It is 1967 and Larry Gopnik, a physics professor at a quiet Midwestern university, has just been informed by his wife Judith that she is leaving him since she has fallen in love with one of his more pompous colleagues. His domestic woes accumulate: his unemployable brother Larry is sleeping on the couch, his son Danny is playing hooky from Hebrew school, and his daughter is sneaking money from his wallet in order to save up for a nose job. Also, a graduate student seems to be trying to bribe him for a passing grade while at the same time threatening to sue him for defamation, thus putting in jeopardy Larry's chances for tenure at the university. As if all this wasn't enough, he is tormented by the sight of his beautiful next door neighbor sunbathing nude. Larry's search for some kind of equilibrium is conveyed with the kind of humor, imagination, and verbal wit that have made the work of Ethan and Joel Coen so distinctive.

Newly discharged from the Korean War army, reeling from his mother's recent death, freed from old attachments and hungrily seeking others, Gabe Wallach is drawn to Paul Herz, a fellow graduate student in literature, and to Libby, Paul's moody, intense wife. The anarchy caused by the Herzes' struggle with responsible adulthood and his own eager love affairs vicariously tests Gabe's desire to be connected to the ordered 'world of feeling' that he finds in books.--from publisher's description.

Howard Katz is a new play by Patrick Marber, who has been called "the greatest British playwright to have emerged in the 1990s." (The Financial Times) Following on the success of his play Closer, Patrick Marber's Howard Katz has been hailed as "a gripping piece of work" (Sunday Telegraph). This haunting play is centered on its title character, a hard-as-nails talent agent now down on his luck. Marber traces the story of the mighty Katz through almost dream- like flashbacks, capturing a man in freefall, while he determinedly clings to life. Marber's tale is a universal one about the search for faith and the power of love to touch even the most hardened soul. "Howard Katz is one of the most fascinating, relevant, and thoughtful plays to hit London in recent years." -- Time "A dream-play, a nightmare-play, a sad-funny life and death play. A must." -- Sunday Times (London)

In this powerfully affecting novel—by the author of The Pawnbroker—Joe Berman, an immigrant at eighteen, fifty-nine now, and a hard-working Connecticut plumber, faces the loss of his deeply loved wife. The months that follow, months of wrath and rebellion during which he fights his way to a new idea of life, death, and God, are part of Berman's human season. But so are the years behind him, vividly evoked as the narrative travels back into the past.

A whirling top most of his life, Michael Goldberg's world changes when his dying shrink bequeaths to him the tapes of thirty years of Michael's therapy sessions. The tapes give Michael a second chance in middle age: they unlock his life for him, as a gallery of absurd and touching characters, events and scenes spring out of his past: the shrink who cracks up and reverses roles with Michael when his wife dies; a first love encountered again in desperate, ravaged middle age; a Communist Party leader who "would rather be a lamppost in Moscow than President of the United States"; a "glistening failure" of a father who is a cheerleader of Michael's defeat ("You can fail, Michael, if you try! I did it, why can't you?"); the fetish porn-drenched world of old TImes Square; a Holocaust survivor Michael meets on September 11th who cannot confront his experience; a Hollywood of elderly Jewish moguls, scholarly and bizarre, "who seemed to have been shipped fresh to California from New York like onion bagels or seeded bialies"---- men like Michael's mentor, Julius Birnbach, creator of the cult classic, The Curse of the Evil Midgets. As Michael reclaims his life, The Great Kisser becomes a story of gratitude ---- of many kisses ---- by its climax ...