A tragicomic portrait of one man's unravelling in an absurd, twisted world, Howl is the propulsive new novel from Booker-Prize winner Howard Jacobson.

In the aftermath of October 7, Ferdinand Draxler walks the streets of London in despair. Everything has changed – the sights, the sound, the spirit. He too is not who he was. Is he at the crossroads of history or is it just a bend in the cul-de-sac of his own gloomy nature?

The son of a Holocaust survivor who accuses him of cowardice and the father of a daughter who sees him as complicit in genocide, Draxler fixates on bad news. He shouts at the television. He carries his own tin of paint to cover up graffiti. The staffroom at the primary school of which he is headmaster has become a battlefield of inflamed opinion he does nothing to quiet.

His wife Charmian is a beacon of calm but even she isn't sure she can save Ferdie from himself. 'Don't worry about me,' he tells her. 'I don't have what it takes to go mad.'

Julian Treslove, a professionally unspectacular former BBC radio producer, and Sam Finkler, a popular Jewish philosopher, writer and television personality, are old school friends. Despite a prickly relationship and very different lives, they’ve never quite lost touch with each other – or with their former teacher, Libor Sevcik, a Czech always more concerned with the wider world than with exam results.

Now, both Libor and Finkler are recently widowed, and with Treslove, his chequered and unsuccessful record with women rendering him an honorary third widower, they dine at Libor’s grand, central London apartment.

It’s a sweetly painful evening of reminiscence in which all three remove themselves to a time before they had loved and lost; a time before they had fathered children, before the devastation of separations, before they had prized anything greatly enough to fear the loss of it. Better, perhaps, to go through life without knowing happiness at all because that way you have less to mourn? Treslove finds he has tears enough for the unbearable sadness of both his friends’ losses.

And it’s that very evening, at exactly 11:30 pm, as Treslove, walking home, hesitates a moment outside the window of the oldest violin dealer in the country, that he is attacked. And after this, his whole sense of who and what he is, will slowly and ineluctably change.

The Finkler Question has been awarded the Man Booker Prize for Fiction 2010.

'A wonderful memoir, written with great linguistic brio. Candid, shrewd and moving - a classic of its kind,' William Boyd Howard Jacobson's funny, revealing and tender memoir of his path to becoming a writer. It's my theory that only the unhappy, the uncomfortable, the gauche, the badly put together, aspire to make art. Why would you seek to reshape the world unless you were ill-at-ease in it? And I came out of the womb in every sense the wrong way round. In Mother's Boy, Booker-Prize winner Howard Jacobson reveals how he became a writer. It is an exploration of belonging and not-belonging, of being an insider and outsider, both English and Jewish. Born to a working-class family in 1940s Manchester, the great-grandson of Lithuanian and Russian immigrants, Jacobson was raised by his mother, grandmother and aunt Joyce. His father was a regimental tailor, as well as an upholsterer, a market-stall holder, a taxi driver, a balloonist, and a magician. Grappling always with his family's history and his Jewish identity, Jacobson takes us from the growing pains of childhood to studying at Cambridge under F.R. Leavis, and landing in Sydney as a maverick young professor on campus, through to his first marriage, the birth of his son and beyond. Full of Jacobson's trademark humour and infused with bittersweet memories of his parents, this is the story of a writer's beginnings. 'Laugh-out-loud glorious and uproarious of course - but don't let the self-ribbing fool you; this is deep and poignant,' Simon Schama

Taking the terrorist attacks of 9/11 as their starting point, five new essays look at how Jewish culture has changed over the past two decades. Covering music (Vanessa Paloma Elbaz), art (Monica Bohm Duchen), literature (Bryan Cheyette), theatre (Judi Herman) and film (Nathan Abrams), the essays explore the role of confidence in the cultural output of minority communities, and ask whether the trends identified look set to continue over the coming years. Commissioned to mark the twentieth anniversary of Jewish Renaissance magazine, the book includes a foreword by Howard Jacobson and is interspersed with a selection of the best articles from the magazine's archive, including pieces by the director Mike Leigh, author Linda Grant and sociologist Keith Kahn-Harris.

