Kirjahaku

Frank Ritz is a television critic. Let him out of the house and his first instinct is to go looking for sex. Deviant sex, treacherous sex, even straight sex, so long as it's immoderate - he's never been choosy. But what happens when sex is all you know but no longer what you want?

From the beginning Oliver Walzer is a natural - at ping-pong. At sex he is not so adept, but with tuition from Sheeny Waxman, fellow member of the Akiva Social Club Table Tennis Team and stalwart of the Kardomah coffee bar, his game improves. Winner of the 2010 Man Booker Prize.

Winner of the 2010 Man Booker Prize. Karl Leon Forelock is a product of the northern English town of Partington (the wettest spot in Europe) and a graduate with a double starred first in the Moral Decencies from Malapert college, Cambridge.

Barney Fugleman has two major preoccupations in life: sex and literature. He is obsessed by the life and work of a man hailed by many as a genius of the nineteenth century. This curious propulsion drives him out of Finchley, and out of the life he shares with Sharon and her 'rampant marvellings', to Cornwall.

Marvin Kreitman lives for sex, and infidelity is a way of life for him. His friend, Charlie Merriweather, on the other hand, has been faithful to his wife for 20 years. But then Charlie decides he wants a piece of Marvin's disordered life.

In an ever divided Britain, this wryly observed novel is a timely and thought-provoking read from the Booker-winning author of The Finkler Question. 'A very funny, bitterly intelligent novel...do read it' Malcolm BradburySefton Goldberg: mid-thirties, English teacher at Wrottesley Poly in the West Midlands;

One day, out of the blue, Henry Nagel inherits a sumptuous apartment in St John's Wood. Not that the ghosts of Henry's past are prepared to disappear without a struggle - his old school-friend and rival Osmond 'Hovis' Belkin, currently enjoying success in Hollywood;

Grayling, The TimesWild, angry and uproarious, Kalooki Nights is a darkly comic, timely novel of what it means to be human. Max Glickman is son to an atheist boxer, Jack 'The Jew' Glickman, and a glamorous card-playing mother.

No man has ever loved a woman and not imagined her in the arms of someone else. Felix Quinn calls himself a happy man. But a childhood experience has taught him that loss is intrinsic to love, and Felix realises that he can only be truly happy if his wife is sleeping with another man.

A re-envisaging of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, from the Man Booker Prize-winner and our great chronicler of Jewish life. He writes like a dreamâ?? Evening Standard'The funniest British novelist since Kingsley Amis or Tom Sharpe' Mail on Sunday

Two people fall in love, not yet knowing where they have come from or where they are going. They aren't sure if they have fallen in love of their own accord, or whether they've been pushed into each other's arms. But who would have pushed them, and why?

The Exagoge is a drama on the theme of the Jewish Exodus, written in Greek in the form of a Greek tragedy by a Jew living in Alexandria probably at some time during the second century BC. It survives in 269 lines - not isolated verses but forming several continuous passages - enough to give the shape of the play and to reveal Ezekiel as a tragedian of significance. For the student of Jewish literary history and thought Ezekiel is a most important source, of interest for being one of the earliest examples of Jewish exegesis and paraphrase of the Bible. Professor Jacobson accompanies the text of the play with a translation. In the commentary he examines the fragments line by line, comparing them with the biblical account and other accounts in related Jewish sources. The substantial and readable introduction examines the historical, social and intellectual background to Ezekiel and the Exagoge.

A series of letters purportedly written by Penelope, Dido, Medea, and other heroines to their lovers, the Heroides represents Ovid's initial attempt to revitalize myth as a subject for literature. In this book, Howard Jacobson examines the first fifteen elegaic letters of the Heroides. In his critical evaluation, Professor Jacobson takes into consideration the twofold nature of the work: its existence as a single entity with uniform poetic structure and coherent goals, and its existence as a collection of fifteen individual poems. Thus, fifteen chapters are devoted to a thorough analysis and interpretation of the particular poems, while six additional chapters are concerned with problems that pertain to the work as a whole, such as the nature of the genre, the role of rhetoric, theme, and variation, and the originality of Ovid. Special attention is given to the application of modern psychological criticism to the delineations of the pathological psyche in the letters. In an additional chapter on the chronology of Ovid's early amatory poetry, the author challenges and revises the traditional dating of the Heroides. Originally published in 1974. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

