These powerfully vivid stories from a great writer offer enormous pleasure, recognition and discovery. Ranging through the unreliable layers of family archaeology, they uncover earlier, vulnerable selves, moments of innocence or shame, and unfinished business, illumined by shocking flashes of unpredictable violence and pain, or glints of sly humour. In the brilliant cornerstone story the stuff of dreams is both real and imagined—rumoured fields of cannabis picked in secret by migrant workers, or a nightmare encounter on a dark city street. In “Night Training” a military recruit is scarred by his own complicity in a bizarre nightly ritual. From the image of a small boy entranced by his mother’s GI escort, yet still hoping for the return of a father missing in action, to “Sally’s Story” in which a comfort girl looks for comfort of her own, here are men and women in search of connection, or equally wary of it—whether with each other or with past selves. David Malouf evokes, like no other writer, dark shadows beneath the bright sun.

"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.