Alarming environmental degradation makes ever more urgent the reconciliation of political economy and sustainability. Land and the Given Economy examines how the landed basis of human existence converges with economics, and it offers a persuasive new conception of land that transcends the flawed and inadequate accounts in classical and neoclassical economics.

Todd S. Mei grounds this work in a rigorous review of problematic economic conceptions of land in the work of John Locke, Adam Smith, David Ricardo, John Stuart Mill, Karl Marx, Henry George, Alfred Marshall, and Thorstein Veblen.

Mei then draws on the thought of Martin Heidegger to posit a philosophical clarification of the meaning of land—its ontological nature. He argues that central to rethinking land is recognizing its unique manner of being, described as its "givenness." Concluding with a discussion of ground rent, Mei reflects on specific strategies for incorporating the philosophical account of land into contemporary economic policies.

Revivifying economic frameworks that fail to resolve the impasse between economic development and sustainability, Land and the Given Economy offers much of interest to scholars and readers of philosophy, environmentalism, and the full spectrum of political economy.

Igor Klekh emerges as a writer from the crossroads of Europe—Western Ukraine—influenced by the great Russian literary tradition as well as the languages and dialects of both East-Central Europe and his native country. A Land the Size of Binoculars collects his breakthrough 1993 novella Kallimakh's Wake, five short pieces, and two more recent novellas.

Throughout, Klekh studies landscapes as intimate as the terrain between fathers and sons and as broad as the wild, mysterious Carpathian Mountains. His work has been compared to that of Borges, Eco, and the magical realists, and celebrated for its synthesis of numerous literary traditions, its use of esoteric knowledge, and its breathtaking prose.
 

The dispute over Edgar Degas’s Landscape with Smokestacks was featured in newspapers and on television. But because the suit was settled before trial, the story behind the headlines was never publicly presented. Howard J. Trienens, a lawyer for the defendant collector, traces the landscape’s travels from its prewar home to its current location in the Art Institute of Chicago, laying out the mystery surrounding the work and demonstrating the legal complexities that plague Holocaust restitution cases, yet are seldom examined in depth by the media.

Eugene Gendlin's contribution to the theory of language is the focus of this collection of essays edited by David Michael Levin. This compilation of critical studies—each followed by a comment from Gendlin himself—investigates how concepts grow out of experience, and explores relations between Gendlin's philosophy of language and experience and the philosophies of Wittgenstein, Dilthey, and Heidegger.

Hard-luck attorney Luis Montez has hit the big-time at last. He's successfully defended Jimmy Esch, the good-for-nothing son of a powerful Denver family. No small bonus, Jimmy's attractive sister Lisa is, as the saying goes, appreciative. It's enough to make a man quit moping about a lost love.

What a difference a day makes. Inside of twenty-four hours, a cop rumored to have received bribes from Montez takes a header off a mountain, Jimmy Esch is found butchered, and the cops consider the attorney their top suspect. Lisa—Montez's alibi—has conveniently disappeared. As if all that wasn't enough, Montez must also cope with the news his father is in the hospital.

Distracted by family strife and a media circus, Montez broods on the latest wrong turns in his life. Then he decides to act. Jumping bail, he heads across the Rockies to the barrios of San Diego. It's not easy to unravel the perfect set-up when you're down to your last cent. But Montez pursues the truths that will clear his name, and ultimately confronts the powerful force that is Family.

These testimonies, submitted by individual authors and not originally intended for publication, were assembled as a historical record by the Association of the Children of the Holocaust in Poland. While evil and brutal anti-Semitism are described, the accounts also reveal the great risks taken by courageous individuals in order to save Jewish children.

The memoirs of Jews who were children during the Nazi occupation of Poland

This book serves as a memorial to loved ones who do not even have a grave, as well as a tribute to those who risked their lives and families to save a Jewish child. A wide variety of experiences during the Nazi occupation of Poland are related with wrenching simplicity and candor, experiences that illustrate horrors and deprivation, but also present examples of courage and compassion.

These recollections-whether of hiding in forests or camouflaged bunkers, fighting with groups of partisans, enduring the horrors of concentration camps, or living in fear under disguised identities-serve as eloquent testimony to the depth, diversity, and richness of humanity under siege and offer a powerful lesson for future generations. Written by people who remained in Poland after the war, these accounts convey a great immediacy; the authors are not removed from the environment in which these experiences took place. The psychological impact on these child survivors and the difficulties they encountered even after the war are very poignant. The passing years have brought urgency to the publication of these stories, as those who wrote them are the last surviving eyewitnesses of these tumultuous events.
 

 

In a remote Albanian village, a place of banishment, a stranger appears, claiming to be Viktor Dragoti and looking for his long-lost love. That Viktor Dragoti has been dead for nine years, killed by the Albanian coast guard while trying to swim to freedom, only adds to the stranger's mystery--and to the suspense of this curiously real and yet otherworldly work by one of Albania's most distinguished writers. With echoes of The Return of Martin Guerre and Kafka's The Trial, with allusions to The Odyssey and the Albanian folktale of Ago Ymeri, a legendary hero released from the underworld for one day, Shehu's novel blends the autobiographical and the historical, the personal and the political into a powerful tale--a story that conveys the terrors, small and large, of a totalitarian state while capturing all that is surreal and even lyrical in life in such a deeply distorted world.

The Last Mistress of Jose Rizal is a collection of stories that focuses on multigenerational tales of intertwined Filipino families. Set in the huge yet relatively overlooked and misunderstood Filipino diaspora in the United States, this book follows characters who live in the shadow of the histories of the United States and its former colony in Asia, the Philippines. The impact of immigration and separation filters through the stories as a way of communing with or creating distance between individuals and family, country, or history.

Roley’s work has been praised by everyone from New York Times literary critics to APIA author Helen Zia for his bare, poetic style and raw emotionalism. In the collection’s title story, a woman living with her daughter and her daughter’s American husband fears the loss of Filipino tradition, especially Catholicism, as she tries to secretly permeate her granddaughter’s existence with elements of her ancestry. In "New Relations," an American-born son introduces his mother to his Caucasian bride and her family, only to experience his first marital discord around issues of politesse, the perception of culture, and post-colonial legacies. Roley’s delicately nuanced collection often leaves the audience with the awkwardness that comes from things lost in translation or entangled in generational divides.