A series of letters purportedly written by Penelope, Dido, Medea, and other heroines to their lovers, the Heroides represents Ovid's initial attempt to revitalize myth as a subject for literature. In this book, Howard Jacobson examines the first fifteen elegaic letters of the Heroides. In his critical evaluation, Professor Jacobson takes into consideration the twofold nature of the work: its existence as a single entity with uniform poetic structure and coherent goals, and its existence as a collection of fifteen individual poems. Thus, fifteen chapters are devoted to a thorough analysis and interpretation of the particular poems, while six additional chapters are concerned with problems that pertain to the work as a whole, such as the nature of the genre, the role of rhetoric, theme, and variation, and the originality of Ovid. Special attention is given to the application of modern psychological criticism to the delineations of the pathological psyche in the letters. In an additional chapter on the chronology of Ovid's early amatory poetry, the author challenges and revises the traditional dating of the Heroides. Originally published in 1974. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Taking the terrorist attacks of 9/11 as their starting point, five new essays look at how Jewish culture has changed over the past two decades. Covering music (Vanessa Paloma Elbaz), art (Monica Bohm Duchen), literature (Bryan Cheyette), theatre (Judi Herman) and film (Nathan Abrams), the essays explore the role of confidence in the cultural output of minority communities, and ask whether the trends identified look set to continue over the coming years.Commissioned to mark the twentieth anniversary of Jewish Renaissance magazine, the book includes a foreword by Howard Jacobson and is interspersed with a selection of the best articles from the magazine’s archive, including pieces by the director Mike Leigh, author Linda Grant and sociologist Keith Kahn-Harris.

______________WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE______________'Full of wit, warmth, intelligence, human feeling and understanding. It is also beautifully written with that sophisticated and near invisible skill of the authentic writer' - Observer'Wonderful ... Jacobson is seriously on form' - Evening Standard______________Julian Treslove, a professionally unspectacular former BBC radio producer, and Sam Finkler, a popular Jewish philosopher, writer and television personality, are old school friends. Despite very different lives, they've never quite lost touch with each other - or with their former teacher, Libor Sevcik. Both Libor and Finkler are recently widowed, and together with Treslove they share a sweetly painful evening revisiting a time before they had loved and lost. It is that very evening, when Treslove hesitates a moment as he walks home, that he is attacked - and his whole sense of who and what he is slowly and ineluctably changes.______________‘How is it possible to read Howard Jacobson and not lose oneself in admiration for the music of his language, the power of his characterisation and the penetration of his insight? ... The Finkler Question is further proof, if any was needed, of Jacobson's mastery of humour' - The Times‘There are few writers who exhibit the same unawed respect for language or such a relentless commitment to re-examining even the most seemingly unobjectionable of received wisdoms' - Daily Telegraph

_______________'[An] acutely observed collection of occasional pieces that pick at absurdist life and reveal him to be a quiz, a cultural critic gifted with precise comic timing' - The Times'Yes, Jacobson is an entertainer ... And he does indeed entertain, but in a way that stimulates rather than simply amuses' - Sunday Telegraph'Nobody does it better than Jacobson' - Observer_______________It takes a particular kind of man to want an embroidered polo player astride his left nipple. Occasionally, when I am tired and emotional, or consumed with self-dislike, I try to imagine myself as someone else, a wearer of Yarmouth shirts and fleecy sweats, of windbreakers and rugged Tyler shorts, of baseball caps with polo players where the section of the brain that concerns itself with aesthetics is supposed to be. But the hour passes. Good men return from fighting Satan in the wilderness the stronger for their struggle, and so do I.The winner of the 2010 Man Booker Prize, Howard Jacobson, brims with life in this collection of his most acclaimed journalism. From the unusual disposal of his father-in-law's ashes and the cultural wasteland of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang to the melancholy sensuality of Leonard Cohen and desolation of Wagner's tragedies, Jacobson writes with all the thunder and joy of a man possessed. Absurdity piles upon absurdity, and glorious sentences weave together to create a hilarious, heartbreaking and uniquely human collection. This book is not just a series of parts, but an irresistible, unputdownable sum which triumphantly out-Thurbers Thurber._______________'The no-nonsense tone, coupled with a coherent defence of truth, even in uncomfortable circumstances, shows the essayist as a natural comedian' - Prospect'Jacobson is one of the great sentence-builders of our time. I feel I have to raise my game, even just to praise ... In short, he is one of the great guardians of language and culture - all of it. Long may he flourish' - Nicholas Lezard, Guardian

