From the award-winning author of God’s Ear: A “wildly funny, achingly spiritual, profoundly Jewish and feminist” satire of religion and gender politics (The New York Times Book Review). Call Me Ishtar is the outrageous manifesto of a goddess determined to right the wrongs of the three-thousand-year-old patriarchy. She is Ishtar: Mother Goddess, Queen of Heaven, Angel of Death, and Whore of Babylon, and, returning to earth in this most recent incarnation, suburban housewife and sexual subversive. Gallivanting through upstate New York, Ishtar breaks into a Hostess factory to taint its products, catapults a rock band to stardom via satanic rituals, and rises from the coffin at her own funeral—all to overthrow the worship of phallic gods and resume her former glory in this “bouncy, tongue-in-cheek mythmash of The White Goddess and The Feminine Mystique” (Kirkus Reviews). “[Lerman’s] is a unique voice—wildly funny, achingly spiritual, profoundly Jewish and feminist at the same time.” —The New York Times Book Review

Ishtar, who was an Iraqi girl, worked in a bar and there she met William, with whom she falls in love. He was an American, amazing and faithful man. They loved each other and their relati onship conti nued very strong. Even though Ishtar was a virgin and naive girl and William was an expert man and has many previous relati onships that did not hinder any one of them. They accepted diff erences of each other including languages, traditi ons, and life style. They always overcome the troubles and reconcile when they had a break up. To prove his love to her and also to ensure her heart William proposed to Ishtar in very romanti c and diff erent way in her birthday but life did not conti nue as they want and as they planned for it. On Tuesday, September 11, 2001 while William was inside one of the towers visiti ng his best friend the att ack on the towers happened..

Phyllis Rose embarks on a grand literary experiment -- to systematically read her way through a random shelf of books in the library, LEQ-LES, "fairly sure that no one in the history of the world has read exactly this series of novels." An original take on literary taste and habits by the acclaimed author of Parallel Lives. Rose, after a career of reading from syllabuses and writing about canonical books, decided to read like an explorer. She "wanted to sample, more democratically, the actual ground of literature." Casting herself into the untracked wilderness of the New York Society Library's stacks, she chose a shelf of fiction almost at random and read her way through it. What results is a spirited experiment in "Off-Road or Extreme Reading." Rose's shelf of roughly thirty books has everything she could wish for—a remarkable variety of authors and a range of literary ambitions and styles. The early-nineteenth-century Russian classic A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov is spine by spine with The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux. Stories of French Canadian farmers sit beside tales about aristocratic Austrians. California detective novels about a novel from an Afrikaans writer who fascinates Rose to the extent that she ends up watching a YouTube video of his funeral. A joyous testament to the thrill of engagement with books high and low, The Shelf leaves us with the feeling that there are treasures to be found on every library or bookstore shelf. Rose investigates her own discoveries with exuberance, candor, and while pondering the many questions her experiment raises and measuring her discoveries against her own inner shelf. “Exhilarating, adventurous, original--Phyllis Rose's The Shelf is a reminder of what reading and writing are all about.” -- Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran

The novel that Gloria Steinem called “the feminist Jekyll-and-Hyde of our time―and we recognize the monster in ourselves while we’re laughing.” Outrageous and outrageously funny, The Girl That He Marries is the story of Stephanie―nearly thirty and still single, a bright and attractive young woman with an unerring instinct for unmarriageable men and a nagging fear she’s going to grow old alone. Enter Richard: urbane, ambitious, and eminently marriageable. The adored son of an adoring mother, Richard has been adroitly manipulating people all his life. He’s especially adroit at the game of love. Before she knows it, Stephanie is hooked on Richard. But before Richard knows it, Stephanie has figured out the rules―and very soon is beating him at his own artful game. In the process, she twists herself into the girl he would marry―and becomes a very different woman. The trouble is, as Stephanie finds out too late, when you play the mating game, you risk getting stuck with the prize. “[A] hilarious romance a la Kafka.” —The New York Times Book Review

“Hilarious . . . Lerman proves herself mistress not only of side-splitting one-liners but also of pregnant perceptions about faith and virtue” (Publishers Weekly). From a novelist whose characters have ranged from ancient deities to suburban housewives to Eleanor Roosevelt, God’s Ear is the story of a rabbi who opens his heart to God, only to have every shnorrer in his congregation fill it with pain. Yussel Fetner’s ancestors had been such rabbis. Yussel, the last of the Fetner line, is not. Yussel turns his back on a thousand years of Fetner destiny, eschewing his family’s twinned piety and poverty to sell life insurance in New York. But the history of a thousand years is not to be thrown away so lightly. On his death, Yussel’s father discovers he will be unable to enter heaven until Yussel repents and enters the faith. The old rabbi will have to dip into a kit bag full of family lore, Hasidic tales, Kabbalistic wisdom, outright lies, and Jewish justifications to tease, trick, and torment his son until he accepts the pain of loving God. “A unique voice—wildly funny, achingly spiritual, profoundly Jewish.” —The New York Times Book Review

Engaging a diverse range of contemporary anglophone literature from authors of the Asian, Middle Eastern and Caribbean diasporas, this book explores how such works turn to spirit forces, spirit realms and spirit beings - were-animals, mystical birds, and snake goddesses - as positive forces that assert perceptual dimensions beyond those of the human, and present a vision of Earth as agentive and animate. With previous scholarship downplaying these aspects of modern works as uncanny hauntings or symptoms of capitalism's or anthropocentrism's destructiveness, or within a blanket rubric of 'magical realism', Hilary Thompson rejects this partitioning of them as products of an exotic East or global South. By contrast, this book builds a new critical framework for analysis of worldly spirits, drawing on anthropological discussions of animism, the newly recovered 1930s boundary-crossing art movement Dimensionism, and multispecies theories of animals' diverse perceptual worlds. Taking stock of novels published from 2018-2020 by such writers as Amitav Ghosh, André Alexis, Yangsze Choo, Azareen Van der Vliet Oloomi, Zeyn Joukhadar, and Tanya Tagaq, Thompson illuminates how these works extend an ecological call to decentre the human and align with multidimensional theories of art and literature to provide ways to read for rather than reduce the extra-human dimensions emerging in contemporary fiction. A refreshing rejection of ecological apocalypticism, this book unsettles typical conceptualizations of both anglophone and Anthropocene literatures by invoking European art theory, philosophy, and non-Western ideas on animism and spirits to put forward perceptions of the extra-human as a form of dealing with the many uncertainties of today's different crises.

Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature, A Checklist, 1700-1974, Volume one of Two, contains an Author Index, Title Index, Series Index, Awards Index, and the Ace and Belmont Doubles Index.