Jewish American Heritage Month

(Short Stories) The Amazing Mr. Morality features tenacious men and women whose determination to buck middle-class social convention draws them toward unforeseen challenges. A failed television producer insists upon having a woodchuck relocated from his lawn, only to receive desperate letters in which the woodchuck begs to return. An overconfident ne'er-do-well obtains a lucrative lecture invitation intended for a renowned ornithologist and decides to deliver the speech himself. An innocuous dispute over whether to rename a local street opens up racial fault lines that prove deadly. The collection concludes with the title novella in which two unscrupulous ethicists, writing rival newspaper columns, seek to unseat each other by addressing questions such as: If you're going to commit a murder, is it worse to kill when the victim is sleeping or awake?

"An "extraordinary" novel of five friends coming of age in 1960s New York City, from a New York Times-bestselling, Academy Award-winning author (The Plain Dealer). William Goldman, the versatile author who gave us classic thrillers like Marathon Man, the immortal comedy of The Princess Bride, and the infamous Hollywood tell-all Adventures in the Screen Trade, offers a beautiful and sweeping novel inspired by his own coming-of-age, set against the backdrop of the New York theater world."

Imagine a bookish man named Francis D., swimming at a public beach in Cape Cod, who drifts out beyond his depth. Imagine that he doesn't drown, that the tide carries him to a private cove where he is rescued by two mysterious young women named Charlotte and Emily. Imagine then that Francis leaves behind his former humdrum life-his formidable wife and teenage daughter-and embarks on a series of violent and erotic adventures, as dream-like as reels of film. Imagine at the same time that a man named Joshua Quartz is telling his silent wife, Genevieve, the story of Francis's adventures, that they have little other communication, that the story is a way of keeping contact between husband and wife alive. Imagine that at some point Genevieve tells her own story, within and without Joshua's account. Baumbach's characters make occasional connections, make love and war, in the disguises of metaphor. If the main action is dream-like or fantastic, the real world is always at the window looking in.

With only a yellowing photograph in hand, a young man - also named Jonathan Safran Foer - sets out to find the woman who might or might not have saved his grandfather from the Nazis. Accompanied by an old man haunted by memories of the war, an amorous dog named Sammy Davis, Junior, Junior, and the unforgettable Alex, a young Ukrainian translator who speaks in a sublimely butchered English, Jonathan is led on a quixotic journey over a devastated landscape and into an unexpected past.

Famous all Over Town, the first novel from southern storyteller Bernie Schein, is a comically candid multigenerational account of two Jews, a lowcountry native and a northern transplant, at the epicenter of momentous events in the sleepy southern coastal hamlet of Somerset, a fictitious stand-in for Schein's native Beaufort, South Carolina. Schein includes a diverse and memorable cast. Famous all Over Town also uses its web of interconnected storylines to make its setting, the eponymous town itself, a central character with a personality and an arc as complete as that of any other member of the deftly rendered cast. Delving beneath the surface of the southern status quo, Schein's tale follows these interconnected lives through the private and public upheavals in small-town life from the turbulent 1960s to the eve of the new millennium, confronting the ramifications of the civil rights era, Vietnam, Watergate, and--closer to home--a deadly version of the infamous Ribbon Creek incident.

Jason K. Friedman investigates art, sexuality, love, and religion in seven unconventional and engrossing short stories. A gay man attends his high school reunion in Savannah, where he's pursued by the now-married former football star. An awkward teenager grapples with notions of God and girls at his bar mitzvah. A curator's assistant struggles to understand a five hundred-year-old Italian painter's body of work, until his boyfriend (whom he's previously written off as frivolous), makes an accidental discovery that challenges decades of art criticism. A moving picture of the trials religious, cultural, and sexual minorities experience in Georgia and the Deep South.

This is the story of Ida, whose life consists mainly of resting, because she is always tired; of talking to herself; and of getting married, time after time. When it was first published New York Times wrote: 'One might call it a short novel, a long poem, or a modern fairy tale.

Jewish identity and magical realism are the themes of the tales of adventure and cultural alienation collected here by the leading authority on Jewish Latin American literature. First published in 1994 as Tropical Synagogues: Short Stories by Jewish-Latin American Writers, Ilan Stavans's classic anthology is expanded and updated in this new edition.

This vibrant anthology showcases new, unpublished short stories by a rapidly growing crop of highly talented young Jewish American fiction writers. Cohering around the core Jewish theme of the Promised Land, all the stories were written especially for this volume.

The New York Times-bestselling author's phenomenal debut novel about growing up in midwestern, midcentury America. Raymond Euripides Trevitt grows up virtually alone in the small town of Athens, Illinois, until a new boy moves in next door. His name is Zachary Crowe, but he goes by Zock. They're as different as two midwestern boys can be, but their friendship will go on to shape--if not define--both of their lives.

Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons: Objects, Food, Rooms from 1914 is a poetic exploration of words - clustered, juxtaposed, redefined and played off one another - to subterfuge their common meanings, which Stein felt had become watered down, and to re-infuse them with expressive force. Tender Buttons is the best known of Gertrude Stein's "hermetic" works. It is a small book separated into three sections - Food, Objects and Rooms each containing prose under subtitles.

From the streets of modern Israel to the barrooms of Brooklyn to a suburban New England synagogue, the characters in these 10 stories search for love and acceptance in a world scarred by loss and loneliness. Magical, erotic, spiritually penetrating and terrifyingly realistic, these provocative tales continue the storytelling tradition of Bernard Malamud, Philip Roth, and Nathan Englander.

Regarded by some critics as a minor masterpiece, Three Lives was Stein's first published book. In it she tells the stories of three working class women — Anna, a conscientious but rigid serving woman; Melanctha, a worldly-wise and sensitive black girl; and Lena, a gentle but feeble-minded maid. Although these are relatively ordinary women, in Stein's hands their lives and minds take on extraordinary interest. Told in clear, carefully crafted prose, these stories are not only memorable works in themselves but an excellent entree to Stein's later work.