A retrospective article on Leslie Fiedler in the New York Times Book Review in 1965 referred to Love and Death in the American Novel as "one of the great, essential books on the American imagination . . . an accepted major work." This groundbreaking work views in depth both American literature and character from the time of the American Revolution to the present. From it, there emerges Fiedler's once scandalous--now increasingly accepted--judgment that our literature is incapable of dealing with adult sexuality and is pathologically obsessed with death.

In a novel about being an outsider in America and what it means to be an American, Vladimir, a young Russian-American immigrant, pursues his dreams of success, wealth, and a girlfriend, as his quest takes him deep into uncharted territory.

"No wonder Silver is feeling slightly desperate: his ex-wife is about to marry a terrific guy, his Princeton-bound daughter announces that she's pregnant, and if he doesn't acquiesce to an operation, he will soon drop dead."--Library Journal.

In snowy upstate New York, Ari, a struggling mother of a one-year-old, and Mina, a nine-months-pregnant woman who is new to town, become comrades-in-arms.--Provided by publisher.

The third volume of the Library of America's edition of Saul Bellow's complete novels collects three essential works: Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970), Humboldt's Gift (1975) -- and The Dean's December (1982). In each, Bellow shows himself a master of biting social commentary and bold characterization--above all through a trio of unforgettable protagonists. These novels, written in the period of Bellow's greatest literary and popular acclaim--he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1976--are unsparing yet humane, and range widely in their philosophical and cultural concerns. They offer the indispensable voice of a great American raconteur and thinker.

Edith Pearlman manages to combine subtlety with extravagance, understatement with spectacle, drawing our focus to the eccentricities of those who would prefer to remain unnoticed. . . . Confronted with unexpected obstacles, these characters exchange the blurring comfort of routine with spontaneity and improvisation . . . . Full of vivid, intricate, nuanced portraits, confidently focused, restrained and yet spirited, saturated with a powerful imaginative sympathy, How to Fall is a remarkable collection by a remarkable writer. --From the Foreword by Joanna Scott How to Fall is a darkly humorous collection that welcomes the world's immense variety with confidence. Spanning no fewer than four countries in sixty years, these sixteen stories flesh out the complexities of people who, at first glance, live ordinary, unremarkable lives. Widowers, old men, estranged spouses, young restaurant workers, career women and Jewish grandmothers are all at the center of Pearlman's cool, studied observation. Each character is rendered with such unpredictable intricacy that they often astonish themselves just as much as the reader. Many of the stories either begin or wind their way back to one, mythical, two-by-three-mile Massachusetts town--Godolphin, a place that "called itself a town but was really a leafy wedge of Boston." Edith Pearlman has published over 100 stories in national magazines, literary journals, anthologies and online publications. Her work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories , The O. Henry Prize collection, New Stories from the South: The Year's Best and The Pushcart Prize collection. Her first collection of stories, Vaquita , won the Drue Heinz Prize for Literature, and her second, Love Among the Greats , won the Spokane Prize for Fiction. She now lives in Brookline, Massachusetts.

A charming and undeniably powerful debut novel set in Berlin, "This Must Be the Place" chronicles the friendship between a fading actor and a young married American woman who are both learning to live with the past.

A National Jewish Honor Book composed of seven short stories from the author of The Mind-Body Problem. A mathematician studies the geometry of soap bubbles and responds to the rapture of infatuation by reciting Shakespeare in Yiddish. A group of Olympian intellects is made childlike by the appearance of a double rainbow. Becky Sharp steps out of the pages of Vanity Fair to confound a pretentious philosopher. These are just some of the marvelous and unlikely things that happen in Strange Attractors—a collection of stories that explores the interactions of thought and feeling, mind and heart, to reveal the deep, mysterious ties between seemingly unrelated lives. “A wonderful collection . . . A picture of remarkable depth and complexity.”—Los Angeles Times “Electric and compelling . . . Rebecca Goldstein brings a keen and specially informed vision to our world.”—Newsday “Rebecca Goldstein again probes the relationships between female intellect and emotion—this time in a sparkling, erudite collection in which brilliant women’s minds dictate their romantic attachments while their gender continues to dictate their fate.”—Kirkus Reviews

A young Jewish couple vows to raise an eight-year-old black girl true to her own culture and heritage, in a novel about racial prejudice and intolerance

Novel Gazing is the first collection of queer criticism on the history of the novel. The contributors to this volume navigate new territory in literary theory with essays that implicitly challenge the "hermeneutic of suspicion" widespread in current critical theory. In a stunning introductory essay, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick delineates the possibilities for a criticism that would be "reparative" rather than cynical or paranoid. The startlingly imaginative essays in the volume explore new critical practices that can weave the pleasures and disorientations of reading into the fabric of queer analyses. Through discussions of a diverse array of British, French, and American novels—including major canonical novels, best-sellers, children’s fiction, and science fiction—these essays explore queer worlds of taste, texture, joy, and ennui, focusing on such subjects as flogging, wizardry, exorcism, dance, Zionist desire, and Internet sexuality. Interpreting the works of authors as diverse as Benjamin Constant, Toni Morrison, T. H. White, and William Gibson, along with canonical queer modernists such as James, Proust, Woolf, and Cather, contributors reveal the wealth of ways in which selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them. The dramatic reframing that these essays perform will make the significance of Novel Gazing extend beyond the scope of queer studies to literary criticism in general. Contributors . Stephen Barber, Renu Bora, Anne Chandler, James Creech, Tyler Curtain, Jonathan Goldberg, Joseph Litvak, Michael Lucey, Jeff Nunokawa, Cindy Patton, Jacob Press, Robert F. Reid-Pharr, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Melissa Solomon, Kathryn Bond Stockton, John Vincent, Maurice Wallace, Barry Weller