Taking cues from Walter Benjamin’s fragmentary writings on literary-historical method, Late Colonial Sublime reconstellates the dialectic of Enlightenment across a wide imperial geography, with special focus on the fashioning of neo-epics in Hindi and Urdu literary cultures in British India. Working through the limits of both Marxism and postcolonial critique, this book forges an innovative approach to the question of late romanticism and grounds categories such as the sublime within the dynamic of commodification. While G. S. Sahota takes canonical European critics such as Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer to the outskirts of empire, he reads Indian writers such as Muhammad Iqbal and Jayashankar Prasad in light of the expansion of instrumental rationality and the neotraditional critiques of the West it spurred at the onset of decolonization.

By bringing together distinct literary canons—both metropolitan and colonial, hegemonic and subaltern, Western and Eastern, all of which took shape upon the common realities of imperial capitalism—Late Colonial Sublime takes an original dialectical approach. It experiments with fragments, parallaxes, and constellational form to explore the aporias of modernity as well as the possible futures they may signal in our midst. A bold intervention into contemporary debates that synthesizes a wealth of sources, this book will interest readers and scholars in world literature, critical theory, postcolonial criticism, and South Asian studies.

Latinx Theater in the Times of Neoliberalism traces how Latinx theater in the United States has engaged with the policies, procedures, and outcomes of neoliberal economics in the Americas from the 1970s to the present.

Patricia A. Ybarra examines IMF interventions, NAFTA, shifts in immigration policy, the escalation of border industrialization initiatives, and austerity programs. She demonstrates how these policies have created the conditions for many of the most tumultuous events in the Americas in the last forty years, including dictatorships in the Southern Cone; the 1994 Cuban Rafter Crisis; femicides in Juárez, Mexico; the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico; and the rise of narcotrafficking as a violent and vigorous global business throughout the Americas.

Latinx artists have responded to these crises by writing and developing innovative theatrical modes of representation about neoliberalism. Ybarra analyzes the work of playwrights María Irene Fornés, Cherríe Moraga, Michael John Garcés, Caridad Svich, Quiara Alegría Hudes, Victor Cazares, Jorge Ignacio Cortiñas, Tanya Saracho, and Octavio Solis. In addressing histories of oppression in their home countries, these playwrights have newly imagined affective political and economic ties in the Americas. They also have rethought the hallmark movements of Latin politics in the United States—cultural nationalism, third world solidarity, multiculturalism—and their many discontents.

The lava of change has spilled over South Africa again as apartheid as ended. What sort of social and artistic emerges as it cools? This anthology, containing more than two hundred poems by over fifty poets, spans five distinct historical periods in the contemporary development of South Africa, from the 1960s Durban worker strikes to the dismantling of apartheid in the 1990s. Most of the poems have been written in English, but forty-eight have been translated from Afrikaans, Zulu, Xhosa, and /Xam, a Bushman linguistic group. Inspired by music, by the language of the streets, by the sensual and the erotic, and by social, political, and economic turmoil, these poems showcase a remarkable complexity of literary traditions. They provide a fascinating and moving rendering of South Africa's hybrid language and unique worldview.

In Learning to Perform Carol Simpson Stern and Bruce Henderson enliven the dialogue between theory and practice for actors and teachers alike. Beginning with an overview of the study of literary and cultural texts through performance, Stern and Henderson then translate literary and performance theory into concrete classroom experience. Learning to Perform presents a dynamic performance methodology that offers the tools students need to develop and refine performance skills, analyze texts, and think and reflect critically on performed texts. By addressing an expanded sense of text that includes cultural as well as literary artifacts, the authors bridge the gap between oral interpretation and the more inclusive field of performance studies that overarches it.

From Litchfield's great church stove war to Hartford's Charter Oak to Stonington's infamous Lantern Hill, these traditional tales from the Nutmeg State span four centuries of Connecticut history. Personal legends, narratives, anecdotes, and supernatural stories—all are fascinating, humorous and rich with the history and lore of the land.

Praised as the first Russian novel of psychological realism and as a critique of the repressive era in which Mikhail Lermontov lived, A Hero of Our Time brought to life the political and social ideas that at that time could only be expressed indirectly. This latest volume in the acclaimed Northwestern/AATSEEL Critical Companions to Russian Literature series presents diverse perspectives of leading Slavic literary theorists and specialists, ethnologists, formalist critics, and Western humanists. Lending additional breadth and depth are conservative and radical reviews of the novel written at the time of its publication, plus two new essays, one on ethnic identity and the other on women's issues in the novel.

This is the first study of Russian writer Mikhail Lermontov (1814-41) that attempts to integrate the in-depth interpretations of all his major texts--including his famous A Hero of Our Time, the novel that laid the foundation for the Russian psychological novel.

Lermontov's explorations of the virtues and limitations of heroic, self-reliant conduct have subsequently become obscured or misread. This new book focuses upon the peculiar, disturbing, and arguably most central feature of Russian culture: its suspicion of and hostility toward individual achievement and self-assertion. The analysis and interpretation of Lermontov's texts enables Golstein to address broader cultural issues by exploring the reasons behind the persistent misreading of Lermontov's major works and by investigating the cultural attitudes that shaped Russia's reaction to the challenges of modernity.

Winner of the 1992 Anisfield-Wolf Book Award

Nearly half a century after the Nazi massacre of the Jews in Europe, the Holocaust is now moving from the domain of experience to that of history. It is becoming the subject of recorded rather than living memory. Is real comprehension of the development and horror of the Nazi onslaught accessible to us? If so, through what intellectual processes or categories of understanding, and in the face of what temptations or diversions? How can we preserve, expand, and apply our knowledge of why and how barbarity came to prevail? What meaning can present and future generations derive from the catastrophe? These are the vital questions addressed by the essays in this volume.

In the years following the demise of the Third Reich, the task of Holocaust education fell predominantly to survivors. Now, as the generation of survivors passes along this responsibility, growing numbers of individuals and institutions are committed to Holocaust education.

Lessons and Legacies II focuses on matters unique to Holocaust education. Consisting of selected papers delivered at the second Lessons and Legacies conference in 1992, the volume is organized in three sections: Issues, Resources, and Applications. Taken individually, the essays speak directly to specific concerns surrounding Holocaust education: the growing maturity of the Holocaust as a field of study; the difficult issue of explaining the perpetrators' behavior; the process of decision-making within Jewish communities during the Holocaust; issues of gender and family; the scope and content of survivor literature; and the structure of courses and the implications of being an educator in the field. Taken as a whole, the volume speaks to the reciprocal and mutually reinforcing relationship between teaching and scholarship in this important field.

The process of looking back on the Holocaust is one of a double nature: it can bring both enlightenment and a paralyzing pain, particularly for its survivors. This volume addresses the process of looking back, the challenges to understanding of unimaginable horrors that took place, and how academia, media, popular attitudes, and even judicial mind-sets handle that process.

