The clepsydra is an ancient water clock and serves as the primary metaphor for this examination of Jewish conceptions of time from antiquity to the present. Just as the flow of water is subject to a number of variables such as temperature and pressure, water clocks mark a time that is shifting and relative. Time is not a uniform phenomenon. It is a social construct made of beliefs, scientific knowledge, and political experiment. It is also a story told by theologians, historians, philosophers, and astrophysicists. Consequently, Clepsydra is a cultural history divided in two parts: narrated time and measured time, recounted time and counted time, absolute time and ordered time. It is through this dialog that Sylvie Anne Goldberg challenges the idea of a unified Judeo-Christian time and asks, "What is Jewish time?" She consults biblical and rabbinic sources and refers to medieval and modern texts to understand the different sorts of consciousness of time found in Judaism. In Jewish time, Goldberg argues, past, present, and future are intertwined and comprise one perpetual narrative.

The deeply personal reflections of a giant of Jewish history. Scholar Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi (1932-2009) possessed a stunning range of erudition in all eras of Jewish history, as well as in world history, classical literature, and European culture. What Yerushalmi also brought to his craft was a brilliant literary style, honed by his own voracious reading from early youth and his formative undergraduate studies. This series of interviews paints a revealing portrait of this giant of history, bringing together exceptional material on Yerushalmi's personal and intellectual journeys that not only attests to the astonishing breakthrough of the issues of Jewish history into "general history," but also offers profound insight into being Jewish in today's world.

"Magellania"--the region around the Strait of Magellan--is the home of Kaw-djer, a mysterious man of Western origin whom the indigenous people consider a demigod. A man whose motto is "Neither God nor master," he has shunned Western civilization and its hypocrisies in order to live peacefully on an island claimed by no one. But when a storm strands a thousand immigrants on his island and they ask him to be the leader of their colony, Kaw-djer must decide whether to help them live and prosper in this foreign land at the end of the world or leave them to their fate.
Jules Verne penned "Magellania" in 1897, following the death of his brother and at a time when his own health was beginning to fail. Originally titled "Land of Fire" and "At the End of the World," "Magellania" was intended to reflect Verne's deeply held religious and political beliefs as well as examine his own mortality.
This first English translation of the original manuscript shows "Magellania "to be a unique, forceful novel that widens the scope of Verne's literary legacy."
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The consistent wit and charm of Francis Poulenc (1899-1963) has often led to an underestimation of its value, yet there is now a growing recognition of his stature to which this biography will add. Admired for his fine songs and relgious works, he is perhaps best known for his humorous, insouciant pieces. From the freshness of his ballet Les Biches, composed for Diaghilev in 1924, to his ambitious 1956 opera, Dialogues des Carmelites, the author discusses Poulenc's work in the context of his homosexuality and against the colourful background of Paris in the first half of the century. His friendships with such key figures of the time as Jean Cocteau, Igor Stravinksy and Darius Milhaud were complex, but always artistically enriching. For 25 years he toured as an accompanist to the great French baritone, Pierre Barnac, for whom he wrote many of his works, and also performed as piano soloist in some of his own compositions.

Canvas, Zagajewski's second book to appear in English, features all of this poet's distinctive traits. In these sixty-one poems, syntax explodes, masses of detail spill from profuse catalogs, lines break in ways apt but unexpected, and compressed lyrics alternate with extended riffs. European culture is the poet's native province throughout these explorations, and time is a recurrent metaphysical concern.

Translated from the French by Benjamin Ivry, Simone Weil was one of the twentieth century's most original philosopher-critics, and as a result her legacy has been claimed by many. This memoir by Weil's niece is strong-willed and incisive and as close as we are likely to get to the real Simone Weil. Born into a freethinking Jewish family, Weil contributed many articles to Socialist and Communist journals and was active in the Spanish Civil War until her health failed.  In 1940 she became strongly attracted to Roman Catholicism and the Passion of Christ. Most of her works, published posthumously, continue to inform debates in ethics, philosophy, and spirituality surrounding questions of sacrifice, asceticism, and the virtues of manual labor. Massively influential, Weil's writings were widely praised by such readers as Albert Camus, T. S. Eliot, Simone de Beauvoir, Pope John XXIII, Czeslaw Milosz, and Susan Sontag. Sylvie Weil recovers the deeply Jewish nature of Simone's thinking and details how her preoccupations with charity and justice were fully in the tradition of tzedakah, the Jewish religious obligation toward these actions.Using previously unpublished family correspondence and conversations, Sylvie Weil offers a more authentically personal portrait of her aunt than previous biographers have provided. At Home with AndrÉ and Simone Weil illuminates Simone's relationship to her family, especially to her brother, the great Princeton mathematician AndrÉ Weil. A clear-eyed and uncompromising memoir of her family, At Home with AndrÉ and Simone Weil is a fresh look at the noted French philosopher,mystic, and social activist.