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2) Everyman
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Description
The hero of Everyman is obsessed with mortality. As he reminds himself at one point, "I'm thirty-four! Worry about oblivion when you're seventy-five." But he cannot help himself. He is the ex-husband in three marriages gone wrong. He is the father of two sons who detest him, despite a daughter who adores him. And as his health worsens, he is the envious brother of a much fitter man.
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Along with Saul Bellow's Herzog, Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint defined Jewish American literature in the 1960s. Roth's masterpiece takes place on the couch of a psychoanalyst, an appropriate jumping-off place for an insanely comical novel about the Jewish American experience. Roth has written several great books--Goodbye, Columbus and When She Was Good among them, but it is perhaps Portnoy's Complaint for which he is best known.
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Appears on these lists
Description
The ghost writer introduces Nathan Zuckerman in the 1950s, a budding writer infatuated with the Great Books, discovering the contradictory claims of literature and experience while an overnight guest in the secluded New England farmhouse of his idol, E.I. Lonoff. At Lonoff's, Zuckerman meets Amy Bellette, a haunting young woman of indeterminate foreign background who turns out to be a former student of Lonoff's and who may also have been his mistress....
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"In Yiddish, there is a word for it: bashert-- the person you are fated to meet. Twentysomething Benji Steiner views the concept with scepticism. But the elderly rabbi who stumbles into Benji's office one day has no such doubts. Jacob Zuckerman's late wife, Sophie, was his bashert. And now that she's gone, Rabbi Zuckerman grapples with overwhelming grief and loneliness. Touched by the rabbi's plight, Benji becomes his helper-- driving him home after...
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Appears on list
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Coleman Silk is a respected professor at a New England college who suddenly finds his life unraveling after a comment he makes about some African-American students is misinterpreted as a racial slur. As the scandal heats up, Nathan Zuckerman, a writer researching a biography of Silk, begins to dig deeply into Silk's life. Eventually, matters are made worse when Coleman's affair with a young married janitor named Faunia Farley is exposed. But amid...
9) Herzog
Author
Description
"This is the story of Moses Herzog, a great sufferer, joker, mourner, and charmer. Although his life steadily disintegrates around him - he has failed as a writer and teacher, as a father, and has lost the affection of his wife to his best friend - Herzog sees himself as a survivor, both of his private disasters and those of the age. He writes unsent letters to friends and enemies, colleagues and famous people, revealing his wry perception of the...
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Buck Schatz mysteries volume 2
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"Twenty something Daniel Friedman's debut hit novel, Don't Ever Get Old, was a huge critical and word-of-mouth success. Friedman's unforgettable protagonist Buck Schatz is back, and, once again, this 88-year-old retired Memphis cop refuses to go gently into that good night. Having sustained injuries in Don't Ever Get Old, Buck is living at a retirement home with his wife, and he's downright miserable being treated like the elderly person he is. But...
11) The winter guest
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"Life is a constant struggle for the eighteen-year-old Nowak twins as they raise their three younger siblings in rural Poland under the shadow of the Nazi occupation. The constant threat of arrest has made everyone in their village a spy, and turned neighbor against neighbor. Though rugged, independent Helena and pretty, gentle Ruth couldn't be more different, they are staunch allies in protecting their family from the threats the war brings closer...
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For starters, Jared Leiman is home for the holidays. Because though he and Caroline Weiss were high school sweethearts, their postcollege lives took them in different directions. Jared became a big-time entertainment lawyer in LA, while Caroline became a fitness instructor and stayed in town to care for her sick mother. And though her mother passed away three years ago, Caroline is finally free to go where she chooses. Meanwhile Jared, who inherited...
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When American Jewish men intermarry, goes the common assumption, they and their families are "lost" to the Jewish religion. In this provocative book, Keren R. McGinity shows that it is not necessarily so. She looks at intermarriage and parenthood through the eyes of a post-World War II cohort of Jewish men and discovers what intermarriage has meant to them and their families. She finds that these husbands strive to bring up their children as Jewish...
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Abe Lieberman mysteries volume 6
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This Chicago cop drama is "jam-packed with the stuff of good crime fiction—character, style, place, recognizable human conflict" (The Washington Post).
When the wife of a mob witness is killed and his teenage son is kidnapped, the ransom isn't cash—it's his life. The dead can't testify. If the witness kills himself, the mob will let his son live.
Now veteran cops Abe Lieberman and Bill Hanrahan need...
When the wife of a mob witness is killed and his teenage son is kidnapped, the ransom isn't cash—it's his life. The dead can't testify. If the witness kills himself, the mob will let his son live.
Now veteran cops Abe Lieberman and Bill Hanrahan need...
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Abe Lieberman mysteries volume 9
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Description
Carl Zwick is an aging Chicago Cubs baseball player. Sometimes he feels like he's spent his life hitting into double plays, but he's finally gotten onto the right track. Then tragedy strikes him out.
Anita Mills is a pretty single black mother just trying to get by. A random act of brutality in one of Chicago's rougher neighborhoods permanently ends her struggle.
Richard Allen Smith walks the streets of ChiTown saying God has sent him. He
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Description
"Sammler, a New Yorker in his seventies, a refugee from Nazism, a thinker of complex thoughts, a touchstone around whom a heterogeneous group revolves, is not simply the protagonist but the prime mover of a many-sided novel held together by the centripetal force of his presence. The counterpoint of personalities, subplots, and incidents constitutes a tragi-comic commentary on twentieth-century urban life but it is Sammler's considered reflections...
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Abe Lieberman mysteries volume 2
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Two Chicago cops need to defuse an explosive situation in this “tightly plotted” police procedural (Chicago Tribune).
After killing his wife and her lover, an unhinged and heavily armed Chicago cop named Bernie Shepard barricades himself at the top of a high-rise apartment building and sends a message to the police: meet his demands, or he’ll detonate enough explosives to blow the whole block sky...
After killing his wife and her lover, an unhinged and heavily armed Chicago cop named Bernie Shepard barricades himself at the top of a high-rise apartment building and sends a message to the police: meet his demands, or he’ll detonate enough explosives to blow the whole block sky...
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Acclaimed by literary critic Carl Van Doren as "the most important of all immigrant novels," The Rise of David Levinsky takes place amid America's biggest and most diverse Yiddish-speaking community during the early 20th century. David Levinsky, a young Hasidic Jew struggling to master the Talmud, seeks his fortune amid the teeming streets of New York's Lower East Side. All the energy formerly focused on his religious studies now turns in the direction...
19) The forgotten
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Malkiel Rosenbaum agrees begrudgingly to revisit the events of his father's wartime experiences in Romania fighting the Nazis and, as a result, discovers another side to the stories, and a truth his own generation is in danger of forgetting.
20) A serious man
Publisher
Universal
Pub. Date
[2010]
Description
One ordinary man's quest to become a serious man. Physics professor Larry Gopnik (Stuhlbarg) can't believe his life. His wife is leaving him for his best friend, his unemployed brother won't move off the couch, someone is threatening his career, his kids are a mystery and his neighbor is tormenting him by sunbathing nude. Struggling to make sense of it all, Larry consults three different rabbis and their answers lead him on a twisted journey of faith,...
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