Puddingstone goes to the heart of Boston's "savage geography" in the last half of the Twentieth Century. Mark Jay Mirsky, whose Blue Hill Avenue was praised by The Boston Globe as "one of the 100 essential books about New England," has concocted a hot pudding out of the simmering racial and ethnic animosities in the city. Centered in the districts around its historic Franklin Park, Jews, Irish, African Americans, Yankee bankers, and the last of its native Ponkapoag Indians, join in a gener...

A Mother's Steps: A Meditation on Silence is the novelist Mark Jay Mirsky's attempt to understand the life of a mother who was reluctant to tell him any details about her family or herself. Concealing much of her strong affection for her son, she began to reveal it after learning that she was dangerously ill. The book tries to un-riddle the silence that Ruth S. Mirsky drew over her childhood, adolescence and the first years of her marriage. She remained a mystery to her son after her death...

The Jews of Pinsk is the most detailed and comprehensive history of a single Jewish community in any language. This second portion of this study focuses on Pinsk's turbulent final sixty years, showing the reality of life in this important, and in many ways representative, Eastern European Jewish community. From the 1905 Russian revolution through World War One and the long prologue to the Holocaust, the sweep of world history and the fate of this dynamic center of Jewish life were...

The Drama in Shakespeare's Sonnets: "A Satire to Decay" is a work of detective scholarship. Unable to believe that England's great dramatist would publish a sequence of sonnets without a plot, Mark Jay Mirsky, novelist, playwright, and professor of English, proposes a solution to a riddle that has frustrated scholars and poets alike. Arguing that the Sonnets are not just a "higgledy piggledy" collection of poems but were put in order by Shakespeare himself, and drawing on the insights of s...

Obedience Brings Blessing!God wants to bless His people. Don’t let yourself be concerned about what other people are doing. Concern yourself with what you are doing for God. You must reach the point that you are willing to put your own desires aside and do what God wants you to do. Then you will find yourself in the place for God to give you His peace, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.PrayThe devil can’t defeat a person who prays. The storms may come, but he will jus...

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE WINNER • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • An extraordinary look at privilege, discrimination, and the fallacy of post-racial America by the renowned Pulitzer Prize–winning cultural criticJefferson takes us into an insular and discerning society: “I call it Negroland,” she writes, “because I still find ‘Negro’ a word of wonders, glorious and terrible.”Margo Jefferson was born in 1947 into upper-crust black Chicago. Her father was head of pe...

A father; a husband; a lover; a friend; a rabbi. This is the story about the making of a modern rabbi, his coming of age, and how he finds his place in in a confused and confusing world.Michael Kind is raised in the Jewish cauldron of 1920s New York, familiar with the stresses and materialism of metropolitan life. Turning to the ancient set of ethics of his Orthodox grandfather, with a modern twist, he becomes a Reform rabbi. As insecure and sexually needy...

A collection of early personal and political essays from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Color Purple.Includes a new letter written by the authorWhat is a womanist? Alice Walker sets out to define the concept in this anthology of early essays and other nonfiction pieces. As she outlines it, a womanist is a person who prefers to side with the oppressed: with women, with people of color, with the poor. As a writer, Walker has...

Three New York Times bestsellers chronicle the rise of America's most influential Jewish families as they transition from poor immigrants to household names.In his acclaimed trilogy, author Stephen Birmingham paints an engrossing portrait of Jewish American life from the colonial era through the twentieth century with fascinating narrative and meticulous research.The collection's best-known book, "Our Crowd" follows nineteenth-century Germa...

Ishmael Reed's inspired fable of the ragtime era, in which a social movement threatens to suppress the spread of black culture—hailed by Harold Bloom as one of the five hundred greatest books of the Western canonIn 1920s America, a plague is spreading fast. From New Orleans to Chicago to New York, the "Jes Grew" epidemic makes people desperate to dance, overturning social norms in the process. Anyone is vulnerable and when they catch it, they'll bump and grind into ...

An inspiring account of America at its worst-and Americans at their best-woven from the stories of Depression-era families who were helped by gifts from the author's generous and secretive grandfather.Shortly before Christmas 1933 in Depression-scarred Canton, Ohio, a small newspaper ad offered $10, no strings attached, to 75 families in distress. Interested readers were asked to submit letters describing their hardships to a benefactor calling himself Mr. B. Virdo...

When pain is real, why is God silent?Frederick Buechner has grappled with the nature of pain, grief, and grace ever since his father committed suicide when Buechner was a young boy. He continued that search as a father when his daughter struggled with anorexia. In this essential collection of essays, including one never before published, Frederick Buechner finds that the God who might seem so silent is ever near. He writes about what it means to be a steward of our pain, and about ...