A collection of nineteen essays, this book is organized into four sections: the first focuses on how various fields of study can open new perspectives on the Holocaust and sharpen old ones; the second examines culture and politics in Germany before and after 1933; the third addresses the problems associated with the memorialization of those years; and the final section examines the shocking denials of the Holocaust.

In authoritative, nonpolemical essays on some of the latest and most contentious issues surrounding the Holocaust, the contributors to this volume revisit some topics central to Holocaust studies, such as the stance of the papacy and the concern about the uses to which the meaning of the Holocaust has been put, while expanding research into less-examined areas such as propriety, sexuality, and proximity.

Variously concerned with issues of guilt and victimization, the essays examine individuals like Pius XII and Romano Guardini and the institutions of organized religion as well as the roles of the Jewish Councils and the retributive judicial proceedings in Hungary. They reveal that victimization within the Holocaust experience is surprisingly open-ended, with Jewish women doubly victimized by their gender; postwar Germans viewing themselves as the epoch's greatest victims; Poles, whether Jewish or not, victimized beyond others because of their proximity to the epicenter of the Holocaust; and German university students corrupted by ideological inculcation and racist propaganda.

Though offering no "positive lessons" or comforting assurances, these essays add to the ongoing examination of Holocaust consequences and offer insightful analyses of facets previously minimized or neglected. Together they illustrate that matters of gender, sexuality, and proximity are crucial for shaping perceptions of a Holocaust reality that will always remain elusive.

How can one link the Holocaust and justice, given the enormity of the Holocaust? Is justice even possible for a crime of such magnitude, and if so, what kind of justice? Weighing these questions and their implications, a group of distinguished scholars attempts to untangle the complex and often contradictory conjunction of the Holocaust and justice.

Seeking a historical context, the contributors ask, What were the political, social, psychological, and ideological prerequisites for this tragedy? Considering the courts and trials both during and immediately after World War II, and recent cases against aging perpetrators, the contributors examine the legal circumstances for trying to provide justice, the dimming impact of passing time, and other issues that complicate litigation. Their inquiry extends to questions about memory--how it is shaped and reshaped and whether it can be reliable--and about the re-creation of events of the Holocaust by a second generation. Does reassembling the evidence through the lenses of a later generation provide a deeper understanding, and does this understanding include a sense of justice accomplished?

In the courtroom and the classroom, in popular media, public policy, and scholarly pursuits, the Holocaust-its origins, its nature, and its implications-remains very much a matter of interest, debate, and controversy. Arriving at a time when a new generation must come to terms with the legacy of the Holocaust or forever lose the benefit of its historical, social, and moral lessons, this volume offers a richly varied, deeply informed perspective on the practice, interpretation, and direction of Holocaust research now and in the future. In their essays the authors-an international group including eminent senior scholars as well those who represent the future of the field-set the agenda for Holocaust studies in the coming years, even as they give readers the means for understanding today's news and views of the Holocaust, whether in court cases involving victims and perpetrators; international, national, and corporate developments; or fictional, documentary, and historical accounts.

Several of the essays-such as one on nonarmed "amidah" or resistance and others on the role of gender in the behavior of perpetrators and victims-provide innovative and potentially significant interpretive frameworks for the field of Holocaust studies. Others; for instance, the rounding up of Jews in Italy, Nazi food policy in Eastern Europe, and Nazi anti-Jewish scholarship, emphasize the importance of new sources for reconstructing the historical record. Still others, including essays on the 1964 Frankfurt trial of Auschwitz guards and on the response of the Catholic Church to the question of German guilt, bring a new depth and sophistication to highly charged, sharply politicized topics. Together these essays will inform the future of the Holocaust in scholarly research and in popular understanding.

As the discipline of Holocaust studies matures, new questions and themes come to the fore. Among these are critical issues that receive serious scholarly attention, often for the first time, in this collection of essays by some of the world's most respected experts in the field. Greed and theft as motives for Holocaust perpetrators and bystanders; sexual violence and what it tells us about the experiences of both victims and perpetrators; collaboration with Nazis among the local populations of the ever-moving Eastern front; the durability of anti-Semitism after 1945; and the perspectives of the Soviet military and Soviet leadership on Nazi crimes: these are some of the topics the authors address as they extend the boundaries of Holocaust scholarship beyond the central loci of the planning and execution of technologized mass murder--Germany and Poland--and into ghettos and killing fields in Ukraine and Belarus, as well as spaces whose boundaries and national identities changed repeatedly. The authors also look to Western Europe and consider the expropriation of Dutch Jews and the exigencies of post-Holocaust filmmaking in France; they draw insights from recent genocides such as those in Cambodia and Rwanda, and provide new critical analyses of the course and meaning of contested responses to the Shoah in nations and locations long and deeply studied.

A thorough, thoughtful, and insightful introduction clarifies the volume's themes and concisely places them within the larger context of Holocaust scholarship; and an introductory essay by Omer Bartov brings into focus the numerous paradoxes structuring early twenty-first-century retrospective thinking about the significance of the Holocaust as a central theme of the twentieth century.

Primo Levi opened his memoir Survival in Auschwitz with a call to remember, reflect upon, and teach about the Holocaust—or to face the rejection of subsequent generations. The transmittal of this urgent knowledge between generations was the theme of the eighth Lessons and Legacies Conference on the Holocaust, and it is the focus of this volume. The circular formulation—from generation to generation—points backward and forward: where do we locate the roots of the Holocaust, and how do its repercussions manifest themselves? The contributors address these questions from various perspectives—history, cultural studies, psychiatry, literature, and sociology. They also bring to bear the personal aspect of associated issues such as continuity and rupture. What has the generation of the Shoah passed on to its descendants? What have subsequent generations taken from these legacies? Contributions by scholars, some of whom are survivors and children of survivors, remind us that the Holocaust does—and must—remain present from generation to generation.

The essays in the tenth volume of Lessons and Legacies offer a sense of the issues that run through current thinking about the Holocaust and ideas about the different ways we engage with a broad range of sources. New sources ranging from traditional archival finds to microhistories accessible via newer technology infuse Holocaust research. At the same time, the fields of Holocaust research and Jewish studies have an increasing impact upon other disciplines. Overall, the editor and writers find that the integration of insights, methodologies, critiques, and questions from psychology, literary studies, visual arts, and other fields with those of history, political science, and other social sciences sharpens the tools of analysis. The essays in this volume testify to the evolution of the field of Holocaust studies and also indicate a future direction.

