Library of American Fiction – Serie

Filled with Curt Leviant's signature blend of humor and drama, these two enchanting and original novellas lure readers into a dazzling storybook world."Ladies and Gentlemen, the Original Music of the Hebrew Alphabet" is set in Budapest during the Communist era. The story focuses on the tenuous seesaw between Dr. Isaac Gantz, a musicologist, and engineer Ferdinand Friedman, a Holocaust survivor who believes that he possesses one of the greatest manuscripts of the ages, a Rosetta Stone of Judaica. Friedman is willing to share it—but there is a "but." In pursuing this prize, Gantz enters a world of strange human relationships filled with doubts and surprises. A vibrant cast of characters adds dimension to this gripping story in which Jewish folklore, music, and history coalesce."Weekend in Mustara" unfolds on the fictional island of Mustara in southern Europe, a mountainous, totalitarian country that tolerates Judaism. Its few Jews cling to their heritage, embodied in their beautiful but sparsely attended synagogue and their museum, where a great memorial book is inscribed with the names of all Mustara Jews martyred during World War II. A scholar of medieval Hebrew manuscripts comes to the island, searching for traces of Yehuda Halevi, the great Hebrew poet of the Spanish Golden Age. He is soon enmeshed among elusive personalities and tangled loyalties, but only when he finds himself displaced in time—in a kind of theater of the absurd—are the purposes of his journey finally realized.

Set before the Holocaust in the tiny Polish shtetl of Proszowice, each interconnected story follows the young protagonist through the pleasures and humiliations of childhood and rites of manhood, as he fights against historical, social and psychological forces that threaten to pull him down.

Sasha Saunders is the daughter of a Polish rabbi who wins renown as a Yiddish actress. Her daughter Chloe becomes a professor of classics, and Chloe's daughter Phoebe becomes a mathematician who is drawn to traditional Judaism and the domestic life her mother and grandmother rejected.

In this lively coming-of-age novel, young Danny Meyer lays bare a landscape of illness and despair but emerges triumphant, with a new awareness of the limitations of security and the lessons of eternity. Danny's bubble-like existence in paradisal Madison is broken when his father, a concert pianist and professor, is stricken with illness and must give up his professorship. The family is forced to move to Milwaukee to live at the brink of poverty while his father gets sicker, his artistic mother struggles as bread-winner, and his brother becomes delusional. Here, Danny finds himself in the uncertain position of having to accept the responsibilities of manhood while still struggling with adolescence. In a world that keeps shifting, Danny befriends the son of a gangster and, through his brushes with that compelling world of crime, finds his way to a new confidence. Realistically portrayed, A Friend of Kissinger captures an authentic sense of place that is one part arty, heartland Main Street and one part shady, small-time gangsterland.

After her husband's death, Ginny Gillespie travels with his ashes to Paris, where she meets and falls in love with Roland Keppi, a strange, visionary man without a country. But when Roland is deported to a German camp for people without identity papers, their dreamlike affair is disrupted.

This poignant and humorous collection of stories offers a fresh perspective on current issues of homosexuality and anti-Semitism and lends a voice to those experiencing growing pains and self-discovery. Newman's quirky Jewish characters go through all kinds of experiences, from an initial lesbian sexual encounter to being sequestered in a college apartment after paranoid Holocaust flashbacks. Her characters anxiously discover their lesbian identities while beginning to understand, and finally to embrace, their Jewish heritage. The title story, ""A Letter to Harvey Milk,"" was the second-place finalist in the Raymond Carver Short Story Competition.

While many Jews pick Florida as the perfect place to retire, Matt Glassman has chosen it as the place to begin his adulthood. Perhaps that's because the pressures of life have always reminded him of his grandfather, who mysteriously disappeared from the family twenty years ago. Now, while he tries to begin a family of his own, Glassman also builds a relationship with the one person, his grandmother, who might know the truth about his grandfather's disappearance. She's remained stubbornly reticent on the topic all these years, but when a familiar old man shows up at Glassman's office he thinks he may finally get some answers.

These ten magical stories are primarily set in Pittsburgh-area river towns, where Italian American women and girls draw from their culture and folklore to bring life and a sense of wonder to a seemingly barren region of the Rust Belt. Each story catapults the ordinary into something original and unpredictable. A sceptical journalist scopes out the bar where the town mayor, in seemingly perfect health, is drinking with his buddies and celebrating what he claims is the last day of his life. A woman donates her dead mother's clothes to a thrift shop but learns that their destiny is not what she expected. A ten-year-old girl wrestles with the facts of life as she watches her neighbour struggle to get pregnant while her teenage sister finds it all too easy. A high school girl hallucinates in a steamy hospital laundry room and discovers she can see her co-workers' futures. A developer's wrecking ball is no match for the legend of Giovanna's green thumb in the title story ""Giovanna's 86 Circles."" Quirky and profound, Corso's magical leaps uncover the everyday poetry of these women's lives.