Before All The World

An NPR Best Book of the Year A mesmerizing, inventive story of three souls in 1930s Philadelphia seizing new life while haunted by the old. I do not believe that all the world is darkness. In the swirl of Philadelphia at the end of Prohibition, Leyb meets Charles. They are at a former speakeasy called Cricket’s, a bar that welcomes, as Charles says in his secondhand Yiddish, feygeles. Leyb is startled; fourteen years in amerike has taught him that his native tongue is not known beyond his people. And yet here is suave Charles—fingers stained with ink, an easy manner with the barkeep—a Black man from the Seventh Ward, a fellow traveler of Red Emma’s, speaking Jewish to a young man he will come to call Lion. Lion is haunted by memories of life before, in Zatelsk, where everyone in his village, everyone except the ten non-Jews, a young poet named Gittl, and Leyb himself, was taken to the forest and killed. Then, miraculously, Gittl is in Philadelphia, too, thanks to a poem she wrote and the intervention of a shadowy character known only as the Baroness of Philadelphia. And surrounding Gittl are malokhim, the spirits of her siblings. Flowing and churning and seething with a glorious surge of language, carried along by questions of survival and hope and the possibility of a better world, Moriel Rothman-Zecher’s Before All the World lays bare the impossibility of escaping trauma, the necessity of believing in a better way ahead, and the power that comes from our responsibility to the future. It asks, in the voices of its angels, the most essential question: What do you intend to do before all the world?

The author of THE ROUGH FACE GIRL creates a stunning coming-of-age novel built from a glorious Seneca Indian story cycle. Cast out of the Seneca tribe because they are unable to help make war, Crow and his grandmother struggle to survive alone. Then Crow hears the magnificent voice of the Storytelling Stone -- an ancient rock that tells tales of the Long Ago Time, when the Sky Woman trod the Above World and a child could alter the ways of a people. As he listens to the Stone's stories, Crow comes to realize his own power to effect change and his destiny as a Seneca and a man. THE WORLD BEFORE THIS ONE laces Seneca legends with Crow's narrative to create a story about stories, how they help us live and grow.

The brilliant, hauntingly beautiful second novel, twelve years in the making, from a writer whose previous novel Stay was a Globe and Mail Top 100 pick, a finalist for the Amazon First Novel Award, and made into a feature film. When she was just fifteen, smart, sensitive Jane Standen lived through a nightmare: she lost the sweet five-year-old girl she was minding during a walk in the woods. The little girl was never found, leaving her family, and Jane, devastated. Now the grown-up Jane is an archivist at a small London museum that is about to close for lack of funding. As her one last project, she is searching the archives for scraps of information related to another missing person--a woman who disappeared some 125 years ago from a Victorian asylum. As the novel moves back and forth between the museum in contemporary London, the Victorian asylum, and a dilapidated country house that seems to connect both missing people, it unforgettably explores the repercussions of small acts, the power of affection, and the irrepressible vitality of everyday objects and events. Here is a rivetting, gorgeously written novel that powerfully reminds us of the possibility that we are less alone than we might think.

Three strikingly different alien races greeted the military mission from Earth when it reached the planet called Bezer'ej. Now one of the sentient species has been exterminated—and two others are poised on the brink of war. The fragile bezeri are no more, due to the ignorant, desperate actions of human interlopers. The powerful wess'har protectors have failed in their sworn obligation to the destroyed native population—and the outrage must be redressed. But those who are coming to judge from the World Before -- the home planet, now distant and alien to the wess'har, whose ancestors left there generations ago -- will not restrict their justice to the individual humans responsible for the slaughter. Earth itself must answer for the genocide. And its ultimate fate may depend on a dead woman: former police officer Shan Frankland, who became something far greater than human before destroying herself in the vast airless depths of space.

Inspired by the spiritual exegesis of the early church fathers, and modeled on the revival of an imaginative and contemplative approach to Scripture developed by Adrienne von Speyr, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Joseph Ratzinger, and Erasmo Leiva-Merikakas, BEFORE THE FOUNDATION OF THE WORLD takes a small portion of a single letter of St. Paul and invites us to communion with Father, Son, and Holy Spirit through an extended exercise in lectio divina. According to the ressourcement theological vision advocated by the authors above, our reading of Scripture should be a living encounter with the Eternal Word in every word of the Bible. BEFORE THE FOUNDATION OF THE WORLD invites us into just such an encounter.

Broadcast journalist Maria Shriver reveals the lessons that have guided her journey as a career woman, wife, and mother. Expanded from her highly praised commencement address and best-selling book, this Little Book offers wise and wonderful advice.This Little Book has been adapted from Ten Things I Wish I'd Known-Before I Went Out into the Real World by Maria Shriver, published by Warner Books, Inc., and is published by arrangement with Warner Books. All rights reserved.

This book explores the implications of claims that the most challenging political problems of our time express an urgent need to reimagine where and therefore what we take politics to be. It does so by examining the relationship between modern forms of politics (centred simultaneously within individual subjects, sovereign states and an international system of states) and the (natural, God-given or premodern) world that has been excluded in order to construct modern forms of political subjectivity and sovereign authority. It argues that the ever-present possibility of a world outside the international both sustains the structuring of relations between inclusion and exclusion within the modern internationalized political order and generates desires for escape from this order to a politics encompassing a singular humanity, cosmopolis, globe or planet that are doomed to disappointment. On this basis, the book develops a critique of prevailing traditions of both political theory and theories of international relations. It especially examines what it might now mean to think about sovereignties, subjectivities, boundaries, borders and limits without automatically reproducing forms of inclusion and exclusion, or universality and particularity, expressed in the converging but ultimately contradictory relationship between international relations and world politics.