Love And Exile

From pre-First World War Warsaw to the New York of the 1930s, Nobel Prize-winner Isaac Bashevis Singer traces the early years of his life in this autobiographical trilogy. In A Little Boy in Search of God, he remembers his bookish boyhood as the son of an Orthodox rabbi, equally absorbed in science, philosophy and cabbala. Later, the pursuit of women came to obsess him almost as much as the pursuit of knowledge, and in A Young Man in Search of Love he chronicles the intricacies of his first love affairs. When he emigrated to the United States from Poland on the eve of the Second World War loneliness and depression overwhelmed him, and he relives those dark years in Lost in America. From beginning to end, Love and Exile sheds new light on Singer's own life and the fictional lives mirrored in it.

A new paperback edition of a haunting novel of love and loss and the impossibility of true exile from the world

Quasicrystals: The State of the Art has proven to be a useful introduction to quasicrystals for mathematicians, physicists, materials scientists, and students. The original intent was for the book to be a progress report on recent developments in the field. However, the authors took care to adopt a broad, pedagogical approach focusing on points of lasting value. Many subtle and beautiful aspects of quasicrystals are explained in this book (and nowhere else) in a way that is useful for both the expert and the student. In this second edition, some authors have appended short notes updating their essays. Two new chapters have been added. Chapter 16, by Goldman and Thiel, reviews the experimental progress since the first edition (1991) in making quasicrystals, determining their structure, and finding applications. In Chapter 17, Steinhardt discusses the quasi-unit cell picture, a promising, new approach for describing the structure and growth of quasicrystals in terms of a single, repeating, overlapping cluster of atoms.

The bestselling author of Last Train to Istanbul returns with a tale of love defying all boundaries. Sabahat, a beautiful young Muslim woman, is known in her family for her intelligence, drive, and stubbornness. She believes there is more in store for her life than a good marriage and convinces her parents to let her pursue her education, rare for young Turkish women in the 1920s. But no one--least of all Sabahat herself--expects that in the course of her studies she will fall for a handsome Armenian student named Aram. After precious moments alone together, their love begins to blossom. Try as she might to simplify her life and move on, Sabahat has no choice but to follow her heart's desire. But Aram is Christian, and neither family approves. With only hope to guide their way, they defy age-old traditions, cross into dangerous territory, and risk everything to find their way back to each other. One of Turkey's most beloved authors brings us an evocative story of two star-crossed lovers inspired by her own family's history.

With the Spanish conquest of Islamic Granada and the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, the year 1492 marks the exile from Europe of crucial strands of medieval culture. It also becomes a symbolic marker for the expulsion of a diversity in language and grammar that was disturbing to the Renaissance sensibility of purity and stability. In rewriting Columbus's narrative of his voyage of that year, Renaissance historians rewrote history, as was often their practice, to purge it of an offending vulgarity. The cultural fragments left behind following this exile form the core of Shards of Love, as María Rosa Menocal confronts the difficulty of writing their history. It is in exile that Menocal locates the founding conditions for philology--as a discipline that loves origins--and for the genre of love songs that philology reveres. She crosses the boundaries, both temporal and geographical, of 1492 to recover the "original" medieval culture, with its Mediterranean mix of European, Arabic, and Hebrew poetics. The result is a form of literary history more lyrical than narrative and, Menocal persuasively demonstrates, more appropriate to the Middle Ages than to the revisionary legacy of the Renaissance. In discussions ranging from Eric Clapton's adaption of Nizami's Layla and Majnun, to the uncanny ties between Jim Morrison and Petrarch, Shards of Love deepens our sense of how the Middle Ages is tied to our own age as it expands the history and meaning of what we call Romance philology.

The complexity and uncertainty of the idea of home are very much at issue in the stories Gallant writes about Canada, her home country. Included in this new collection are the celebrated Linnet Muir stories, wonderfully wise and funny investigations into the difficulties of growing up and breaking free.

Edith, a struggling young writer from the East Bronx, worked first at the The Daily Worker, and then as one of the first "American railroad girls.".

“When Matisse dies,” Pablo Picasso remarked in the 1950s, “Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what color really is.” As a pioneer of modernism and one of the greatest figurative artists of the twentieth century, Marc Chagall achieved fame and fortune, and over the course of a long career created some of the best-known and most-loved paintings of our time. Yet behind this triumph lay struggle, heartbreak, bitterness, frustration, lost love, exile—and above all the miracle of survival. Born into near poverty in Russia in 1887, the son of a Jewish herring merchant, Chagall fled the repressive “potato-colored” tsarist empire in 1911 for Paris. There he worked alongside Modigliani and Léger in the tumbledown tenement called La Ruche, where “one either died or came out famous.” But turmoil lay ahead—war and revolution; a period as an improbable artistic commissar in the young Soviet Union; a difficult existence in Weimar Germany, occupied France, and eventually the United States. Throughout, as Jackie Wullschlager makes plain in this groundbreaking biography, he never ceased giving form on canvas to his dreams, longings, and memories. His subject, more often than not, was the shtetl life of his childhood, the wooden huts and synagogues, the goatherds, rabbis, and violinists—the whole lost world of Eastern European Jewry. Wullschlager brilliantly describes this world and evokes the characters who peopled it: Chagall’s passionate, energetic mother, Feiga-Ita; his eccentric fellow painter and teacher Bakst; his clever, intense first wife, Bella; their glamorous daughter, Ida; his tough-minded final companion and wife, Vava; and the colorful, tragic array of artist, actor, and writer friends who perished under the Stalinist regime. Wullschlager explores in detail Chagall’s complex relationship with Russia and makes clear the Russian dimension he brought to Western modernism. She shows how, as André Breton put it, “under his sole impulse, metaphor made its triumphal entry into modern painting,” and helped shape the new surrealist movement. As art critic of the Financial Times, she provides a breadth of knowledge on Chagall’s work, and at the same time as an experienced biographer she brings Chagall the man fully to life—ambitious, charming, suspicious, funny, contradictory, dependent, but above all obsessively determined to produce art of singular beauty and emotional depth. Drawing upon hitherto unseen archival material, including numerous letters from the family collection in Paris, and illustrated with nearly two hundred paintings, drawings, and photographs, Chagall is a landmark biography to rank with Hilary Spurling’s Matisse and John Richardson’s Picasso.