**AS SEEN ON BBC TWO's BETWEEN THE COVERS** Discover Joseph Heller's hilarious and tragic satire on military madness, and the tale of one man's efforts to survive it. It's the closing months of World War II and Yossarian has never been closer to death. Stationed in an American bomber squadron off the coast of Italy, each flight mission introduces him to thousands of people determined to kill him. But the enemy above is not Yossarian's problem - it is his own army intent on keeping him airborne, and the maddening 'Catch-22' that allows for no possibility of escape. 'The greatest satirical work in the English language' Observer

Rose Wylie RA (b.1934) trained as an artist in the 1950s, but it was her re-engagement with painting in the early 1980s, after a period spent raising a family, that marked the beginning of a remarkable career that continues to evolve and impress. This monograph, the first of its kind, follows Wylie's fascinating artistic journey celebrating her achievements while also examining her current practice. Rose Wylie's large-scale paintings are inspired by a wide range of visual culture. Her subject matter ranges from contemporary Egyptian Hajj wall paintings and Persian miniatures to films, news stories, celebrity gossip and her observation of daily life. Often working from memory, she distills her subjects into succinct observations, using text to give additional emphasis to her recollections. In weaving together imagery from different sources with personal elements, Wylie's paintings offer a direct and wry commentary on contemporary culture. Her pictures refuse judgment but reveal a concern with the everyday that makes visible its enigmatic core. Drawing on a series of extended interviews with the artist, Clarrie Wallis unpicks the complexities of Wylie's visual language so providing an important contribution to our understanding, and appreciation of, a significant, and increasingly celebrated, figure in contemporary British art.

_______________ 'Comedy is never as clever as when Howard Jacobson is on a roll and this book finds him barrelling' - Independent on Sunday 'Brilliantly composed ... crackling with Jacobson's wit, superb wordplay and boundless exuberance' - Times Literary Supplement 'Seriously funny' - Alexei Sayle, Daily Telegraph _______________ A sharp, witty novel from the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Finkler Question Novelist Guy Ableman is in thrall to his vivacious wife Vanessa, a strikingly beautiful red-head, contrary, highly strung and blazingly angry. The trouble is, he is no less in thrall to her alluring mother, Poppy. More like sisters than mother and daughter, they come as a pair, a blistering presence that destroys Guy's peace of mind, suggesting the wildest stories but making it impossible for him to concentrate long enough to write any of them. Not that anyone reads Guy, anyway. Not that anyone is reading anything. Reading, Guy fears, is finished. His publisher, fearing the same, has committed suicide. His agent, like all agents, is in hiding. Vanessa, in the meantime, is writing a novel of her own. Guy doesn't expect her to finish it, or even start it, but he dreads the consequences if she does. In flight from personal disappointment and universal despair, Guy wonders if it's time to take his love for Poppy to another level. Fiction might be dead, but desire isn't. And out of that desire he imagines squeezing one more great book. By turns angry, elegiac and rude, Zoo Time is a novel about love - love of women, love of literature, love of laughter. It shows our funniest writer at his brilliant best. _______________ 'All the trademark Jacobson qualities - waspish comedy, transgressive sex, wry riffs on Jewishness, prose so scintillating you might miss its underlying artistry - are here in spades *****' - The Mail on Sunday 'Once again, Jacobson shows that the true humorist is among the best kinds of novelist. His humour is neither cheap nor chirpy but addresses fundamental mysteries' - Sunday Telegraph

The Exagoge is a drama on the theme of the Jewish Exodus, written in Greek in the form of a Greek tragedy by a Jew living in Alexandria probably at some time during the second century BC. It survives in 269 lines - not isolated verses but forming several continuous passages - enough to give the shape of the play and to reveal Ezekiel as a tragedian of significance. For the student of Jewish literary history and thought Ezekiel is a most important source, of interest for being one of the earliest examples of Jewish exegesis and paraphrase of the Bible. Professor Jacobson accompanies the text of the play with a translation. In the commentary he examines the fragments line by line, comparing them with the biblical account and other accounts in related Jewish sources. The substantial and readable introduction examines the historical, social and intellectual background to Ezekiel and the Exagoge.

