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

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.

**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

_______________ '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

_______________ '[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

**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

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.

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.

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.

'This second collection of his newspaper pieces is a reminder of just how good they were: sharp and playful, surreal and thoughtful, and occasionally...rather moving' New Statesman Hilarious, heartbreaking, provocative and affecting - Howard Jacobson's irresistible journalism reveals the Man Booker Prize-winning novelist in all his humanity. From the tiniest absurdities to the most universal joys and desolations, Jacobson writes with a thunder, passion and wit unmatched. Just as did his previous volume, Whatever It Is I Don't Like It, this glorious, unputdownable collection will delight, entertain, challenge and move.

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.

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.

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.

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.

'A . . . tender love story . . . This book is alive. It pulses with warmth and intelligence' The Times 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. 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 carers with tangled tales of her husbands and affairs. Shimi Carmelli can do up his own buttons, walks without a frame and speaks without spitting. Among the widows of North London, he's whispered about as the last of the eligible bachelors. He forgets nothing -especially not the shame of a childhood incident that has long hung over him. There's very little left 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. *SHORTLISTED FOR THE WINGATE LITERARY PRIZE 2020*

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.

In a stunning follow-up to his much-heralded masterpiece, "Kalooki Nights," acclaimed author Howard Jacobson has turned his mordant and uncanny sights on Felix Quinn, a rare-book dealer living in London, whose wife Marisa is unfaithful to him.

All husbands, Felix maintains, secretly want their wives to be unfaithful to them. Felix hasn't always thought this way. From the moment of his first boyhood rejection, surviving the shattering effects of love and jealousy had been the study of his life. But while he is honeymooning with Marisa in Florida an event occurs that changes everything. In a moment, he goes from dreading the thought of someone else's hands on the woman he loves to thinking about nothing else. Enter Marius into Marisa's affections. And now Felix must wonder if he really is a happy man.

"The Act of Love" is a haunting novel of love and jealousy, with stylish prose that crackles and razor-sharp dialogue, praised by the London Times as "darkly transgressive, as savage in its brilliance, as anything Jacobson has written." It is a startlingly perceptive, subtle portrait of a marriage and an excruciatingly honest, provocative exploration of sexual obsession.

Max Glickman, a Jewish cartoonist whose seminal work is a comic history titled "Five Thousand Years of Bitterness," recalls his childhood in a British suburb in the 1950s. Growing up, Max is surrounded by Jews, each with an entirely different and outspoken view on what it means to be Jewish. His mother, incessantly preoccupied with a card game called Kalooki, only begrudgingly puts the deck away on the High Holy Days. Max's father, a failed boxer prone to spontaneous nosebleeds, is a self-proclaimed atheist and communist, unable to accept the God who has betrayed him so unequivocally in recent years.

But it is through his friend and neighbor Manny Washinsky that Max begins to understand the indelible effects of the Holocaust and to explore the intrinsic and paradoxical questions of a postwar Jewish identity. Manny, obsessed with the Holocaust and haunted by the allure of its legacy, commits a crime of nightmare proportion against his family and his faith. Years later, after his friend's release from prison, Max is inexorably drawn to uncover the motive behind the catastrophic act -- the discovery of which leads to a startling revelation and a profound truth about religion and faith that exists where the sacred meets the profane.

Spanning the decades between World War II and the present day, acclaimed author Howard Jacobson seamlessly weaves together a breath-takingly complex narrative of love, tragedy, redemption, and above all, remarkable humor. Deeply empathetic and audaciously funny, "Kalooki Nights" is a luminous story torn violently between the hope of restoring and rebuilding Jewish life, and the painful burden of memory and loss.

'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

'One of the all-time great memoirs' Daily Telegraph 'Wonderful...candid, shrewd and moving' William Boyd 'Laugh-out-loud glorious and uproarious' Simon Schama Howard Jacobson's funny, revealing and tender memoir of his path to becoming a writer. Howard Jacobson was forty when his first novel was published. In Mother's Boy, he traces the life that brought him there. Born into a working-class Jewish family in 1940s Manchester, he did not lack encouragement or subject matter. Jacobson takes us from childhood and studying at Cambridge, through landing in Sydney as a maverick young professor, and on to his first marriage and the birth of his son. Later, he begins new - and often surprising - ventures in places as disparate as London, Wolverhampton, Boscastle and Melbourne. Infused with bittersweet memories of Jacobson's parents and friends, this is the story of a writer's beginnings, and of learning to understand who you are before you can become the writer you were meant to be. 'Hilariously brilliant' David Baddiel 'Howard Jacobson brilliantly transforms calamity into rip-roaring comedy' Craig Brown, Mail on Sunday

From the beginning Oliver Walzer is a natural - at ping-pong. Even with his improvised bat (the Collins Classic edition of DR JEKYLL AND MR HYDE) he can chop, flick, half-volley like a champion. At sex he isnot a natural, being shy and frightened of women, but with tuition from Sheeny Waxman, fellow member of the Akiva Social Club Table Tennis team, his game improves. And while the Akiva boys teach him everything he needs to know about ping-pong, his father, Joel Walzer, teaches him everything there is to know about 'swag'. Unabashedly autobiographical, this is an hilarious and heartbreaking story of one man's coming of age in 1950's Manchester. It is Howard Jacobson's masterpiece.

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