Heatwave and Crazy Birds


Book Description

When her archeologist father died, Loya Kaplan left Israel seemingly for good, severing all ties to her past. Twenty-five years later, she's a flight attendant without friends or family, happiest in the temporary and artificial world of airports. Sleepwalking through life, Loya is summoned back to Israel following the death of David—her father's friend, or rival, or lover, or nemesis?—who has named Loya as his heir. Returning now to a country that has become alien to her, and the house where she was raised, filled with relics not only of her own past but of her family and even ancient history, Loya's story splits, deliriously, in two: the life she once led in an improvised neighborhood, filled with concentration- camp refugees and secrets, colliding with the antiseptic, well-fed present day.




Narratives of Dissent


Book Description

Students and teachers of Israeli studies will appreciate Narratives of Dissent.




Reverberations of Nazi Violence in Germany and Beyond


Book Description

Reverberations of Nazi Violence in Germany and Beyond explores the complex and diverse reverberations of the Second World War after 1945. It focuses on the legacies that National Socialist violence and genocide perpetrated in Europe continue to have in German-speaking countries and communities, as well as among those directly affected by occupation, terror and mass murder. Furthermore it explores how those legacies are in turn shaped by the present. The volume also considers conflicting, unexpected and often dissonant interpretations and representations of these events, made by those who were the witnesses, victims and perpetrators at the time and also by different communities in the generations that followed. The contributions, from a range of disciplinary perspectives, enrich our understanding of the complexity of the ways in which a disturbing past continues to disrupt the present and how the past is in turn disturbed and instrumentalized by a later present.




A Brief History of Yes


Book Description

Micheline Marcom describes her newest novel, A Brief History of Yes—her first since 2008's scathing and erotic The Mirror in the Well—as a "literary fado," referring to a style of Portuguese music that, akin to the American blues, is often melancholic and soulful, and encapsulates the feeling of what the Portuguese call saudade—meaning, loosely, yearning and nostalgia for something or someone irrepreably lost. A Brief History of Yes tells the story of the break-up between a Portuguese woman named Maria and an unnamed American man: it is a collage-like, fragmentary novel whose form captures the workings of attraction and grief, proving once again that American letters has no better poet of love and loss than Micheline Aharonian Marcom.




Selected Stories


Book Description

This volume collects new short stories from one of Ireland’s leading writers in both the Irish and English languages. Eilis Ni Dhuibhne’s stories are widely acclaimed for their acute perception of Irish women’s lives, the power of her verbal economy, and her skillful and unique use of both humor and the fantastic.




The Soil


Book Description

A major, never before translated novel by the author of Mujông / The Heartless—often called the first modern Korean novel—The Soil tells the story of an idealist dedicating his life to helping the inhabitants of the rural community in which he was raised. Striving to influence the poor farmers of the time to improve their lots, become self-reliant, and thus indirectly change the reality of colonial life on the Korean peninsula, The Soil was vitally important to the social movements of the time, echoing the effects and reception of such English-language novels as Upton Sinclair's The Jungle.




Stepping Off the Edge


Book Description

Stepping Off the Edge addresses the question of literary edges and endings in contemporary works of literature from France, the United States, Canada, and Latin America. The book includes discussion of works by nine different authors, including Anne Carson, Marie NDiaye, Paul Auster, and César Aira. It considers the way that specific texts identify and interrogate textual boundaries, and also draw attention to questions of closure. Each of these texts also reflects on the way we experience and write about edges and endings in our lives.




Wasabi for Breakfast


Book Description

These touching novellas detail the difficulties of a Japanese woman to both adapt to her new life in the United States without abandoning ties to her family and community back home. This book collects two novellas by the noted Japanese painter: “Family Business” and “1,001 Pillars of Flame.” In the first, Megumi—like the author, a long-time resident of the United States—pays a visit to her now eighty-seven-year-old mother in Japan. After so many years living abroad, Megumi simply can't understand contemporary Japan, and when her nephew runs away from home, and her elderly mother gives chase, Megumi finds herself having to relearn Japanese survival skills in an effort to bring them home safely. In “1,001 Pillars of Fire,” another Japanese-American woman, Yu, has been living in California for decades—which makes it all the more painful that she’s just as subject to discrimination now as ever. When, in the wake of the Rodney King trial, LA’s African-American population begins to riot, Yu learns just how much damage exclusion can do—finding it even within her own family.




Gestures


Book Description

A forty-year-old man, burying himself in work and avoiding close emotional bonds with people, pays a visit to his mother in the country and is forced to extend it upon discovering her illness. While there, he reevaluates past familial and romantic relationships and finally attempts to build new ones. Gestures is "a psychologically precise and moving autopsy of a 'man in the wake of ordeals.'"




Permission


Book Description

Consisting of anonymous e-mail messages sent by the author to an acclaimed visual artist over the course of a year, Permission is the record of an experiment: an attempt to forge a connection with a stranger through the writing of a book, and thus a search for fellowship in solitude, as well as a testimony to the isolating effects and creative possibilities of the digital age. With reveries touching upon the insipid landscape of post-Cold War Poland, the elongated shadows of the Holocaust, and the narrator's "safe passage" to America, Permission not only updates the "epistolary novel" for our time by embracing the permissiveness we associate with digital communication, it opens up a new literary frontier.