“Expanding Perspectives on the Holocaust in a Changing World” was the theme of the eleventh Lessons and Legacies Conference on the Holocaust. The eighteen essays published here, which sprung from the conference, reflect questions that Holocaust scholars are asking in the face of shifting political, economic, social, and disciplinary contexts. These questions are addressed from various perspectives including Jewish studies, history, cultural studies (film and memory), literary studies, legal studies, and geography. The book opens with the contentious issues raised in the keynote addresses of Omer Bartov and Timothy Snyder, which highlight the fact that the Holocaust, a once untold history, is now a central component of a wide-ranging scholarship not limited to German history.

Lessons and Legacies XII explores new directions in research and teaching in the field of Holocaust studies. The essays in this volume present the most cutting-edge methods and topics shaping Holocaust studies today, from a variety of disciplines: forensics, environmental history, cultural studies, religious studies, labor history, film studies, history of medicine, sociology, pedagogy, and public history. This rich compendium reveals how far Holocaust studies have reached into cultural studies, perpetrator history, and comparative genocide history. Scholars, laypersons, teachers, and the myriad organizations devoted to Holocaust memorialization and education will find these essays useful and illuminating.

Lessons and Legacies XIII: New Approaches to an Integrated History of the Holocaust is an edited collection of thirteen original essays that reflect current research on the Holocaust in a range of disciplines.
 

One of the great modern painters, Paula Modersohn-Becker was also a gifted writer who left behind journals and a sizable correspondence. This edition includes every extant letter, all carefully annotated, and is illustrated with forty-six black-and-white plates.

The Letters and the Law explores the fraught relationship between writers and lawyers in the four decades following Alexander II’s judicial reforms. Nineteenth-century Russian literature abounds in negative images of lawyers and the law. Literary scholars have typically interpreted these representations either as the common, cross‑cultural critique of lawyerly unscrupulousness and greed or as an expression of Russian hostility toward Western legalism, seen as antithetical to traditional Russian values. The Letters and the Law is the first book to frame the conflict in terms of the two professions’ competition for cultural authority.
 
Anna Schur combines historical research and literary analysis to argue that the first generations of Russian trial lawyers shaped their professional identity with an eye to the celebrated figure of the writer and that they considered their own activities to be a form of verbal art. A fuller understanding of writers’ antipathy to the law, Schur contends, must take into account this overlooked cultural backdrop. Laced with the better‑known critique of the lawyer’s legalistic proclivities and lack of moral principle are the writer’s reactions to a whole network of explicit and implicit claims of similarity between the two professions’ goals, methods, and missions that were central to the lawyer’s professional ideal. Viewed in this light, writers’ critiques of the law and lawyers emerge as a concerted effort at protecting literature’s exclusive cultural status in the context of modernization and the rapidly expanding public sphere.
 
The study draws upon a mix of well-known and rarely studied nineteenth-century authors and texts—with particular attention paid to Fyodor Dostoevsky and Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin—and on a wide range of nonliterary sources, including courtroom speeches, guides to forensic oratory, legal treatises, and specialized press.
 

For Rainer Maria Rilke, letter writing was a discipline and art unto itself. Some seven thousand of his letters have survived, among them works of profound beauty and insight to rival his poems and fiction. For the first time, this volume makes available to an English-speaking audience two of the earliest collections of Rilke letters published after his death, each with a nuanced introduction and notes by Annemarie S. Kidder.

The thematic collection Letters on God contains two letters by Rilke, the first an actual letter written during World War I, in 1915 in Munich, the second a fictional one composed after the war, in 1922 at Muzot in Switzerland. In these letters, Rilke builds on the mystical view of God conceived in The Book of Hours, but he moves beyond it, demonstrating a unique vision of God and Christ, the church and religious experience, friendship and death.

Like his famous Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke’s Letters to a Young Woman presents an intimate series of letters written to a young admirer. The nine letters collected here were written to Lisa Heise over the course of five years, from 1919 to 1924. Though Rilke and Heise never met, the poet emerges in these letters as a compassionate listener and patient teacher who with levelheaded sensitivity affirms and guides the movements of another person’s soul.

By virtue of the originality and depth of its thought, Emmanuel Levinas’s masterpiece, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, is destined to endure as one of the great works of philosophy. It is an essential text for understanding Levinas’s discussion of “the Other,” yet it is known as a “difficult” book. Modeled after Norman Kemp Smith’s commentary on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, Levinas’s Existential Analytic guides both new and experienced readers through Levinas’s text. James R. Mensch explicates Levinas’s arguments and shows their historical referents, particularly with regard to Heidegger, Husserl, and Derrida. Students using this book alongside Totality and Infinity will be able to follow its arguments and grasp the subtle phenomenological analyses that fill it.

Ivan Chonkin is a simple, bumbling peasant who has been drafted into the Red Army. Shortly before the outbreak of World War II, he is sent to an obscure village with one week's ration of canned meat and orders to guard a downed plane. Apparently forgotten by his unit, Chonkin resumes his life as a peasant and passes the war tending the village postmistress's garden. Just after the German invasion, the secret police discover this mysterious soldier lurking behind the front line. Their pursuit of Chonkin and his determined resistance lead to wild skirmishes and slapstick encounters.

Fedor Aleksandrovich Abramov (1920-83) was one of the leading representatives of the Russian village prose movement of the 1960s and 1970s. In The Life and Work of Fedor Abramov, scholars from the United States and abroad draw on Abramov's works, his diaries, and his private writings as sources for examining his place within the village prose movement and within Anglo-American theories of cultural reception.

Margaret Storm Jameson (1891–1986) is primarily known as a compelling essayist; her stature as a novelist and champion of the dispossessed is largely forgotten. In Life in the Writings of Storm Jameson, Elizabeth Maslen reveals a figure who held her own beside fellow British women writers, including Virginia Woolf; anticipated the Angry Young Women, such as Doris Lessing; and was an early champion of such European writers as Arthur Koestler and Czesław Miłosz. Jameson was a complex character whose politics were grounded in social justice; she was passionately antifascist—her novel In the Second Year (1936) raised the alarm about Nazism—but always wary of communism. An eloquent polemicist, Jameson was, as president of the British P.E.N. during the 1930s and 1940s, of invaluable assistance to refugee writers. Elizabeth Maslen’s biography introduces a true twentieth century hedgehog, whose essays and subtly experimental fiction were admired in Europe and the States.

In this highly praised and extraordinary biography, Ralph Freedman traces Rilke's luminous career by weaving together detailed accounts of pivotal and formative episodes from the poet's restless life with a close, intimate reading of the verse and prose that refract them. This lively and engrossing biography offers much of interest to Rilke's growing body of followers.
 

