The Other Country


Carol Ann Duffy - 1990
    What is admirable about Duffy', commented Robert Nye in The Times, is that she celebrates such places without sentimentalizing them, and wrings the last drop of meaning from each visit.' Carol Ann Duffy was born in Glasgow in 1955. Her awards include first prize in the 1983 National Poetry Competition; three Scottish Arts Council Book Awards; Eric Gregory, Somerset Maugham and Dylan Thomas Awards in Britain and a 1995 Lannan Literary Award in the USA. In 1993 she received the Forward Poetry Prize and the Whitbread Poetry Award for her acclaimed fourth collection Mean Time. On May 1, 2009 she was named the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom.

Still Loved…Still Missed!


Mridula മൃദുല - 2019
    These stories span characters and emotional states with canny details that touch the depths of your soul. Picturing the complexities of love, misery and mystery, the stories try to gnaw your heart like never before.• What does a flower teach us we often fail to see?• “The belly is an ungrateful wretch.” Is it true?• Ever wondered about the sparseness and illusions in life?• Does death put an end to true love?• Have all the ascetics won over their emotions?With the power of simple language, this book transports the readers to a world scarcely thought of in our bustling lives. The allegories maintain an intense rhythm of life prompting the readers to perceive things from a unique angle.“A whole bookful to make you think, cry, think again and move on.”

Ben-Gurion: A Political Life


Shimon Peres - 2011
    Although the state that Ben-Gurion would lead through war and peace had not yet declared its precarious independence, the “Old Man,” as he was called even then, was already a mythic figure. Peres, who came of age in the cabinets of Ben-Gurion, is uniquely placed to evoke this figure of stirring contradictions—a prophetic visionary and a canny pragmatist who early grasped the necessity of compromise for national survival. Ben-Gurion supported the 1947 United Nations Partition Plan for Palestine, though it meant surrendering a two-thousand-year-old dream of Jewish settlement in the entire land of Israel. He granted the Orthodox their first exemptions from military service despite his own deep secular commitments, and he reached out to Germany in the aftermath of the Holocaust, knowing that Israel would need as many strong alliances as possible within the European community. A protégé of Ben-Gurion and himself a legendary figure on the international political stage, Shimon Peres brings to his account of Ben-Gurion’s life and towering achievements the profound insight of a statesman who shares Ben-Gurion’s dream of a modern, democratic Jewish nation-state that lives in peace and security alongside its Arab neighbors. In Ben-Gurion, Peres sees a neglected model of leadership that Israel and the world desperately need in the twenty-first century.

Faithful and Virtuous Night


Louise Glück - 2014
    Her Poems 1962-2012 was hailed as "a major event in this country's literature" in the pages of The New York Times. Every new collection is at once a deepening and a revelation. Faithful and Virtuous Night is no exception. You enter the world of this spellbinding book through one of its many dreamlike portals, and each time you enter it's the same place but it has been arranged differently. You were a woman. You were a man. This is a story of adventure, an encounter with the unknown, a knight's undaunted journey into the kingdom of death; this is a story of the world you've always known, that first primer where "on page three a dog appeared, on page five a ball" and every familiar facet has been made to shimmer like the contours of a dream, "the dog float[ing] into the sky to join the ball." Faithful and Virtuous Night tells a single story but the parts are mutable, the great sweep of its narrative mysterious and fateful, heartbreaking and charged with wonder.

Midnight Milkshakes: Ice Cream And Suicide Vol. II


Jack Ray - 2018
    The book features raw, blunt, and in your face poems depicting the darker side of relationships. Readers will find themes such as lies, cheating, and heartache abundant in much of this collection. Midnight Milkshakes, being the second volume of Ray's Ice Cream And Suicide, is great for returning readers to the series. The book focuses on much of the same style and mood that is common in his writings.

Lies, First Person


Gail Hareven - 2008
    As if that wasn't disturbing enough, while writing this controversial novel, Gotthilf stayed in Elinor's parent's house and sexually assaulted her "slow" sister.In the time leading up to Gotthilf's visit, Elinor will relive the reprehensible events of that time so long ago, over and over, compulsively, while building up the courage—and plan—to avenge her sister in the most conclusive way possible: by murdering Gotthilf, her own personal Hilter.Along the way to the inevitable confrontation, Gail Hareven uses an obsessive, circular writing style to raise questions about Elinor's mental state, which in turn makes the reader question the veracity of the supposed memoir that they're reading. Is it possible that Elinor is following in her uncle's writerly footpaths, using a first-person narrative to manipulate the reader into forgiving a horrific crime?Gail Hareven is the author of eleven novels, including The Confessions of Noa Weber, which won both the Sapir Prize for Literature and the Best Translated Book Award.Dalya Bilu is the translator of A.B. Yehoshua, Aharon Appelfeld, and many others.

