American writer Steve Katz published his first book, The Lestriad, in 1962. Subsequent novels and collections have continue to appear from such imprints as Holt, Rinehart and Winston; Random House; Alfred A. Knopf; Ithaca House; and Sun & Moon. According to critic Jerome Klinkowitz, Katz has "pushed innovation farther than any of his contemporaries." W. C. Bamberger regards him as "the most important living American novelist." This first extended guide to the author's fiction includes a bibliography, detailed index, notes, and 200 pages of illuminating commentary. W. C. Bamberger is the author of ten books and dozens of published critical essays on the major writers of our time, including the volumes, William Eastlake: High Desert Interlocutor and The Work of William Eastlake: An Annotated Bibliography and Guide (both available from Borgo Press). He lives and works in Michigan.

This new collection of literary essays includes pieces on the fiction of Joe Brainard, Guy Davenport, Alice Hoffman, Kenneth Koch, Ann Lauterbach, Ishmael Reed, and Samuel R. Delany, among many others. Bamberger also adds an unpublished diary of his 2007 trip to Manhattan, Long Island, and Philadephia, detailing the many literary and artistic figures he met along the way. Another remarkable journey by a major modern critic.

The mysterious medium known only as Methuselah Kzradock is conducting a series of horrific seances in Paris, under the treatment of Dr. Renard de Montpensier. But Montpensier begins to doubt the ravings of Kzradock--and their possible meaning--as he delves further into the borderline between reality and madness. An early twentieth-century mystery novel, translated for the first time into English.

This book argues that mystical doctrines and practices initiate parallel transformative processes in the consciousness of mystics. This thesis is supported through a comparative analysis of Tibetan Buddhist Dzogchen (rdzogs-chen) and the medieval German mysticism of Eckhart, Suso, and Tauler. These traditions are interpreted using a system/cybernetic model of consciousness. This model provides a theoretical framework for assessing the cognitive effects of mystical doctrines and practices and showing how different doctrines and practices may nevertheless initiate common transformative processes. This systems approach contributes to current philosophical discourse on mysticism by (1) making possible a precise analysis of the cognitive effects of mystical doctrines and practices, and (2) reconciling mystical heterogeneity with the essential unity of mystical traditions.

This volume advances scholarly understanding of the ways in which discourse deixis underpins the workings of metafictional novels. Building on existing scholarship in the field, the book begins by mapping out key themes and techniques in metafiction and puts forward a focused and theoretically coherent account of discourse deixis—language which points to a section or aspect of the discourse context in which that language is used—in written literary discourse, highlighting its inherent significance in metafiction specifically. Macrae takes readers through an exploration of discourse deixis as used within the techniques of metanarration, metalepsis, and disnarration, drawing on a mix of both well-established and lesser-known metafictional novels from the late 1960s and early 1970s by such authors as John Barth, Brigid Brophy, Robert Coover, John Fowles, Steve Katz, and B.S. Johnson. This comprehensive account integrates and develops a new approach to understanding discourse deixis and innovative insights into metafictionality more broadly and will be of particular interest to scholars in literary studies, postmodern literature, narratology, and stylistics.

This major new collection of Bamberger's literary essays focuses on the process of trying to understand difficult new works and concepts, and of coming to grips with something new, mysterious, or simply "the other."

Sin, often defined as a violation of divine will, remains a crucial idea in contemporary moral and religious discourse. However, the apparent familiarity of the concept obscures its origins within the history of Western religious thought. Joseph Lam examines a watershed moment in the development of sin as an idea-namely, within the language and culture of ancient Israel-by examining the primary metaphors used for sin in the Hebrew Bible. Drawing from contemporary theoretical insights coming out of linguistics and philosophy of language, this book identifies four patterns of metaphor that pervade the biblical texts: sin as burden, sin as an account, sin as path or direction, and sin as stain or impurity. In exploring the permutations of these metaphors and their development within the biblical corpus, Patterns of Sin in the Hebrew Bible offers a compelling account of how a religious and theological concept emerges out of the everyday thought-world of ancient Israel, while breaking new ground in its approach to metaphor in ancient texts. Far from being a timeless, stable concept, sin becomes intelligible only when situated in the matrix of ancient Israelite culture. In other words, sin is not as simple as it might seem.