Ivan Bunin was the first Russian writer of the twentieth century to be award the Nobel Prize in literature. Like many other Russian writers, he emigrated after the Revolution and never returned to his homeland; The Life of Arseniev is the major work of his émigré period.

In ways similar to Nabokov's Speak, Memory, Bunin's novel powerfully evokes the atmosphere of Russia in the decades before the Revolution and illuminates those Russian literary and cultural traditions eradicated in the Soviet era. This first full English-language edition updates earlier translations, taking as its source the version Bunin revised in 1952, and including an introduction and annotations by Andrew Baruch Wachtel.

A Life of Solitude is a biography of Polish playwright Stanislawa Przybyszewska (1901–35). One of the finest plays about the French Revolution, The Danton Case, was written by this unknown Polish woman living in obscurity in the free city of Danzig. The illegitimate daughter of writer Stanislaw Przybyszewski, she became a writer against long odds and at the cost of her health, her sanity, and eventually her life. A Life of Solitude shows how she chose her vocation, examine her ideas about writing, and reveal her struggle with material existence. Tragically, she came to substitute creativity for life and clung to her sense of calling with a stubbornness that dulled the instinct for self-preservation and led to her death from morphine and malnutrition at age thirty-four.

In Nazi-occupied Prague, ex-bank clerk Josef Roubick discovers that the prosaic world he has always inhabited is suddenly off-limits to him because he is a Jew. When he begins to observe his new, increasingly skewed, and macabre environment with resigned detachment, his life becomes centered on survival and on the surprisingly small things he clings to in order to persevere.

Limited Inc is a major work in the philosophy of language by the celebrated French thinker Jacques Derrida. The book's two essays, "Limited Inc" and "Signature Event Context," constitute key statements of the Derridean theory of deconstruction. They are the clearest exposition to be found of Derrida's most controversial idea, that linguistic meaning is fundamentally indeterminate because the contexts that fix meaning are never stable. Limited Inc includes an important new afterword by the author.

Line Break is the major work on poetry as social practice and a must-read for anyone interested in contemporary criticism or poetry. For many years, James Scully, along with others, quietly radicalized American poetry—in theory and in practice, in how it is lived as well as in how it is written. In eight provocative essays, James Scully argues provocatively for artistic and cultural practice that actively opposes structures of power too often reinforced by intellectual activities.

Among modern philosophers, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) has few rivals for his influence over the development of contemporary philosophy as a whole. While the issue of language has become a key fulcrum of continental philosophy since the twentieth century, Kant has been overlooked as a thinker whose breadth of insight has helped to spearhead this advance.

The Linguistic Dimension of Kant’s Thought remedies this historical gap by gathering new essays by distinguished Kant scholars. The chapters examine the many ways that Kant’s philosophy addresses the nature of language. Although language as a formal structure of thought and expression has always been part of the philosophical tradition, the “linguistic dimension” of these essays speaks to language more broadly as a practice including communication, exchange, and dialogue.

Lionel Trilling was one of the twentieth century's most widely read and influential American literary critics. Mark Krupnick traces Trilling’s career from the 1920s through the 1970s, following the shifting intellectual and ideological currents in his thought. Krupnick places Trilling’s criticism and fiction in the context of his New York intellectual group, illuminating the connection between Trilling’s preoccupation with self-definition and his struggle to achieve a cultural overview in a period marked by contradictions, polarizations, and reversals. He provides not only the best single assessment of Trilling but also an incisive history of American literary criticism through the mid-twentieth century.

In recent years, articles in major periodicals from the New York Times Magazine to the Times Literary Supplement have heralded the arrival of a new school of literary studies that promises-or threatens-to profoundly shift the current paradigm. This revolutionary approach, known as Darwinian literary studies, is based on a few simple premises: evolution has produced a universal landscape of the human mind that can be scientifically mapped; these universal tendencies are reflected in the composition, reception, and interpretation of literary works; and an understanding of the evolutionary foundations of human behavior, psychology, and culture will enable literary scholars to gain powerful new perspectives on the elements, form, and nature of storytelling.

The goal of this book is to overcome some of the widespread misunderstandings about the meaning of a Darwinian approach to the human mind generally, and literature specifically. The volume brings together scholars from the forefront of the new field of evolutionary literary analysis-both literary analysts who have made evolution their explanatory framework and evolutionist scientists who have taken a serious interest in literature-to show how the human propensity for literature and art can be properly framed as a true evolutionary problem. Their work is an important step toward the long-prophesied synthesis of the humanities and what Steven Pinker calls "the new sciences of human nature."

Eric Ziolkowski’s monumental study examines Kierkegaard’s “whole ‘prolix literature,’” including both the pseudonymous and the signed published writings as well as the private journals, papers, and letters, in relation to works by five literary giants from different times and places: Clouds by Aristophanes; Parzival by the medieval German poet Wolfram von Eschenbach; Don Quixote by Cervantes; certain plays, particularly Hamlet, by Shakespeare; and the fictional, poeticphilosophical work Sartor Resartus, together with some of the essays by Kierkegaard’s Scottish contemporary Thomas Carlyle. No full or complete understanding of the writings of an author as prolific and complex as Kierkegaard is possible.

Yet Kierkegaard signals the essentially literary as opposed to strictly theological or philosophical nature of his writings. Ziolkowski first considers the notions of aesthetics and the aesthetic as Kierkegaard adapted them, and then his posture as a poet, as interrelated contexts of his selfconception as “a weed in literature.” After next taking account of the history of the critical recognition of Kierkegaard as a literary artist, he looks at an important characteristic of his literary craft that has received relatively little attention: the manner by which he and his pseudonyms read and quote other authors. Ziolkowski then explores the connections between the philosopher’s writings and those of other literary masters by whom he was directly influenced, such as Aristophanes, Cervantes, and Shakespeare; or of those who, while they did not directly influence him, gave paradigmatic expression to some of the same aspects of aesthetic, ethical, and religious existence that Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms portray. Ziolkowski’s seminal study will be of interest to Kierkegaard scholars, philosophers, and comparative literature scholars alike.

Literary Modernism and the Transformation of Work probes the relationship between the aesthetic structures of modernism and its political and philosophical shape. James F. Knapp explores modernism's engagement with and reaction to the theories and discourse of scientific management that were reshaping the workplace in the early twentieth century, and in so doing, he traces "the ways in which a socially dominant discourse of knowledge is reproduced—and challenged—through a series of texts that range from the marginal to the most fully canonized."

This long-awaited translation of Das literarische Kunstwerk makes available for the first time in English Roman Ingarden's influential study. Though it is inter-disciplinary in scope, situated as it is on the borderlines of ontology and logic, philosophy of literature and theory of language, Ingarden's work has a deliberately narrow focus: the literary work, its structure and mode of existence.

