"Oy! to the world. Rachel Rubenstein-Goldblatt is a nice Jewish girl with a shameful secret: she loves Christmas. For a decade she’s hidden her career as a Christmas romance novelist from her family. Her talent has made her a bestseller even as her chronic illness has always kept the kind of love she writes about out of reach. But when her diversity-conscious publisher insists she write a Hanukkah romance, her well of inspiration suddenly runs dry. Hanukkah’s not magical. It’s not merry. It’s not Christmas. Desperate not to lose her contract, Rachel’s determined to find her muse at the Matzah Ball, a Jewish music celebration on the last night of Hanukkah, even if it means working with her summer camp archenemy—Jacob Greenberg. Though Rachel and Jacob haven’t seen each other since they were kids, their grudge still glows brighter than a menorah. But as they spend more time together, Rachel finds herself drawn to Hanukkah—and Jacob—in a way she never expected. Maybe this holiday of lights will be the spark she needed to set her heart ablaze" -- back cover.

In I Love Dick, published in 1997, Chris Kraus, author of Aliens & Anorexia, Torpor, and Video Green, boldly tore away the veil that separates fiction from reality and privacy from self-expression. It's no wonder that I Love Dick instantly elicited violent controversies and attracted a host of passionate admirers. The story is gripping enough: in 1994 a married, failed independent filmmaker, turning forty, falls in love with a well-known theorist and endeavors to seduce him with the help of her husband. But when the theorist refuses to answer her letters, the husband and wife continue the correspondence for each other instead, imagining the fling the wife wishes to have with Dick. What follows is a breathless pursuit that takes the woman across America and away from her husband; and far beyond her original infatuation into a discovery of the transformative power of first person narrative. I Love Dick is a manifesto for a new kind of feminist who isn't afraid to burn through her own narcissism in order to assume responsibility for herself and for all the injustice in world; and it's a book you won't put down until the author's final, heroic acts of self-revelation and transformation.

A man in his late twenties goes to a large Christmas party in Manhattan where a woman introduces herself with three words: "I am Clara." Over the following seven days, they meet every evening at the same cinema. Overwhelmed yet cautious, he treads softly and won't hazard a move. The tension between them builds gradually, marked by ambivalence, hope, and distrust. They move both closer together and farther apart, culminating on New Year's Eve in a final scene charged with magic and the promise of renewal.

When Deborah Eisenberg's first book of stories, Transactions in a Foreign Currency , was published, John Updike noted: "Whenever a new writer arrives, a new window of life is opened, and this has happened here." The scope and depth of Eisenberg's idiosyncratic vision were even more apparent in her second collection, Under the 82nd Airborne , which The New York Times Book Review called "nothing short of extraordinary." As these two collections gathered here into one volume show, Eisenberg's stories have an astonishing power and range. Her characters, whether they are walking in the streets of Manhattan or seemingly abandoned in foreign countries, continually make disquieting and sometimes life-threatening discoveries about themselves, discoveries that illuminate not only their own lives but also the wider net of relationships in which they are enmeshed. "The reprinting of these two collections as one is sure to win Eisenberg's stories an even wider audience than they now enjoy." - Publishers Weekly

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 novel on an unusual household in our day and age, three generations of women living together in Boston. They are a lawyer who owns the house, her ailing mother--the mother had no time for the lawyer before she fell ill--and the lawyer's daughter, unemployed and on drugs.

"Eighty-three-year-old Harvey Franklin never thought he would find love again after losing his wife of more than fifty years. Spending his days walking his beloved poodle in Central Park, he has gotten used to the idea of being alone. Everything changes the morning he meets eighty-year-old Sarah Silverman. Romance blooms between the two and they quickly become entangled in a passionate love affair. When Sarah reveals her husband's battle with dementia, things become complicated"--back cover.

A tale of small-town political and sexual intrigue. The hero is David Greene, a baseball player returning to his hometown in Cape Cod after a mediocre career and a failed marriage. He embarks on two affairs at once and runs for selectman.

Characters make discoveries about themselves and their relationships, in seven stories that comment on topics ranging from surburbia to Central American politics

"The Matrimonial Flirtations of Emma Kaulfield is an often laugh-out-loud comedy of conflicting manners, values, and customs, set against the backdrop of a Russian immigrant family's struggle to assimilate, their newfound love of capitalism, and their insistent push for their children's tangible success. Emma Kaulfield escaped the Soviet Union in the 1980s when she was 10--hers was one of the last Jewish families to be let out. Now a gorgeous young woman, going to grad school at NYU, chaffing at the cultural restraints of her heritage, Emma is engaged to someone just like her--a handsome young Russian Jew--but then a steamy encounter with a stranger in a restaurant bathroom turns into a torrid love affair. She wrestles with what she knows she should do (career vs. art); who she should love (one of her own vs. the exotic temptation), to remain loyal to her family, her people--after all they have suffered--or cut ties and defy those who love her. The Matrimonial Flirtations of Emma Kaulfield builds in power and suspense, easily becoming an all-night binge read, impossible to put down. Fishbeyn's debut novel is sexy, hilarious, heartbreaking, and breathtaking"--back cover.

"At eight years old, Gerta Pieters is forced to disguise herself as a boy and sent to work for a genteel Dutch family. When their brilliant and beautiful daughter Maria sees through Gerta's ruse, she insists that Gerta accompany her to Amsterdam and help her enter the elite, male-dominated art world. While Maria rises in the ranks of society as a painting prodigy, Gerta makes herself invaluable in every way: confidante, muse, lover. But as Gerta steps into her own talents, their relationship fractures into a complex web of obsession and rivalry--and the secrets they keep threaten to unravel everything"--