The Silent Echo examines the texts and subtexts of a number of English and American contemporary women's novels dealing with middle age. These novels of midlife chart the brief development of a female protagonist in early or late middle age as she achieves some measure of emotional and physical contentment or wisdom. Author Helen Paloge clearly shows that, in fact, these novels, which claim to confront in narrative terms the gender-bound implications of aging, generally reveal an unconscious denial of the truth of aging's significance for women, a consistent dishonesty on this score, and an ultimate refusal to confront the issues they claim to examine. The Silent Echo explores fiction by such authors as Margaret Atwood, Joan Barfoot, Fay Weldon, and Joyce Carol Oates, in search of the middle-aged woman's body and its decline unto death. If the quest for happiness or meaning in most of these novels proves successful, it is despite, rather than because of, the middle-aged body. The aging female body might present no hindrance to happiness, but it must be acknowledged and engaged.

A challenge, a mission, a hope for a better life for all in an embattled country. This was the author's vision in The Other's Other. The challenge turned out to be greater and different than imagined; the mission more exasperating; the hope, more complicated. The book offers a new perspective on the problematic encounter between Jewish and Arab Israelis through the experience of a Jewish lecturer at an Arab college in an Arab city in Israel. The author's unique insights into Arab Israeli culture gleaned from conversations with staff and students, students' work, and everyday contact offer a window on the often conflicting feelings; the ambiguities, ambivalent identities, and layers of reality; the questions, doubts and dilemmas that mark the struggle of Arabs and Jews living in one country. It is also a meditation on the rewards and difficulties of discovering and accepting the other - and oneself as the other's other. Of coexistence.