_______________ '[An] acutely observed collection of occasional pieces that pick at absurdist life and reveal him to be a quiz, a cultural critic gifted with precise comic timing' - The Times 'Yes, Jacobson is an entertainer ... And he does indeed entertain, but in a way that stimulates rather than simply amuses' - Sunday Telegraph 'Nobody does it better than Jacobson' - Observer _______________ 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. _______________ 'The no-nonsense tone, coupled with a coherent defence of truth, even in uncomfortable circumstances, shows the essayist as a natural comedian' - Prospect 'Jacobson is one of the great sentence-builders of our time. I feel I have to raise my game, even just to praise ... In short, he is one of the great guardians of language and culture - all of it. Long may he flourish' - Nicholas Lezard, Guardian

A wickedly observed novel about falling in love at the end of your life, by the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Finkler Question. *SHORTLISTED FOR THE WINGATE LITERARY PRIZE 2020* At the age of ninety-something, Beryl Dusinbery is forgetting everything - including her own children. She spends her days stitching morbid samplers and tormenting her two long-suffering carers, Nastya and Euphoria, with tangled stories of her husbands and love affairs. Shimi Carmelli can do up his own buttons, walks without the aid of a frame and speaks without spitting. Among the widows of North London, he's whispered about as the last of the eligible bachelors. Unlike Beryl, he forgets nothing - especially not the shame of a childhood incident that has hung over him like an oppressive cloud ever since. There's very little life remaining for either of them, but perhaps just enough to heal some of the hurt inflicted along the way, and find new meaning in what's left. Told with Jacobson's trademark wit and style, Live a Little is in equal parts funny, irreverent and tender - a novel to make you consider all the paths not taken, and whether you could still change course.

**AS SEEN ON CHANNEL 4**

Discover Joseph Heller's hilarious and tragic satire on military madness, and the tale of one man's efforts to survive it.

It’s the closing months of World War II and Yossarian has never been closer to death. Stationed in an American bomber squadron off the coast of Italy, each flight mission introduces him to thousands of people determined to kill him.

But the enemy above is not Yossarian’s problem – it is his own army intent on keeping him airborne, and the maddening ‘Catch-22’ that allows for no possibility of escape.

‘The greatest satirical work in the English language’ Observer

A series of letters purportedly written by Penelope, Dido, Medea, and other heroines to their lovers, the Heroides represents Ovid's initial attempt to revitalize myth as a subject for literature. In this book, Howard Jacobson examines the first fifteen elegaic letters of the Heroides. In his critical evaluation, Professor Jacobson takes into consideration the twofold nature of the work: its existence as a single entity with uniform poetic structure and coherent goals, and its existence as a collection of fifteen individual poems. Thus, fifteen chapters are devoted to a thorough analysis and interpretation of the particular poems, while six additional chapters are concerned with problems that pertain to the work as a whole, such as the nature of the genre, the role of rhetoric, theme, and variation, and the originality of Ovid. Special attention is given to the application of modern psychological criticism to the delineations of the pathological psyche in the letters. In an additional chapter on the chronology of Ovid's early amatory poetry, the author challenges and revises the traditional dating of the Heroides. Originally published in 1974. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

"New York Times" Bestseller
What happens when you eat an apple? The answer is vastly more complex than you imagine.
Every apple contains thousands of antioxidants whose names, beyond a few like vitamin C, are unfamiliar to us, and each of these powerful chemicals has the potential to play an important role in supporting our health. They impact thousands upon thousands of metabolic reactions inside the human body. But calculating the specific influence of each of these chemicals isn't nearly sufficient to explain the effect of the apple as a whole. Because almost every chemical can affect every other chemical, there is an almost infinite number of possible biological consequences.
And that's just from an apple.
Nutritional science, long stuck in a reductionist mindset, is at the cusp of a revolution. The traditional "gold standard" of nutrition research has been to study one chemical at a time in an attempt to determine its particular impact on the human body. These sorts of studies are helpful to food companies trying to prove there is a chemical in milk or pre-packaged dinners that is "good" for us, but they provide little insight into the complexity of what actually happens in our bodies or how those chemicals contribute to our health.
In "The China Study," T. Colin Campbell (alongside his son, Thomas M. Campbell) revolutionized the way we think about our food with the evidence that a whole food, plant-based diet is the healthiest way to eat. Now, in "Whole," he explains the science behind that evidence, the ways our current scientific paradigm ignores the fascinating complexity of the human body, and why, if we have such overwhelming evidence that everything we think we know about nutrition is wrong, our eating habits haven't changed.
"Whole" is an eye-opening, paradigm-changing journey through cutting-edge thinking on nutrition, a scientific tour de force with powerful implications for our health and for our world.

