In 2017-18, the trustees of the Berkshire Museum in Pittsfield, Mass., decided to "deaccession" (sell) some of its most valuable artworks, including a painting by Norman Rockwell appraised at $25 million. The proposed sales broke long-established norms of museum collection oversight and sent shock waves through both the Berkshire community and the national art world. The broad outline of the events and alliances leading up to the sales form the nonfictional backdrop to this novel, an other...

JOB by Joseph Roth (HIOB, 1930) is a modern retelling of the Biblical story in a mixed form, fable and realism. It follows the fortunes of the Singer family from Western Russia at the end of the 19th century to New York in the early 20th. Stefan Zweig wrote: "JOB, more than a novel and a legend, is a pure, perfect poem of our time, and if I am not mistaken, the only one certain to outlast all that we, its contemporaries, have created and written." Heinrich Böll comments: "Joseph Roth's nov...

Here are eight fundamental works by one of the few greatest English poets: three lyric pieces, Songs of Innocence, The Book of Thel, Songs of Experience; the prose satire An Island in the Moon, the mystical prose poem The Marriage of Heaven & Hell, and three visionary poems: The French Revolution, Visions of the Daughters of Albion, America, a Prophecy. William Blake (1757-1827) is one of the great relevant figures of his time, who like Beethoven in music bridges the classical and romantic...

The Austrian writer Joseph Roth's first novel, 'Das Spinnennetz', 1923, intensely chronicles the development of a fascist and the first steps in his rise to power. It is a vivid portrait of the nationalist fervor and the struggle between Right and Left in Germany during the years immediately following the end of the Great War, or First World War. Two days after its serial publication in the Vienna Arbeiterzeitung ('The Worker'), Adolf Hitler and General Erich Ludendorff set in motion the M...

An odometer measures the distance that you have traveled. This odometer measures moments with poems dispersed across life like mile markers. They begin when the poet was a college student of 20 in 1966 and end with the last poem written when he was 78 in 2023. This is 58 years of poetry that runs the gamut of life and transcends the gauntlet of emotions from youth to older adult. There are 403 poems scattered over 20,842 days and they begin on September 5, 1966, with this first line on day...

A lusty parable filled with hearty surprises, LY A Lunatic Love Life takes the reader on an emotional and intellectual romp through a strange parallel universe and an achingly lovely romance. First-time author Stephen Leon White has created a foreign landscape with its own set of rules that nevertheless seems as familiar as the streets we live on.A young man of twenty-one distracted by daydreams of love, Oliver Sandwich suddenly finds himself in a pickle as he tries to jam a "ladde...

This adventure story is about an African-American pioneer who experienced hardships in a strange, new Promised Land while searching for Americas soul. It is a love story about a man and his race who gave up American only to rediscover it and eventually reclaim it. It is an epic of human strength and colorless passion, capturing the Black Fever that gripped our nation in the early 1800s and is still echoed in the debate over immigration today.

Set in the 1950s, the protagonist, cal, cannot find a direction for his life. At home with his mother and brother, he feels lost as he heads into his senior year of high school. During the summer, his mother continues to compare his failures with his younger brother's successes, making Cal question her love for him.Encouraged by her brother, she encourages Cal to attend a military school in Texas in order to gain a sharper focus on his future. Reluctantly he agrees, approaching it ...

This is Louis' introspective memoir that spans 50 years. He first focuses on when he met his future wife, Susan, in 1969. She is a successful feminist artist in Chicago that specializes in figurative art. A year later she and Louis drive to Boulder, Colorado after camping in Rocky Mountain National Park. Susan rests while Louis takes a self-guided tour of the Columbine Collegium which is a music school founded by unemployed musicians after the depression. While crossing the campus Louis me...

Life is a Circle Life isnt stagnant. Life doesnt stand still. Life is a constant car-ou-sel. Everything changes for better or for worse Life turns in circlesin our universe. Light breaks darkness and heat warms cold War ends peace and youth turns old Food cures famine and water quenches thirst Rain follows sunshine and luck ends a curse If life were so predictable it wouldnt be much fun Cause anything can happen thats under the sun Love and hate are cousins of the heart Human nature is the...

To see objects that live in the fourth dimension we humans would need to add a fourth dimension to our three-dimensional vision. An example of such an object that lives in the fourth dimension is a hyper-sphere or “3-sphere.” The quest to imagine the elusive 3-sphere has deep historical roots: medieval poet Dante Alighieri used a 3-sphere to convey his allegorical vision of the Christian afterlife in his Divine Comedy. In 1917, Albert Einstein visualized the universe as a 3-sphere, describ...

Master storyteller and international bestselling author of Redemption, Trinity, and Exodus, Leon Uris once again brilliantly interweaves historical fact with gripping fiction in this powerful novel of politics, family, intrigue, love, and the passions that rule human lives.Spanning the decades from World War II to the 2008 presidential campaign, A God in Ruins is the unforgettable story of Quinn Patrick O'Connell, an honest, principled, and courageous man...