Jacob's Folly

Author	Barbara Chase-Riboud
ISBN	1400032083

It is Paris, 1815. An extraordinarily shaped South African girl known as the Hottentot Venus, dressed only in feathers and beads, swings from a crystal chandelier in the duchess of Berry’s ballroom. Below her, the audience shouts insults and pornographic obscenities. Among these spectators is...

Author	Carrie Callaghan
ISBN	1944995897

In Holland 1633, a woman’s ambition has no place.

Judith is a painter, dodging the law and whispers of murder to become the first woman admitted to the prestigious Haarlem artist’s guild. Maria is a Catholic in a country where the faith is banned, hoping to absolve her sins by recovering...

Author	Michèle Roberts
ISBN	1408816008

A stunning war-time novel set in France from Booker-shortlisted author Michèle Roberts.

After every war there are stories that are locked away like bluebottles in drawers and kept silent. But sometimes the past can return: in the smell of carbolic soap, in whispers darting through a village...

Author	K.J.A. Wishnia
ISBN	0061725374

“Whatever you are currently reading, I promise you it is not nearly as intelligent, witty, compelling, or entertaining as The Fifth Servant….Wishnia makes history come alive.”
 — David Liss, author of The Devil's Company

 

A brilliantly imagined, beautifully...

Author	Roxana Robinson
ISBN	0374709572

Going from peace to war can make a young man into a warrior. Going from war to peace can destroy him.



Conrad Farrell has no family military heritage, but as a classics major at Williams College, he has encountered the powerful appeal of the Marine Corps ethic. "Semper Fidelis" comes...

Author	Joy Castro
ISBN	1250004586

Alors que la Nouvelle-Orléans s’éveille et qu’elle fait son jogging dans un parc, la journaliste du Times-Picayune Nola Céspedes se retrouve au beau milieu d’une scène de crime. Et elle connaît la victime de ce meurtre : il s’agit de Judith Taffner, son ancienne professeure de journalisme....

Author	Nicholson Baker
ISBN	0399160965

cross-posted at: http://themocentricuniverse.blogspot....

i adore nicholson baker's writing voice and i really feel i can give no higher compliment than this: quite often it is how a writer's voice resonates with me that makes or breaks a novel for me; no matter what craft it might otherwise...

Author	Alexis Landau
ISBN	1101870079

A sweeping, gorgeously written debut: a novel of duty to family and country, the dictates of passion, and blood ties unraveling in the charged political climate of Berlin between the world wars.

Lev Perlmutter, an assimilated, cultured German Jew, enlists to fight in World War I, leaving...

Author	Ronit Matalon
ISBN	0805091602

In the beginning there was Lucette, who is the mother to three children - Sammy, a gentle giant, almost blind, but a genius with locks; Corinne, a flighty beauty who cannot keep a job; and the child, an afterthought, who strives to make sense of her fractured Egyptian - Jewish immigrant family. Lucette's...

Author	György Spiró
ISBN	9631424308

The last time I read a novel like this was Gore Vidal's Creation. I hope never again to do so. Pure unadulterated Historical Fiction, unsullied by neither style naught story (but you'll learn a lot!). What you get is in for mation ; and no telling really of course when it's fictional in for mation and when...

Author	Leora Skolkin-Smith
ISBN	1611881641

It's summer, 1963. Fourteen-year-old Liana travels to Jerusalem, accompanied by her older sister and larger-than-life mother. The trip takes her from a sheltered life in Westchester County, NY to the hot, bustling, and thoroughly confusing landscape of the Middle East, where Jewish and Arab cultures...

Author	Susan Daitch
ISBN	0872867005

"With shades of Umberto Eco and Paul Auster, this brilliant, addictive adventure novel is about the search for a mythical lost city located somewhere in modern-day Iran. As a succession of explorers and shady characters dig deeper into the landscape, the ancient secret of Suolucidir is gradually...

Author	David Albahari
ISBN	0151015023

The place is Serbia, the time is the late 1990s. Our protagonist, a single man, writes a regular op-ed column for a Belgrade newspaper and spends the rest of his time with his best friend, smoking pot and talking about sex, politics, and life in general. One day on the shore of the Danube he spots a man slapping...

