Leopards In The Temple

The 25 years after World War II were a fertile period for the American novel and an era of transformation in American society. Offering a social as well as literary history, Dickstein provides a frank assessment of more than 20 key figures.

Franz Kafka spent eight months at his sister's house in Zürau between September 1917 and April 1918, enduring the onset of tuberculosis. Illness paradoxically set him free to write, in a series of philosophical fragments, his settling of accounts with life, marriage, his family, guilt and man's condition. These aphorisms have appeared with minor revisions in various posthumous works since his death in 1924. By chance, Roberto Calasso rediscovered Kafka's two original notebooks in Oxford's Bodleian Library. The notebooks, freshly translated and laid out as Kafka intended, are a distillation of Kafka at his most powerful and enigmatic. This lost jewel provides the reader with a fresh perspective on the work of a genius.

An examination of some enigmatic passages and episodes in the gospels.

From tales of Adam, Moses, and other biblical figures, to the fall of Lucifer and the quarrel of the sun and moon, an anthology of Jewish myth presents seven hundred key stories and through extensive commentary places them in context with the literature of the world.

The articles in this collection originated from an international symposium at the University of Haifa and centre around a major topic in German, European and American literature, i.e. the way in which Jewish self-definition, both positive and negative, has materialized as a product of the tensions between secular culture and society on the one hand, and Jewish tradition and religion on the other. The broad range of authors (most of them of German-speaking origin) necessarily results in an almost equally broad range of answers to this central question. The volume is dedicated to the memory of the Israeli literary scholar Chaim Shoham.