Visits From The Seventh

A highly original poetic debut. In the mystical tradition of Merrill and Yeats, these wry, haunting poems take the form of conversations between a woman and a throng of invisible presences -- "visitors," as she calls them -- who counsel, challenge, cajole, and comfort her. Together they murmur about destiny, sex, the moon, an abortion, a walk on park Avenue. Exploring otherness, solitude, and desire, the "visits" are quixotic debates about the nature of language, art, and one woman's particular world. "Life is so complicated for us here, " she remarks, . . . that I wondered how they found theirs. Did they love it up there cutting their spirals into cold fronts andturning somersaults with the storms? Did they nestle cozy into their troughs of air, basking in the serene and glossy heights, the breathtaking vistas of blue-gray seas, the pink-tinted cloudscapes, the high music -- Or did they, as we do, long for blanketsand warm bodies?Exquisitely paced, full of delicate banter, Visits from the Seventh is a passionate and philosophically profound collection of poems.

The most comprehensive book on this subject ever published. With 3,638 references,

Percy Jackson meets Star Trek PSS 118 is just your typical school—except that it's a rickety old spaceship orbiting Ganymede, a moon of Jupiter. Jack's dad used to be the science teacher, until he got fired for tinkering with the ship. Now Jack just wants to get through the last day of school without anything else going wrong. But when the school is mysteriously attacked, Jack discovers that his dad has built humanity's first light-speed engine—and given Jack control of it. To save the ship, Jack catapults it hundreds of light-years away . . . and right into the clutches of the first aliens humans have ever seen. School hasn't just gotten out: it's gone clear across the galaxy. And now it's up to Jack and his friends to get everyone home. "[T]his middle-grade action-adventure space opera is just plain fun."—Booklist "A perfect bridge for readers looking for a Percy Jackson–esque work of science fiction."—School Library Journal

2020 Natan Notable Book Winner, 2020 Latino Book Awards Best Travel Book Internationally renowned essayist and cultural commentator Ilan Stavans spent five years traveling from across a dozen countries in Latin America, in search of what defines the Jewish communities in the region, whose roots date back to Christopher Columbus’s arrival. In the tradition of V.S. Naipaul’s explorations of India, the Caribbean, and the Arab World, he came back with an extraordinarily vivid travelogue. Stavans talks to families of the desaparecidos in Buenos Aires, to “Indian Jews,” and to people affiliated with neo-Nazi groups in Patagonia. He also visits Spain to understand the long-term effects of the Inquisition, the American Southwest habitat of “secret Jews,” and Israel, where immigrants from Latin America have reshaped the Jewish state. Along the way, he looks for the proverbial “seventh heaven,” which, according to the Talmud, out of proximity with the divine, the meaning of life in general, and Jewish life in particular, becomes clearer. The Seventh Heaven is a masterful work in Stavans’s ongoing quest to find a convergence between the personal and the historical.