Unleashed: Poems by Writers' Dogs


Amy Hempel - 1995
    Jones,   Walter Kirn,  Sheila Kohler,   Maxine Kumin,  Natalie Kusz,  Anne Lamott,   Gordon Lish,  Ralph Lombreglia, Merrill Markoe,  Pearson Marx,  Erin McGraw,  Heather McHugh,   Arthur Miller,  George Minot,  Susan Minot,   Honor Moore, Mary Morris,  Alicia Muñoz,  Elise Paschen,  Padgett Powell,  Wyatt Prunty,  Lawrence Raab,  Mark Richard,   John Rybicki, Jeanne Schinto,  Bob Shacochis,  Jim Shepard,   Karen Shepard,  Lee Smith,  Ben Sonnenberg,  Kate Clark Spencer,  Gerald Stern,Terese Svoboda,  William Tester,  Abigail Thomas,  Lily Tuck,  Sidney Wade,  Kathryn Walker,  William Wegman

Chernowitz


Fran Arrick - 1981
    A boy who suffers anti-Semitic abuse at the hands of a classmate during his ninth and tenth grade years plots revenge against his tormentor.

The Rabbi of 84th Street: The Extraordinary Life of Haskel Besser


Warren Kozak - 2004
    Always wearing an easy smile, Hasidic rabbi Haskel Besser spreads joy wherever he goes, enriching the lives of his many friends and congregants with his profound understanding of both Orthodox Judaism and humannature.With warmth and admiration, journalist Warren Kozak writes about the rabbi's extraordinary life—from his family's escape to Palestine in the late 1930s to his witnessing of Israel's rebirth in 1948, to his move to New York City, where he lives today.A rare window into the normally closed world of Hasidic Jews, The Rabbi of 84th Street is also the story of Judaism in the twentieth century; of the importance of centuries-old traditions; and of the triumph of faith, kindness, and spirit.

I am a home to butterflies


J. Alchem - 2018
    It will then be about them only. It will be all about the one they loved like thunder, about the one they struggled hard to keep, about the one who had left them in the middle of their 'forever', about their world shattering into pieces, about them gluing together every piece, and about them falling in love one more time.And if you still think it is about you and me, you haven't loved someone like thunder, yet.

WITCHDOCTORPOET


Bola Juju - 2018
    This book explores topics such as love, spirituality, womanhood, suicide, addiction, ancestral trauma and the unwavering power of healing from the inside out. WITCHDOCTORPOET is an offering to those in need of a sensual and empowering stance on the realities and legacies of the African Diaspora.

The Six Day War


Randolph S. Churchill - 1967
     Randolph Spencer-Churchill was the son of British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and his wife Clementine. He was a Member of Parliament between 1940 to 1945. He served with the 4th Queen's Own Hussars during the Second World War and later worked as a journalist. He was the author of several works of non-fiction, including the first two volumes of the official biography of his father. Winston Spencer-Churchill was the grandson of Sir Winston Churchill. He served as a member of British Parliament between 1970 and 1997. He was the author of five works of non-fiction, while he also compiled and edited Never Give In!, a collection of the Best of Sir Winston Churchill's speeches.

Felon: Poems


Reginald Dwayne Betts - 2019
    Reginald Dwayne Betts confronts the funk of postincarceration existence and examines prison not as a static space, but as a force that enacts pressure throughout a person’s life.The poems move between traditional and newfound forms with power and agility—from revolutionary found poems created by redacting court documents to the astonishing crown of sonnets that serves as the volume’s radiant conclusion. Drawing inspiration from lawsuits filed on behalf of the incarcerated, the redaction poems focus on the ways we exploit and erase the poor and imprisoned from public consciousness. Traditionally, redaction erases what is top secret; in Felon, Betts redacts what is superfluous, bringing into focus the profound failures of the criminal justice system and the inadequacy of the labels it generates.Challenging the complexities of language, Betts animates what it means to be a "felon."

The Aleppo Codex: The True Story of Obsession, Faith, and the International Pursuit of an Ancient Bible


Matti Friedman - 2012
    Using his research, including documents which have been secret for 50 years and interviews with key players, AP correspondent Friedman tells a story of political upheaval, international intrigue, charged courtroom battles, obsession, and subterfuge.

The Book of Job: When Bad Things Happened to a Good Person


Harold S. Kushner - 2012
    Yet after losing everything, Job—though confused, angry, and questioning God—refuses to reject his faith, although he challenges some central aspects of it. Rabbi Harold S. Kushner examines the questions raised by Job’s experience, questions that have challenged wisdom seekers and worshippers for centuries. What kind of God permits such bad things to happen to good people? Why does God test loyal followers? Can a truly good God be all-powerful?  Rooted in the text, the critical tradition that surrounds it, and the author’s own profoundly moral thinking, Kushner’s study gives us the book of Job as a touchstone for our time. Taking lessons from historical and personal tragedy, Kushner teaches us about what can and cannot be controlled, about the power of faith when all seems dark, and about our ability to find God. Rigorous and insightful yet deeply affecting, The Book of Job is balm for a distressed age—and Rabbi Kushner’s most important book since When Bad Things Happen to Good People.