Leo Gursky is trying to survive a little bit longer, tapping his radiator each evening to let his upstairs neighbor know he's still alive, drawing attention to himself at the milk counter of Starbucks. But life wasn't always like this: sixty years ago, in the Polish village where he was born, Leo fell in love and wrote a book. And although he doesn't know it, that book also survived: it crossed oceans and generations, and changed lives. Fourteen-year-old Alma was named after a character in that book. She has her hands full keeping track of her little brother Bird (who thinks he might be the Messiah) and taking copious notes in her book, How to Survive in the Wild Volume Three. But when a mysterious letter arrives in the mail she undertakes an adventure to find her namesake and save her family. In her extraordinary new novel Nicole Krauss has created some of the most memorable and moving characters in recent fiction. A tale brimming with laughter, passion, and soaring imaginative power, The History of Love confirms Krauss as one of the most remarkable writers of her generation.

Dr. Stern’s The Flight from Woman is a study of the polarity of the sexes as reflected in the conflict between two modes of knowledge–scientific or rational, as contrasted with intuitive or poetic. In exploring this rich theme, he undertakes the psychological portraits of six representative figures whose thought and work have influenced modern man: Descartes, Goethe, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Tolstoy, and Sartre. The scientific revolution of the last 300 years has yielded, in Dr. Stern’s view, a de-ferninization and de-humanization of society, in the sense that it is a rejection of the kind of wisdom, called sophia, that is comprehended intuitively. “If we equate the one-sidedly rational and technical with the masculine,” he states, “there arises the ghastly specter of a world impoverished of womanly values.” A deeply original work, The Flight from Woman goes far beyond psychology in its analysis of the malaise of our time.

"A collection of essays from a "great poet-critic-intellectual" (Daily Beast). In these brilliant, wide-ranging essays, published over the last seven years in the New Republic, The New Yorker, and elsewhere, renowned American critic Adam Kirsch explores the intersection of literature with larger questions about ideas, history, and society. Kirsch has been described as "elegant and astute . . . [a] critic of the very first order" (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times). In Rocket and Lightship he examines the work and lives of writers past and present, from intellectuals Susan Sontag, Hannah Arendt, and Walter Benjamin to novelists including E. M. Forster, David Foster Wallace, and Zadie Smith. Kirsch quotes G. M. Hopkins: "Nor rescue, only rocket and lightship, shone." So, according to Kirsch, shines literature: as an unattainable speed, as a moving beacon. Taken together, the provocative and bold essays in Rocket and Lightship show how literature can illuminate questions of meaning, ethics, and politics, and how those questions shape the way we take pleasure in art" --