New York Times Bestseller What happens when you eat an apple? The answer is vastly more complex than you imagine. Every apple contains thousands of antioxidants whose names, beyond a few like vitamin C, are unfamiliar to us, and each of these powerful chemicals has the potential to play an important role in supporting our health. They impact thousands upon thousands of metabolic reactions inside the human body. But calculating the specific influence of each of these chemicals isn't nearly sufficient to explain the effect of the apple as a whole. Because almost every chemical can affect every other chemical, there is an almost infinite number of possible biological consequences. And that's just from an apple. Nutritional science, long stuck in a reductionist mindset, is at the cusp of a revolution. The traditional "gold standard" of nutrition research has been to study one chemical at a time in an attempt to determine its particular impact on the human body. These sorts of studies are helpful to food companies trying to prove there is a chemical in milk or pre-packaged dinners that is "good" for us, but they provide little insight into the complexity of what actually happens in our bodies or how those chemicals contribute to our health. In The China Study, T. Colin Campbell (alongside his son, Thomas M. Campbell) revolutionized the way we think about our food with the evidence that a whole food, plant-based diet is the healthiest way to eat. Now, in Whole, he explains the science behind that evidence, the ways our current scientific paradigm ignores the fascinating complexity of the human body, and why, if we have such overwhelming evidence that everything we think we know about nutrition is wrong, our eating habits haven't changed. Whole is an eye-opening, paradigm-changing journey through cutting-edge thinking on nutrition, a scientific tour de force with powerful implications for our health and for our world.

An original homage to love in later life and a provocative look at infidelity, desire, and what is left when we strip away every layer Lily Redfern falls in love with Sam Quaid the minute she sets eyes on him. It takes Sam Quaid a day or two longer to fall in love with her - but then he already has a wife. Lily is an award-winning television documentary maker. Sam is an award-winning playwright. It is to plan a TV programme that they meet, and it is while shooting the film that their affair begins. She is bolder than he imagined, he more passive. This dynamic sets the seal on their passion. They are a marvel to each other and have eyes, ears and thoughts for no one and nothing else. The outside world fades clean away. Together they seek an immortality that only a love beyond all reason can confer. But what will happen to them when familiarity, illness and age begin to take their toll? What will survive? Until it's poignant close, the author takes us to the edge of desire, love and betrayal in his examination of what is left of us when we strip away every layer.

An acclaimed surgeon specializing in weight loss delivers a paradigm-shifting examination of the diet and health industry's focus on protein, explaining why it is detrimental to our health, and can prevent us from losing weight. Whether you are seeing a doctor, nutritionist, or a trainer, all of them advise to eat more protein. Foods, drinks, and supplements are loaded with extra protein. Many people use protein for weight control, to gain or lose pounds, while others believe it gives them more energy and is essential for a longer, healthier life. Now, Dr. Garth Davis, an expert in weight loss asks, "Is all this protein making us healthier?" The answer, he emphatically argues, is NO. Too much protein is actually making us sick, fat, and tired, according to Dr. Davis. If you are getting adequate calories in your diet, there is no such thing as protein deficiency. The healthiest countries in the world eat far less protein than we do and yet we have an entire nation on a protein binge getting sicker by the day. As a surgeon treating obese patients, Dr. Davis was frustrated by the ever-increasing number of sick and overweight patients, but it wasn't until his own health scare that he realized he could do something about it. Combining cutting-edge research, with his hands-on patient experience and his years dedicated to analyzing studies of the world's longest-lived populations, this explosive, groundbreaking book reveals the truth about the dangers of protein and shares a proven approach to weight loss, health, and longevity.