_______________'A wildly funny account of his travels ... it actually is a book which makes you laugh out loud on almost every page' - Literary Review'The most successful attempt I know to grip the great dreaming Australian enigma by the throat and make it gargle' - Evening Standard'A marvellous read ... he is a comic explorer in the grandest mould' - Financial Times_______________The Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Finkler Question went Down Under - and this is what he found...On what he calls ‘the adventure of his life', Howard Jacobson travels around Australia, never entirely sure where he is heading next or whether he has the courage to tackle the wild life of the bush, the wild men of the outback, or the even wilder women of the seaboard cities.In pursuit of the best of Australian good times, he joins revelers at Uluru, argues with racists in the Kimberleys, parties with wine-growers in the Barossa and falls for ballet dancers in Perth. And even as vexed questions of national identity and Aboriginal land rights present themselves, his love for Australia and Australians never falters._______________'Entertaining ... this is a book about exotic Australia - the fringes, the deserts, the opal mines, the Aborigines, and the North Queensland rednecks' - Guardian

_______________'Comedy is never as clever as when Howard Jacobson is on a roll and this book finds him barrelling' - Independent on Sunday'Brilliantly composed ... crackling with Jacobson's wit, superb wordplay and boundless exuberance' - Times Literary Supplement'Seriously funny' - Alexei Sayle, Daily Telegraph_______________A sharp, witty novel from the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Finkler QuestionNovelist Guy Ableman is in thrall to his vivacious wife Vanessa, a strikingly beautiful red-head, contrary, highly strung and blazingly angry. The trouble is, he is no less in thrall to her alluring mother, Poppy. More like sisters than mother and daughter, they come as a pair, a blistering presence that destroys Guy's peace of mind, suggesting the wildest stories but making it impossible for him to concentrate long enough to write any of them.Not that anyone reads Guy, anyway. Not that anyone is reading anything. Reading, Guy fears, is finished. His publisher, fearing the same, has committed suicide. His agent, like all agents, is in hiding. Vanessa, in the meantime, is writing a novel of her own. Guy doesn't expect her to finish it, or even start it, but he dreads the consequences if she does.In flight from personal disappointment and universal despair, Guy wonders if it's time to take his love for Poppy to another level. Fiction might be dead, but desire isn't. And out of that desire he imagines squeezing one more great book.By turns angry, elegiac and rude, Zoo Time is a novel about love - love of women, love of literature, love of laughter. It shows our funniest writer at his brilliant best._______________'All the trademark Jacobson qualities - waspish comedy, transgressive sex, wry riffs on Jewishness, prose so scintillating you might miss its underlying artistry - are here in spades *****' - The Mail on Sunday'Once again, Jacobson shows that the true humorist is among the best kinds of novelist. His humour is neither cheap nor chirpy but addresses fundamental mysteries' - Sunday Telegraph

_______________'[An] acutely observed collection of occasional pieces that pick at absurdist life and reveal him to be a quiz, a cultural critic gifted with precise comic timing' - The Times‘The author’s prose is always a delight … a book that manages the high-wire act of being genuinely funny while dispensing genuine wisdom’ - Times Literary Supplement'Jacobson is one of the great sentence-builders of our time. I feel I have to raise my game, even just to praise ... In short, he is one of the great guardians of language and culture - all of it. Long may he flourish' - Nicholas Lezard, Guardian_______________Week after week, for eighteen years, the Booker Prize-winning novelist Howard Jacobson wrote a weekly column for the Independent, reflecting in inimitable style on the sacred and the profane in turn, the frivolous and the serious, the deeply personal and the most universal.The shame and humiliation inherent in death is explored with frank astuteness. Matisse, darts and the power of love are celebrated; while cyclists are very much censured. And meanwhile, a beloved old Labrador walks his last walk as life elsewhere hurtles on and away…The Dog’s Last Walk is a collection of wisdom and iconoclasm for our uncertain times, and one that reveals one of our greatest writers in all his humanity._______________'Sharp and playful, surreal and thoughtful, and occasionally … rather moving' - New Statesman'Yes, Jacobson is an entertainer ... And he does indeed entertain, but in a way that stimulates rather than simply amuses' - Sunday Telegraph'His columns were always one of the best things in [the Independent] – funny, argumentative, contrary and stuffed with ideas as well as a big, sympathetic personality' - Philip Hensher, Spectator