The Literary Word of Art establishes the groundwork for a philosophy of literature, i.e., an ontology in terms of which the basic general structure of all lliterary works can be determined. This "essential anatomy" makes basic tools and concepts available for rigorous and subtle aesthetic analysis.

When Achilles dons his armor, gods and readers alike know the outcome, as does the hero himself. But when the commoner becomes the hero, when, as Dr. Johnson remarked in 1750, the heroes of modern fiction are "leveled with the rest of the world"--now that's a different story. In this ambitious work, Stewart Justman ranges across Western literature from the Iliad and the Odyssey through Cervantes and Shakespeare to Dickens, Tolstoy, and Dostoevsky to show how such a leveling not only changed the appearance of literature, but made possible new ways of constructing a tale.

Only when influenced by the principle of equality does a narrative deliberately deny readers knowledge beyond those they are reading about--privileged knowledge. This book argues that such a turn, in the hands of masters of the novel, changed narrative itself into an exploration of the limits of knowledge; that the portrayal of persons unknown to history transformed the novel into an investigation of the unknown. If the novel is the literary form of limited knowledge, the fullest expression of that form is found in the great fictional experiments of the nineteenth century, the age when the social question--the question of human equality--broke upon the world. Justman looks into some of those experiments for their own sake, but also for the light they cast on the nature and history of the novel. Focusing on Great Expectations, War and Peace, The Death of Ivan Ilych, and The Brothers Karamazov, Justman explores what happens when we, as readers, are denied knowledge not only for the sake of suspense, but because ignorance belongs to what we have in common, the human condition.

In the eighteenth century, when the picaresque had been eclipsed by neoclassical and preromantic models in much of Europe, it flourished anew in Russia. Marcia A. Morris's book, a study of this flowering and the antecedents of the picaresque in the seventeenth-century, offers new insight into both the genre and its broad appeal for Russian readers. Morris situates the earlier tales of roguery in the tumultuous social milieu of the waning medieval period and shows how these texts mirror many of the manifestations of subversive behavior in the larger culture. She also shows how eighteenth-century "Europeanized" men of letters, who publicly scorned this earlier literature, actually adapted its popular patterns in their own Western-inspired works. Her book provides fresh readings of several well-known texts and resurrects forgotten eighteenth-century picaresques, revealing their fusion of Western and indigenous aesthetics and their broader cultural underpinnings.

An extraordinary montage of sex and politics, Péter Esterházy's innovative novel can be seen to prefigure the liberation of Eastern Europe. Written under what the author calls "small, Hungarian, pornographic circumstances," A Little Hungarian Pornography exists in a context of official falsehood and misinformation, of lies of the body, the soul, and the state, perpetuated in the duality of language.

In a state where the lack of democracy was called socialist democracy, economic chaos a socialist economy, and revolution an anti-revolution, the notion of speech and obscenity becomes equally distorted and skewed. Under these circumstances, the author considers the shackles inherent in the vocabulary of oppression and contrasts this with the freedom of the body in sex. A kaleidoscopic digression on perversion and politics, A Little Hungarian Pornography is both satire and critique, trifle and tract, and further support for Esterházy's status as one of the best writers in Europe today.

Little Jinx is a canny mockery of the Soviet world. Its author, Andrei Sinyavsky, a respectable member of the USSR's Institute for World Literature, was exposed in 1965 as the real author of a series of irreverent essays and fantastic tales that had been circulating under the nom de plume Abram Tertz. After five years in a labor camp he immigrated to Paris. Little Jinx is the tale of a man named Sinyavsky, a literary hack and runt who clumsily survives repression and anti-Semitism but also brings misery to those around him. When this "little jinx" inadvertently causes the death of his five brothers, he is consumed by a guilt that seems universal in his society.

 

Linda McCarriston mobilizes feeling, thinking, and narrating simultaneously to create works of music, insight, and passion. With characteristic honesty and energy, she draws from the lives of fellow human beings and from those of animals, too--the telling moments, metaphors, and myths of family life, social structures, and gender. Her recent experiences in Alaska come to represent an emigration just as urgent as the previous generation's from Ireland.

First published in Russian in 1974, Live and Remember was immediately hailed by Soviet critics as a superb if atypical example of war literature and a moving depiction of the degradation and ultimate damnation of a frontline deserter. The novel tells the story of a Siberian peasant who makes a tragic miscalculation by deserting in the last year of the war, and of the loyal wife who embraces his fate as her own.

Eugène Minkowski’s Lived Time articulates a phenomenology of time that is as inspired by the philosophical writings of Henri Bergson and Edmund Husserl as it is by the psychiatric descriptions of Eugen Bleuler. After providing a phenomenological description of the experience of time in normal life, Minkowski considers a number of mental illnesses, including schizophrenia, manic depression, and dementia, and he attempts to show that these pathological cases can be characterized in terms of a distortion of lived time and space.

First published in French in 1933 as Le temps vécu, this edition of this classic work of phenomenological psychiatry and psychopathology includes a new foreword by Dan Zahavi that presents some of Minkowski’s main ideas and discusses his contemporary relevance.

In the spirit of Lionel Trilling, Edmund Wilson, and Susan Sontag, the renowned literary critic Jeffrey Hart writes The Living Moment, a close reading of literature as it intersects with the political. Hart’s book is an even-handed guide for anyone toddling into the mists of the modernist moment, effortlessly moving between such modernist monuments as Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, Mann’s Doctor Faustus, and Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. Hart’s most stunning achievement is his brilliant inclusion of Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead as a modernist text, for the way the novel teaches us to see more, to hear more, to feel more. Hart’s dazzling study is an examination of important works of literature as they explore the experience of living in a broken world with thought and sometimes with examples of resolve that possess permanent validity. The Living Moment is for anyone who is wearied by so much of today’s trendy, narrow, and ideologically driven criticism.

Winner of the 2012 PEN Center USA Literary Award for Translation

José Donoso was the leading Chilean representative of the Latin American “Boom” of the sixties and seventies that included Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, and Manuel Puig, among others. Written as a draft in 1973, set aside, and forgotten, The Lizard’s Tale was discovered among Donoso’s papers at Princeton University by his daughter after his death. Edited for publication by critic and poet Julio Ortega, it was published posthumously in Spanish under the title Lagartija sin cola in 2007. Suzanne Jill Levine, who knew Donoso and translated two of his earlier works, brings the book to an English-language audience for the first time. 