A series of letters purportedly written by Penelope, Dido, Medea, and other heroines to their lovers, the Heroides represents Ovid's initial attempt to revitalize myth as a subject for literature. In this book, Howard Jacobson examines the first fifteen elegaic letters of the Heroides. In his critical evaluation, Professor Jacobson takes into consideration the twofold nature of the work: its existence as a single entity with uniform poetic structure and coherent goals, and its existence as a collection of fifteen individual poems. Thus, fifteen chapters are devoted to a thorough analysis and interpretation of the particular poems, while six additional chapters are concerned with problems that pertain to the work as a whole, such as the nature of the genre, the role of rhetoric, theme, and variation, and the originality of Ovid. Special attention is given to the application of modern psychological criticism to the delineations of the pathological psyche in the letters. In an additional chapter on the chronology of Ovid's early amatory poetry, the author challenges and revises the traditional dating of the Heroides. Originally published in 1974. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Novelist Guy Ableman is in thrall to his vivacious wife Vanessa, a strikingly beautiful red-head, contrary, highly strung and blazingly angry. The trouble is, he is no less in thrall to her alluring mother, Poppy. More like sisters than mother and daughter, they come as a pair, a blistering presence that destroys Guy's peace of mind, suggesting the wildest stories but making it impossible for him to concentrate long enough to write any of them. Not that anyone reads Guy, anyway. Not that anyone is reading anything. Reading, Guy fears, is finished. His publisher, fearing the same, has committed suicide. His agent, like all agents, is in hiding. Vanessa, in the meantime, is writing a novel of her own. Guy doesn't expect her to finish it, or even start it, but he dreads the consequences if she does. In flight from personal disappointment and universal despair, Guy wonders if it's time to take his love for Poppy to another level. Fiction might be dead, but desire isn't. And out of that desire he imagines squeezing one more great book. By turns angry, elegiac and rude, Zoo Time is a novel about love - love of women, love of literature, love of laughter. It shows our funniest writer at his brilliant best.

Frank Ritz is a television critic. His partner, Melissa Paul, is the author of pornographic novels for liberated women. He watches crap all day; she writes crap all day. It's a life. Or it was a life. But now they're fighting, locked in oral combat. He won't shut up and she is putting her finger down her throat again. So there's only one thing for it - Frank has to go. But go where? And do what? Frank Ritz has been on heat more or less continuously since he could speak his own name. Let him out of the house and his first instinct is to go looking for sex. Deviant sex, treacherous sex, even straight sex, so long as it's immoderate - he's never been choosy. But what happens when sex is all you know but no longer what you want?

A re-envisaging of Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, from the Man Booker Prize-winner and our great chronicler of Jewish life. 'Who is this guy, Dad? What is he doing here?' With an absent wife and a daughter going off the rails, wealthy art collector and philanthropist Simon Strulovitch is in need of someone to talk to. So when he meets Shylock at a cemetery in Cheshire's Golden Triangle, he invites him back to his house. It's the beginning of a remarkable friendship ... 'Jacobson is quite simply a master of comic precision. He writes like a dream' Evening Standard 'The funniest British novelist since Kingsley Amis or Tom Sharpe' Mail on Sunday

A thought-provoking prescient novel from the Booker-prize winning author of The Finkler Question. 'Remarkable...May well come to be seen as the dystopian British novel of its times' Guardian Two people fall in love, not yet knowing where they have come from or where they are going. They aren't sure if they have fallen in love of their own accord, or whether they've been pushed into each other's arms. But who would have pushed them, and why? Hanging over their lives is a momentous catastrophe - a past event shrouded in suspicion, denial and apology, now referred to as What Happened, If It Happened. Set in the future - a world where the past is a dangerous country, not to be talked about or visited - J is a love story of incomparable strangeness, both tender and terrifying. Shortlisted for the 2014 Man Booker Prize, the 2014 Goldsmiths Prize and Longlisted for the JQ Wingate Literary Prize.

A beautiful hardback edition of one of the most subversive novels ever written - reading Catch-22 is a rite of passage. Set in the closing months of World War II, this is the story of a bombardier named Yossarian who is frantic and furious because thousands of people he has never met are trying to kill him. His real problem is not the enemy - it is his own army which keeps increasing the number of missions the men must fly to complete their service. If Yossarian makes any attempts to excuse himself from the perilous missions then he is caught in Catch-22: if he flies he is crazy, and doesn't have to; but if he doesn't want to he must be sane and has to. That's some catch... 'The greatest satirical work in the English language' Observer 'Wildly original, brutally gruesome, a dazzling performance...it will not be forgotten' New York Times VINTAGE QUARTERBOUND CLASSICS: Beautiful editions of great books to last a lifetime

'What beauties the book contains! There are many pages in it so saturated with warm and lovely intimacies that one reads absorbed' Guardian Women in Love begins one blossoming spring day in England and ends with a terrible catastrophe in the snow of the Alps. Ursula and Gudrun are very different sisters who become entangled with two friends, Rupert and Gerald, who live in their hometown. The bonds between the couples quickly become intense and passionate but whether this passion is creative or destructive is unclear.In this astonishing novel, widely considered to be D.H. Lawrence's best work, he explores what it means to be human in an age of conflict and confusion. WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY HOWARD JACOBSON