Two tales of love. "Betrothed" portrays a teacher, whose love for the sea and all that it holds leads him to the town of Jaffa. Though many pursue him, Rechnitz eschews romantic love for his studies until he can no longer resist. The second tale, "Edo and Enam," is set after World War II in Jerusalem and considers how love evolves throughout the ......
One spring morning Alison Lomez watches her daughter, Rachel, wait for the school bus in front of their house when she sees a coyote trot up to the seven-year-old and sit down. This encounter between species is the first of many in Lisa Lenard-Cook's novel of life in Valle Bosque, New Mexico. The village is only a short commute from Albuquerque, ......
In the Heart of the Seas is a sophisticated fantasy that tells the story of a pilgrimage of a group of Hasidim to the Holy Land. During an early decade of the nineteenth century in Bucsacz, S.Y. Agnon's actual birthplace, a small group of pious townspeople decides to sell their property and belongings, put aside their business affairs, and make ......
Hailed as one of Agnon's most significant works, A Guest for the Night depicts Jewish life in Eastern Europe after World War I. A man journeys from Israel to his hometown in Europe, saddened to find so many friends taken by war, pogrom, or disease. In this vanishing world of traditional values, he confronts the loss of faith and trust of a younger ......
Rudolfo Anaya's personal journey to Tortuga began one desert-hot day when, as an adolescent, he and some friends were swimming in irrigation ditches. He dove in, sustaining an injury that put him in the hospital for an arduous period of time. Tortuga is set in a hospital for crippled children and is based on Anaya's swimming accident. He explores ......
A woman about to lose her job as a professor of literature and history delivers a passionate, witty and word-mad monologue in this inventive novel, which was called 'brilliant' (The Listener), 'dazzling' (The Guardian), 'elegant, rueful and witty' (The Observer) upon its original publication in England in 1984.
History and literature seem to be ......
This dramatic philosophical novel spans more than half the twentieth century in Albuquerque and Los Angeles. The story centres on Hana Nicholas, a liberated woman ahead of her time who is the centre of a circle of devoted friends in Albuquerque's North Valley. Her eccentric world comes to a sudden end in the early 1950s, and Lowell Briscoe, her ......
Rural Mexico is the setting for this fast-moving comic adventure story about a team of journalists who set out to investigate a rumoured rebellion and film the infamous Fiesta de Santiago Apostol in the Indian village of Huatepac. American journalist Lee White, his partner Checo Rivera, Lee's filmmaker daughter and her cameraman/boyfriend, and ......
Set in the Southwest against the backdrop of McCarthyism, this novel combines the political and the love affairs of Ben Cohen, torn between a wealthy Kentucky belle and a New Mexico union organiser. Ben is a student at the University of Colorado, where the president is dismissing faculty and staff for allegedly maintaining subversive associations ......