Author	Anna Solomon
ISBN	1594485356

When 16-year-old Minna Losk journeys from Odessa to America as a mail-order bride, she dreams of a young, wealthy husband, a handsome townhouse, and freedom from physical labor and pogroms. But her husband Max turns out to be twice her age, rigidly Orthodox, and living in a one-room sod hut in South Dakota...

Author	Amber Dermont
ISBN	0312642814

A luminous collection of short stories focusing on privilege and entitlement, from the bestselling author of The Starboard Sea

Damage Control displays Amber Dermont's remarkable gift for portraying characters at crossroads. In “Lyndon,” a daughter visits presidential landmarks...

Author	Elizabeth Rosner
ISBN	1439173087

A model sculpts the air with her body. Unlikely subject for novel-length treatment, but in the hands of a poet, the relationship between body and absence, pose and pencil is elegant philosophy. The model, an Israeli raised on a kibbutz who is scarred by her army service, maps her new identity in the empty...

Author	J.M. Sidorova
ISBN	1451692714

The Empress Anna Ioannovna has issued her latest eccentric order: construct a palace out of ice blocks. Inside its walls her slaves build a wedding chamber, a canopy bed on a dais, heavy drapes cascading to the floor--all made of ice. Sealed inside are a disgraced nobleman and a deformed female jester....

Author	Dror Burstein
ISBN	0374215839

Hipster kings and careerist prophets populate a fantastical Israel on the brink of destruction

In a Jerusalem both ancient and modern, where the First Temple squats over the populace like a Trump casino, where the streets are literally crawling with prophets and heathen helicopters buzz...

Author	Aharon Appelfeld
ISBN	0805242805

A new novel from the award-winning, internationally acclaimed Israeli writer ("One of the greatest writers of the age" —The Guardian), a haunting, heartbreaking story of love and loss.

The ghetto in which the Jews have been confined is being liquidated by the Nazis, and eleven-year-old...

Author	Sigal Samuel
ISBN	0062412175

Sigal Samuel’s debut novel, in the vein of Nicole Krauss’s bestselling The History of Love, is an imaginative story that delves into the heart of Jewish mysticism, faith, and family.

“This is not an ordinary tree I am making.

“This,” he said, “this is the Tree of Knowledge.” 

In...

Author	Glückel von Hameln
ISBN	0805205721

Begun in 1690, this diary of a forty-four-year-old German Jewish widow, mother of fourteen children, tells how she guided the financial and personal destinies of her children, how she engaged in trade, ran her own factory, and promoted the welfare of her large family. Her memoir, a rare account of an...

Author	A.B. Yehoshua
ISBN	8858420837

Noga è una musicista, le sue dita sapienti e affusolate sono abituate a sfiorare le corde dell'arpa e a farne melodia. Ma adesso è lontana dal suo amato strumento, è lontana dalla musica, è lontana dalla vita che si è costruita in Olanda: è dovuta tornare a Gerusalemme, dopo molti anni che l'aveva...

Author	Meir Shalev
ISBN	9651324015

One of Israel's most celebrated novelists the acclaimed author of" A Pigeon and a Boy "now gives us a story of village love and vengeance in the early days of British Palestine that is still being played out two generations later.
In the year 1930, three farmers committed suicide here . . . but contrary...

Author	David Grand
ISBN	0374280886

David Grand's Mount Terminus is a dark, majestic novel about art, family, overwhelming love, and the birth of Los Angeles


After his mother's death, young Bloom boards a train with his bereaved father, Jacob, to travel west across mountains and deserts to California: Mount Terminus,...

Author	Rachel Swirsky
ISBN	1607012383

From Sholom Aleichem to Avram Davidson, Isaac Bashevis Singer to Tony Kushner, the Jewish literary tradition has always been one rich in the supernatural and the fantastic. In these pages, gathered from the best short fiction of the last ten years, twenty authors prove that their heritage is alive...