Defeated and hiding in his Barcelona apartment, painter Antonio Muñoz-Roa—Donoso’s alter ego—relates the story of his flight with Luisa, his cousin, lover, and benefactor, after his scandalous desertion from the “Informalist” movement (a witty reference to a contemporary Spanish art movement and possibly an allusion to the Boom as well), in which he had been a member of a certain standing. Frustrated, old, and alone, the artist looks back on his years in the small town of Dors, a place he unsuccessfully tried to rescue from the crushing advance of modernity, and on the decline of his own family, also threatened by the changing times. In Levine’s able hands, Donoso’s clear prose shines through, forming a compact, powerful, and still-relevant meditation on the commercialization of art and the very places we inhabit.

The neighborhoods that make up Chicago’s rich cultural landscape have been defined by the restaurants that anchor them. In Local Flavor, the popular food writer Jean Iversen chronicles eight beloved local eateries, from Chinatown on the South Side to Rogers Park in the far North, tracing the story of how they became neighborhood institutions.

Iversen has meticulously gathered the tales, recipes, and cultural traditions that define Chicago’s culinary past and present. Rich with firsthand accounts from local restaurateurs, their families, long-time customers, and staff, Local Flavor is a community-driven look at Chicago through a gastronomical lens.

Including recipes for popular dishes from each restaurant that readers can try at home, Local Flavor weaves together ethnography, family, and food history into a story that will enthrall both food and Chicago history lovers.

A comic novel of war from a teenager's point-of-view

Published as the siege of Sarajevo ended, Lodgers is a hilarious, unsentimental report from the front lines of the Balkan wars of the 1990s. Detergent mixed with flour, museum relics sold to U.N. peacekeepers, the magic power of laminated accreditation-all of the folly and the horror of that time are revealed in the sarcastic report of the novel's teenage would-be authoress.

Maja lives in the basement of a Sarajevo museum, enduring with equal annoyance Serb artillery and vegetarian meals that taste like fried sponge. Her father, the museum director, zealously guards the treasures upstairs while their aged co-lodger Julio plots to trade them away. Maja's mother copes with yoga while dour stepbrother Davor endures the endless crying and cravings of his pregnant wife. Floating amidst it all is Maja's grandmother, blind and deaf, yet drawn to any conversation involving food.

Need and crisis propel Maja and her companions from one humorous situation to another. Yet her pitch-perfect gallows humor makes it clear that the brutalities of war penetrate these small moments of life-and even the self-centeredness of a teenaged girl. A best seller in the Balkans and widely translated in Europe, Lodgers is an uncompromising novel about a modern tragedy.

In The Logic of Being, Paul Livingston examines the relationship of truth and time from a perspective that draws on Martin Heidegger’s thought and twentieth-century analytic philosophy. In his influential earlier work The Politics of Logic, Livingston elaborated an innovative “formal” or “metaformal" realism. Here he extends this concept into a “temporal realism” that accounts for the reality of temporal change and becoming while also preserving realism about logic and truth.

Livingston's formal and phenomenological analysis articulates and defends a realist position about being, time, and their relationship that understands that all of these are structured and constituted in a way that does not depend on the human mind, consciousness, or subjectivity. This approach provides a basis for new logically and phenomenologically based accounts of the structure of linguistic truth in relation to the appearance of objects and of the formal structure of time as given. 

Livingston draws on philosophers from Plato and Aristotle to Davidson and Heidegger in this exploration. In it, readers and scholars will discover innovative connections between continental and analytic philosophy.

In her fourth collection of poetry, Alane Rollings grapples with the power and potency of philosophical and psychological opposites. Written by a poet who has suffered from bipolar illness, these paired poems represent opposites in both mood and perspective: they are confessional without being autobiographical; intimate while maintaining a curious detachment; utterly serious, yet often seductively casual in tone.

Finalist, 2007 Los Angeles Times Book Prize in Poetry

In a torrent of rage, love, and irony, Adrian C. Louis explodes all the myths and hypocrisy of Middle America in the twenty-first century. This is how Walt Whitman or Allen Ginsburg might have written about our post-9/11 world--where the realities of poverty on Indian reservations and the plight of Hurricane Katrina victims come in second place to the vagaries of Homeland Security. For Louis, both he and our nation face an uncertain future. Like many of us he is trapped in a surreal void of the present, where he is faced with middle age and isolation, the death of loved ones, an unsatisfying job, and the battle against loneliness and self-destruction. He writes as if he has nothing left to lose but then fills the page with bittersweet sorrow for everything that has been lost. Armed with unforgettable images, relentless rhythms, and a dark and scathing humor, Louis takes aim at this American life.

During World War II more than one thousand Filipinas were kidnapped by the Imperial Japanese Army. Lolas’ House tells the stories of sixteen surviving Filipino “comfort women.”

M. Evelina Galang enters into the lives of the women at Lolas’ House, a community center in metro Manila. She accompanies them to the sites of their abduction and protests with them at the gates of the Japanese embassy. Each woman gives her testimony, and even though the women relive their horror at each telling, they offer their stories so that no woman anywhere should suffer wartime rape and torture.

Lolas’ House is a book of testimony, but it is also a book of witness, of survival, and of the female body. Intensely personal and globally political, it is the legacy of Lolas’ House to the world.

Viola Spolin's Theater Games for the Lone Actor offers theater games and side coaching for the solo player. Available for the first time, this handbook presents more than forty exercises that allow actors to side coach themselves at home, in rehearsal, or in performance.

Spolin's improvisational techniques changed the nature and practice of modern theater. Her work has inspired actors, directors, teachers, and writers in theater, television, and film. Her techniques have also influenced the fields of education, mental health, social work, and psychology.

Few countries attribute as much importance to the Second World War and its memory as Britain; arguably nowhere else has this conflict developed such longevity in cultural memory and retained such presence in contemporary culture. Long Shadows is about how literature and film have helped shape this process in Britain. More precisely, the essays collected here suggest that this is a continuous work in progress, subject to transgenerational revisions, political expediencies, commercial considerations, and the vicissitudes of popular taste. It would indeed be more accurate to speak of the meanings (plural) that the war has been given at various moments in British cultural life. These semantic variations and fluctuations in cultural import are rooted in the specificity of the British war experience, in the political aftermath of the war in Europe, and in its significance for Britain’s postwar position on the global stage. In other words, the books and films discussed in these essays respond to how the war has been interpreted and remembered; what is at stake is the way in which the war has been emplotted as a hegemonic cultural narrative about Britain.