Four stories of comedy, deception, and revenge (including one previously unpublished) showcases heroes who suffer from willful self-deceit. These not-so-innocents proceed from self-deception to deceiving others, who do not take it lightly. The novella "Dictation" imagines a fateful meeting between the secretaries to Henry James and Joseph Conrad at the peak of their fame. Timid Miss Hallowes, who types for Conrad, comes under the influence of James's Miss Bosanquet, high-spirited, flirtatious, and scheming. In a masterstroke of genius, Ozick hatches a plot between them to insert themselves into posterity.--From publisher description.

This book has been written with the narrow conviction that if Native American literature is worth thinking about at all, it is worth thinking about as literature. The vast majority of thought that has been poured out onto Native American literature has puddled, for the most part, on how the texts are positioned in relation to history or culture. Rather than create a comprehensive cultural and historical genealogy for Native American literature, David Treuer investigates a selection of the most important Native American novels and, with a novelist's eye and a critic's mind, examines the intricate process of understanding literature on its own terms. Native American Fiction: A User's Manual is speculative, witty, engaging, and written for the inquisitive reader. These essays--on Sherman Alexie, Forrest Carter, James Fenimore Cooper, Louise Erdrich, Leslie Marmon Silko, and James Welch--are rallying cries for the need to read literature as literature and, ultimately, reassert the importance and primacy of the word. --Publisher.

Examines the effect of the Holocaust on traditional attempts to explain the Jewish people's sufferings while retaining the concept of covenant with God. also examines its influence on the self-image of American Jewry. Analyzes the works of Elie Wiesel, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow, and Cynthia Ozick, among others, and suggests that awareness of a covenantal concept of Judaism is a criterion for authentic Holocaust literature. Adopts the definition of the Holocaust as a unique event - the plan to exterminate an entire nation, and describes various approaches to theological problems raised by the Holocaust.

In Menachem's Seed , Carl Djerassi , world-renowned scientist and inventor of the birth-control pill, brings us a new novel that explores the human--and passionate--side of science. Melanie Laidlaw and Menachem Dvir meet at a series of international conferences where jet-setting scientists come together to discuss the global implications of their discoveries. Melanie runs a foundation that awards grants for innovations in reproductive technology; Menachem is an infertile nuclear engineer and a married man. Naturally, they fall in love. What follows is a story of sexual steam, stolen seed, and religious conversion--a very modern romance that hinges on a cutting-edge scientific breakthrough. As Melanie and Menachem discover, what science makes possible, only two hearts can make right.

City Codes is a study of the representation of the city in the modern novel that takes difference as its point of departure, so that cities are read according to the cultural and social position of the urbanite. City Codes argues that the modern urban novel, in contrast to earlier novels, is characterized by an intersection of public and private space, but that this intersection is mapped differently according to the position of the city dweller in terms of history, politics, nationality, gender, class, and race.

"Part One examines New York from aristocracy (e.g. Henry James and Edith Wharton), immigrants (e.g. Mario Puzo), African Americans (e.g. Ralph Ellison), Jews (e.g. Daniel Fuchs). Part Two studies variations and themes in works of Stephen Crane, Tom Wolfe, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Theodore Dreiser. Part Three covers New York theatre from Eugene O'Neill and Arthur Miller"--Provided by publisher.

Provides an overview of lesbian fiction, and analyzes the ways in which it has both mirrored and shaped the lesbian movement and lesbian culture.

A reading of African American and Jewish American writers from Henry Roth and Ralph Ellison to Philip Roth and David Bradley. Reading the work of such writers alongside and through one another, Newton's book offers an original way of juxtaposing two major traditions in modern American literature, and rethinking the sometimes vexed relationship between two constituencies ordinarily confined to sociopolitical or media commentary alone. Newton combines Emmanuel Levinas's ethical philosophy and Walter Benjamin's theory of allegory in shaping an innovative kind of ethical-political criticism. Through artful, dialogical readings of Saul Bellow and Chester Himes, David Mamet and Anna Deavere Smith, and others, Newton seeks to represent American Blacks and Jews outside the distorting mirror of 'Black-Jewish Relations', and restrictive literary histories alike. A final chapter addresses the Black/Jewish dimension of the O. J. Simpson trial.

Enrique and Margaret Sabas have been married for 30 years. Now, Margaret is under hospice care in the final stages of cancer and asks Enrique to control access to her during her final days so that she can say good-bye to a select few on her own terms. Enrique does so, patiently waiting for his own turn. As he waits, he remembers their life together, from their first conversation forward. The story alternates between past and present, contrasting the budding and then mature relationship to the sad reality of its end.