One of America's most important novelists (New York Times), the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of The History of Love, conjures an achingly beautiful and breathtakingly original novel about personal transformation that interweaves the stories of two disparate individuals, an older lawyer and a young novelist, whose transcendental search leads them to the same Israeli desert. Jules Epstein, a man whose drive, avidity, and outsized...

"Some people seek. Jews question. And to answer their questions comes The Newish Jewish Encyclopedia, a bible of Judaism that, in its deeply knowing and highly entertaining way, reflects the diverse and at times irascible tribe who identify as Jewish, or Jewish, or, in the case of future converts and/or spouses, Jewcurious. Here is a popcultural guide to all the many, many aspects and delights of "being Jewish," created by the hosts of the most popular...

World War I left Berlin, and all of Germany, devastated. Charlatans and demagogues eagerly exploited the desperate crowds. Fascination with the occult was everywhere, in private séances, personalized psychic readings, communions with the dead, as people struggled to escape the grim reality of their lives. In the early 1930s, the most famous mentalist in the German capital was Erik Jan Hanussen, a Jewish mind reader originally from Vienna who became...

Wait finds C. K. Williams by turns ruminative, stalked by "the conscience-beast, who harries me," and "riven by idiot vigor, voracious as the youth I was for whom everything was going too slowly, too slowly." Poems about animals and rural life are set hard by poems about shrapnel in Iraq and sudden desire on the Paris Métro; grateful invocations of Herbert and Hopkins give way to fierce negotiations with the shades of Coleridge, Dostoevsky, and Celan....

Near the end of the Great Depression and the beginning of World War II, a homeless Dust Bowl refugee named Woody Guthrie originally drafted "This Land Is Your Land" as an anthem that encompassed the tough realities of those dark times--and as a rebuttal to Irving Berlin's "God Bless America." But the song that Guthrie despised had its own complexities. Irving Berlin had risen from homelessness before becoming America's most successful songwriter,...