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...

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...

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 ...

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...

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...

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...

“The trouble with the rat race is that, even if you win, you're still a rat” ~ Lily Tomlin ~There was a time, in the not-so-distant past, when families were expected to give up everything in order to achieve the financial security they craved. Perhaps you remember those decades, perhaps you are too young to recall those times.Those were the days when climbing the corporate ladder was a revered activity, and wives and children gazed fondly at pictures of the breadwi...

"Darkly funny and brilliantly unhinged" — Kirkus Reviews"A chaotic black comedy about a man with a messiah complex." — Kirkus ReviewsIf Fight Club, Money, and The Motorcycle Diaries had a three-way, Novelty would be their web-toed, mutant lovechild.Finn Balor is a depraved billionaire and polymath with a vendetta against fate and an insatiable appetite for hedonism. Obsessed with the idea that free will is a fallac...

There remains an urgent need for a deeper discussion of the theoretical, political and federal dimensions of the European codification project. While much valuable work has already been undertaken, the chapters in this volume take as their starting point the proposition that further reflection and critical thought will enhance the quality and efficacy of the on-going work of the various codification bodies. The volume contains chapters by representatives of the Common Frame of Reference, t...

Marcha is a multidisciplinary survey of the individuals, organizations, and institutions that have given shape and power to the contemporary immigrant rights movement in Chicago. A city with longstanding historic ties to immigrant activism, Chicago has been the scene of a precedent-setting immigrant rights mobilization in 2006 and subsequent mobilizations in 2007 and 2008.Positing Chicago as a microcosm of the immigrant rights movement on national level, these essays plumb...

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.

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...