When fast-breaking political events forced British novelist Jacobson (Peeping Tom) to put off a trip to Lithuania planned as a search for his Jewish roots, he accepted an offer from the BBC to visit Jewish communities around the globe instead. This informed and witty account of his experiences deals with the wide variety of contemporary Jewish life, as well as with how Jacobson's observations affected his own concept of what it means to be a Jew. Riding an emotional roller coaster, he witnessed the hostility between Jews and African Americans in New York City, attended services in a gay synagogue in California and found his basic cynicism about religion reinforced after he spent time with Orthodox Jews in Israel, although his spirits were lifted by a visit to an idealistic, tolerant Israeli kibbutz. His journey concluded with the postponed trip to Lithuania, where the author found virulent anti-Semitism.

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.

Sharing a long-time best friendship with a married sex addict, Charlie, a mild-mannered children's book author and faithful husband, tentatively asks his friend to introduce him to a more exciting life and triggers a profound sequence of events. By the Booker Prize-winning author of The Finkler Question. Original. 15,000 first printing.

Up-close and personal views, by the renowned music critic and orchestra administrator, of musical luminaries from Alfred Brendel to Jessye Norman and beyond. Star Turns and Cameo Appearances is the entertaining and insightful memoir by veteran music critic Bernard Jacobson. Its pages are populated by eminent composers ranging from Hans Werner Henze to Andrzej Panufnik and by renowned performers, including Georg Solti, Daniel Barenboim, Sviatoslav Richter, and Jessye Norman. As a music critic and orchestra administrator, Jacobson has had the opportunity to observe these outstanding musicians andmany of their colleagues at close quarters. Assisting Riccardo Muti at the Philadelphia Orchestra for eight years, he saw sides of that maestro not visible to the music-loving public. Throughout Star Turns and Cameo Performances, Jacobson adds his own sensitive and sympathetic view to public perceptions of musical luminaries of yesterday and today, helping to explain and illuminate their artistry. Bernard Jacobson has worked in the music field for over fifty years, including stints as recording executive, music critic of the Chicago Daily News, artistic director and adviser for international orchestras in Holland, and visiting professor at Roosevelt University's Chicago Musical College. He has also performed and recorded as narrator of concert works and opera.

British-Jewish writers are increasingly addressing challenging questions about what it means to be both British and Jewish in the twenty-first century. Writing Jewish provides a lively and accessible introduction to the key issues in contemporary British-Jewish fiction, memoirs and journalism, and explores how Jewishness exists alongside a range of other different identities in Britain today. By interrogating myths and stereotypes and looking at themes of remembering and forgetting, belonging and alienation, location and dislocation, Ruth Gilbert examines how these writers identify the particularity of their difference – while acknowledging that this difference is neither fixed nor final, but always open to re-interpretation.

Reading is over. Writing is finished. Publishing is dead. Embittered author Guy Ableman knows this, as does his desperate editor; as does the sad whole of doomed literary London. But Guy is dedicated to his dying art, and continues to write for an audience that doesn't exist, loathed by the few readers he does have - feminists who charge him with misogyny, mothers who accuse him of hating children. His vivacious wife Vanessa, a strikingly beautiful red-head, contrary, highly strung and often blazingly angry, is another source of pain, as is her alluring mother Poppy. More like sisters than mother and daughter, they come as a pair, a blistering presence. And Guy is, from the off, as captivated by his mother-in-law as he is by his wife... Against a backdrop of disappointment, failure and loss, in a world in which food and fashion have long since trampled fiction into the ground, Guy is consumed with the temptation of an illicit affair. It distorts every thought in his head, and becomes his next great novel. Fantasy blurs with reality in this furious, hilarious novel about love, loss, mothers and daughters. Frank, poignant and moving, Zoo Time is our funniest writer at his brilliant best.