder and editor of the Jewish Daily Forward, is an early Jewish-American treasure. According to the scholar Sam B. Girgus, "The novel is more than an important literary work and cultural document. It forms part of the traditional ritual of renewal of the American Way." Originally published in 1917, Abraham Cahan's realistic novel tells the story of a young Talmudic scholar who migrated from a small town in Russia to the melting pot of turn-of-the-century New York City. As the Jewish "greenhorn" rises from the depths of poverty to become a millionaire garment merchant, he discovers the awful price of assimilation.

Twenty-five celebrated Latino writers delight and move us with their recollections of Christmas in this splendid holiday extravaganza. From Julia Alvarez's tale of how Santicl� delivered a beloved uncle from political oppression to Junot D�az's story of his own uneasy assimilation on his first Christmas in America, to Sandra Cisneros's poignant memories of her late father's holiday dinners, Las Christmas gives us true stories from writers of many traditions--memories of Christmas and Hanukkah that vividly capture the pride and pain, joy and heartbreak, that so often accompany the holidays in the Americas. Richly illustrated and embellished with songs and poems, along with recipes for an unforgettable Christmas dinner--from traditional sweet tamales to Puerto Rican asopao (stew) and coquito (coconut eggnog)--this is an enduring treasury of Latino writing to read again and again. A heartwarming holiday gift.

'A strange and compelling new book from one of America's greatest living authors' Times Literary Supplement 'As cunning and rich as anything Ozick's written' Wall Street Journal 'One of our era's central writers. About a man ensnared by history, Antiquities is at once a warning against the hazards of nostalgia and an invitation to take a longer view of how we got to where we are' The New Yorker 'Ozick's prose urges the breathless reader along, her love of language rolling excitedly through her sentences like an ocean wave' New York Review of Books I remember nothing. I remember everything. I believe everything. I believe nothing. In 1949, Lloyd Wilkinson Petrie returns as a Trustee to the long-defunct boarding school that he attended as a child. There he is preparing a memoir about the subtle anti-Semitism that pervaded the school, about his fascination with the Egyptian archaeological adventures of his distant cousin, about the passions of a boyhood friendship with named Ben-Zion Elefantin, a mystifying older pupil. In this novella, and the three stories published alongside it, one of our most preeminent writers weaves together myth and mania, history and illusion to capture the shifting meanings of the past.

"Scarified sensibility, subversive intellect, and predatory wit make her a writer like no other I know." -New York Times Book Review The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula , Kathy Acker's debut and the first in this three-novel collection, began as an episodic handmade pamphlet that Acker mailed out to influential writers and artists whose addresses she managed to get her hands on. In the novel, Acker steps into the biography of a Mississippi murderess who falls in love with a famous lawyer, and mixes in fragments from porn, historical romance, pulp fictions, and The Story of O . Collect with her second novel, the dreamy exploration of desire I Dreamt I was a Nymphomaniac , and her third, The Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec , Portrait of an Eye is dive into the frenzy of sexual wanting, the search for identity, and the invention of a new literary language. Now with an introduction by Kate Zambreno contextualizing the resurrection of these three early Acker novels, this new edition of Portrait of an Eye reminds us of all there is still to learn from Kathy Acker, a writer and artist whose work "remains radical and uncanny, entirely inimitable, a smash and grab on the history of literature" ( Guardian ).

'A . . . tender love story . . . This book is alive. It pulses with warmth and intelligence' The Times A wickedly observed novel about falling in love at the end of your life, by the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Finkler Question. At the age of ninety-something, Beryl Dusinbery is forgetting everything - including her own children. She spends her days stitching morbid samplers and tormenting her two carers with tangled tales of her husbands and affairs. Shimi Carmelli can do up his own buttons, walks without a frame and speaks without spitting. Among the widows of North London, he's whispered about as the last of the eligible bachelors. He forgets nothing -especially not the shame of a childhood incident that has long hung over him. There's very little left remaining for either of them. . . But perhaps just enough to heal some of the hurt inflicted along the way, and find new meaning in what's left. * SHORTLISTED FOR THE WINGATE LITERARY PRIZE 2020*

A New York Times “Books for Summer Reading” selection Winner of the 2003 National Jewish Book Award for History By the time he died in 1993 at the age of 73, Irving Howe was one of the twentieth century’s most important public thinkers. Deeply passionate, committed to social reform and secular Jewishness, ardently devoted to fiction and poetry, in love with baseball, music, and ballet, Howe wrote with such eloquence and lived with such conviction that his extraordinary work is now part of the canon of American social thought. In the first comprehensive biography of Howe’s life, historian Gerald Sorin brings us close to this man who rose from Jewish immigrant poverty in the 1930s to become one of the most provocative intellectuals of our time. Known most widely for his award-winning book World of Our Fathers, a rich portrayal of the East European Jewish experience in New York, Howe also won acclaim for his prodigious output of illuminating essays on American culture and as an indefatigable promoter of democratic socialism as can be seen in the pages of Dissent, the journal he edited for nearly forty years. Deeply devoted to the ideal of democratic radicalism and true equality, Howe was constantly engaged in a struggle for decency and basic fairness in the face of social injustice. In the century of Auschwitz, the Gulag, and global inter-ethnic mass murder, it was difficult to sustain political certainties and take pride in one's humanity. To have lived a life of conviction and engagement in that era was a notable achievement. Irving Howe lived such a life and Gerald Sorin has done a masterful job of guiding us through it in all its passion and complexity.

Carole Balin introduces us to dozens of Jewish women writers from late nineteenth- and early twentieth- century Tsarist Russia, focusing on five who were among the most prolific. Their extant literary remains include not only fiction, poetry, drama, translations, and essays, but also memoirs, autobiographies, diaries, and letters. Balin contextualizes the works of each within the culture in which she lived and wrote. Miriam Markel-Mosessohn (1839-1920) toiled to advance the goals of the Russian Haskalah (Enlightenment), translated German works into Hebrew, tried her hand at poetry, and became a foreign correspondent for a Hebrew newspaper at the age of 48. Hava Shapiro (1879-1943) published short stories and newspaper articles in Hebrew, earned a doctorate at the University of Berne, and was an active participant in the writing circle convened at the Warsaw home of Y. L. Peretz. Rashel Mironovna Khin (1861-1928) wrote numerous short stories and plays in Russian, two of which were staged at Moscow's Malyi Theater. Feiga Israilevna Kogan (1891-1974) composed books of Symbolist poetry in Russian while harboring a love of Hebrew, which she nurtured at the Society for Lovers of the Hebrew Language. Sofia Dubnova-Erlikh (1885-1986) was the daughter of historian Simon Dubnov, the wife of socialist Genrikh Erlikh, and an accomplished poet, essayist, biographer, and political activist in her own right. The life-like and touching portraits that emerge of these talented writers allow us a penetrating view of Jewish women within their Russian-Jewish milieu that is far more nuanced than the images of housewife and revolutionary currently held in collective Jewish memory. The lives and works of these women help to tell a larger story of Jewish cultural history in the Russian Empire.