By all accounts, Jovan Mosley was a good kid. He was working on a way out of his tough Chicago neighborhood and had been accepted at Ohio State University when he was forced to confess to a murder he did not commit. He then spent five years and ten months in jail without a trial. His efforts to exonerate himself got him nowhere until he happened to meet a successful criminal defense lawyer, Catharine O’Daniel. She became convinced of his innocence and took him on as her first pro bono client. Along with Laura Caldwell, she decided to fight to free Jovan. Against enormous odds, they fi­nally won some measure of justice. In this affecting memoir, Caldwell tells the unforgettable story of a breakdown in the criminal justice system and what it took to free an innocent man.

Winner of 2006 Illinois State Historical Society Book Award-Certificate of Excellence

In the early twentieth century, John Coughlin and Mike Kenna ruled Chicago's First Ward, the lucrative lakefront territory and nerve center of the city. It was one of the most infamous havens for vice in the entire country, home to gambling palaces with marble floors and mahogany bars, to a mini-city of thugs and prostitutes and down-and-outers, to dives and saloons of every description and a few beyond description. In short, the First was a gold mine. In a city where money talked, it made boisterous Bathhouse John and the laconic Hinky Dink Kenna the most powerful men in town. This classic of Chicago-style journalism traces the careers of these two operators as they rose to the top of the city's political world.

The novella and two short stories that make up this volume were written at three different periods in Makanin's life, yet they are united by their narrative and stylistic invention, their range of human emotion, and the profound humanity of their prose. Though banished and suppressed in the Brezhnev era, Makanin is now recognized as one of Russia's leading writers.

In his celebrated short story "The Prisoner of the Caucasus," two Russian soldiers take a Chechen prisoner during the war, and as events unfold, Makanin reveals the casual brutality of the war but also the secret truths of the character's lives. In the novella The Loss, Pekalov, a drunkard and dreamer obsessed with the idea of building a tunnel under the Ural River, disappears in a ditch while working and is made a saint by the people of his village. "Klyucharyov and Alimushkin" tells the story of what happens when one man becomes remarkably lucky while the other loses all his luck.

Lost in a Labyrinth of Red Tape is the story of one family's desperate attempts to emigrate from Nazi Germany. The Frühaufs faced enormous obstacles with the German and foreign authorities when they attempted to take advantage of matriarch Hilde Frühauf's U.S. citizenship. At the mercy of various agencies and shippers, they became more and more entangled in the red tape of the title. The daughter went into hiding and fled to Belgium, where she was hidden by the Resistance and survived the war. Tragically, the remaining members of her family failed to emigrate, and were killed by the Nazis.

2018 AATSEEL Prize for Best Book in Literary Scholarship

Scholars of modernism have long addressed how literature, painting, and music reflected the radical reconceptualization of space and time in the early twentieth century—a veritable revolution in both physics and philosophy that has been characterized as precipitating an “epistemic trauma” around the world. In this wide-ranging study, Benjamin Paloff contends that writers in Central and Eastern Europe felt this impact quite distinctly from their counterparts in Western Europe. For the latter, the destabilization of traditional notions of space and time inspired works that saw in it a new kind of freedom. However, for many Central and Eastern European authors, who were writing from within public discourses about how to construct new social realities, the need for escape met the realization that there was both nowhere to escape to and no stable delineation of what to escape from. In reading the prose and poetry of Czech, Polish, and Russian writers, Paloff imbues the term “Kafkaesque” with a complexity so far missing from our understanding of this moment in literary history.

June J. Hwang’s provocative Lost in Time explores discourses of timelessness in the works of central figures of German modernity such as Walter Benjamin, Georg Simmel, Siegfried Kracauer, and Helmuth Plessner, as well as those of Alfred Döblin, Joseph Roth, and Hugo Bettauer. Hwang argues that in the Weimar Republic the move toward ahistoricization is itself a historical phenomenon, one that can be understood by exploring the intersections of discourses about urban modernity, the stranger, and German Jewish identity.

 

These intersections shed light on conceptions of German Jewish identity that rely on a negation of the specific and temporal as a way to legitimize a historical outsider position, creating a dynamic position that simultaneously challenges and acknowledges the limitations of an outsider’s agency. She reads these texts as attempts to transcend the particular, attempts that paradoxically reveal the entanglement of the particular and the universal.

Love and Scorn: New and Selected Poems combines twenty new poems by Carol Frost with a substantial selection of work from her previous seven books. In forms ranging from the sonnet to the lyric to the narrative, Frost's poems are fiery, passionate meditations on experience and consciousness.

Frank Galati's dramatic adaptation of Gertrude Stein's texts begins with Stein at age 60 as she is lecturing at the University of Chicago in 1934. She starts to speak about her writing, specifically her use of repetition, and to connect this idea with her own life experiences. A young Gertrude then appears to guide the audience through her memories of her life as a student, falling in love with Alice B. Toklas, their time together in France and Alice's account of Stein's final day. These vignettes, each culminating in a song (music by Stephen Flaherty), adeptly encapsulate the joy and passion of Stein's life and work, and the depth and complexity of a lesbian romance. Galati sheds new light on Stein's views on language, communication, and ideas by emphasizing how her art evolved from her fascination with the repetition of human behavior-as Stein sings to the audience "Loving repeating is one way of being."

As dismissal and disdain of Jews speak through the art of some leading twentieth-century poets, so the poetry of Rodger Kamenetz artfully answers, framing in subtle terms the questions that haunt our culture-about the voices through which culture speaks, about the identity of poet and poetry, about the capacity of art to harm and to heal. Whether subjecting the anti-Semitic verses of T. S. Eliot to a literary trial; conjuring the eloquence with which "Allen Ginsberg forgives Ezra Pound on Behalf of the Jews"; or drawing upon personal history, the Torah, and Jewish mysticism to explore the tangled relations of Jewish identity and modern literature, Kamenetz's poems attest to the inexorable power of language.

In these nine stories the Polish writer Aleksander Wat consistently turns history on its ear in comic reversals reverberating with futurist rhythms and the gently mocking humor of despair. Wat inverts the conventions of religion, politics, and culture to fantastic effect, illuminating the anarchic conditions of existence in interwar Europe.

The title story finds a superbly ironic Lucifer wandering the Europe of the late 1920s in search of a mission: what impact can a devil have in a godless time? What is his sorcery in a society far more diablical than the devil himself? Too idealistic for a world full of modern cruelties, the unemployable Lucifer finally finds the only means of guaranteed immortality. In "The Eternally Wandering Jew," steady Jewish conversion to Christianity results in Nathan the Talmudist reigning as Pope Urban IX. The hilarious satire on power, "Kings in Exile," unfolds with the dethroned monarchs of Europe meeting to found their own republic in an uninhabited island in the Indian Ocean.