"Leonard Michaels's stories stand alongside those of his best Jewish contemporaries--Grace Paley and Philip Roth." --Mona Simpson, "The New York Times Book Review

""Leonard Michaels was an original . . . with a concise, pungent and pyrotechnic style that tolerated no flab." --Phillip Lopate, "The Nation

""As good as any writer you're likely to run across." --Alex Abramovich, "Bookforum"

A collection of linked stories that follow Raphael Nachman – a simple, aging mathematician whose sensual needs are satisfied by working out maths problems and playing the violin – throughout his later years. From touring Cracow’s former Jewish ghetto with a young female guide who may or may not be a government agent, to a barbershop in Santa Monica, where Nachman uses his unwitting hairdresser as a therapist, to a mysterious corporate cryptology conference in Manhattan that makes Nachman long for the rolling waves of the Pacific Ocean outside his bedroom window in California.

The last thing Michaels wrote before his death, The Nachman Stories showcase a masterful style of writing, infused with a grace and wisdom that can only come later in life. Each story is delightful and profound – presenting us with a befuddling, comical, and all-too-recognizable portrait of humanity. Featuring a new introduction by David Bezmozgis

This title was first published in 2002. The concept of embeddedness refers to the social construction of inter-firm relationships and the enmeshing of economic relationships within broader social structures and relationships in particular places. Previous research has suggested embedding is the best way to generate local growth and social capital and has focused on SMEs in Europe and North America, although the existing model is being more widely adopted now. This volume is the first to examine the complex processes of embedding in this wider context. Bringing together a broad range of case studies from the developed and developing world which address the nature of embeddedness from various perspectives, it not only questions the universality of the current model and the policy initiatives it has spawned but also provides a much wider understanding of embeddedness . It does so by discussing the social dimensions more fully and by throwing light on the spatial and temporal ambiguity of the concept and its inadequate treatment of power.

This title was first published in 2002. The concept of embeddedness refers to the social construction of inter-firm relationships and the enmeshing of economic relationships within broader social structures and relationships in particular places. Previous research has suggested embedding is the best way to generate local growth and social capital and has focused on SMEs in Europe and North America, although the existing model is being more widely adopted now. This volume is the first to examine the complex processes of embedding in this wider context. Bringing together a broad range of case studies from the developed and developing world which address the nature of embeddedness from various perspectives, it not only questions the universality of the current model and the policy initiatives it has spawned but also provides a much wider understanding of embeddedness . It does so by discussing the social dimensions more fully and by throwing light on the spatial and temporal ambiguity of the concept and its inadequate treatment of power.

Star studded rendition of the classic Shakespeare romantic comedy which sees two princes, Claudio (Robert Sean Leonard) and Benedict (Kenneth Branagh), battling to win the hearts of those they love. The object of Benedict's desire, Beatrice (Emma Thompson), acts as his sharp tongued sparring partner, while Claudio's path to true love is obstructed by the evil meddling of the embittered Don Juan (Keanu Reeves). Love, of course, triumphs eventually in Kenneth Branagh's sunny adaptation, filmed in Tuscany.

In his New York Times bestselling memoir, one of America's greatest boxing legends faces his single greatest competitor: himself "Champions come and go, but to be legendary you got to have heart, more heart than the next man, more than anyone in the world. Ray's heart was bigger than all the rest. He would never stop fighting."-Muhammad Ali In Washington, D.C., during the 1970s, a black man could get into the newspapers in one of two ways: crime-or boxing. "Sugar" Ray Leonard chose to fight. After winning a gold medal at the 1976 Olympics, Ray wanted to call it quits and go to college, but his family's financial needs made him go pro. Boxing history was made. All the while, another, darker Ray-one overwhelmed by depression, rage, drug addiction, sexual abuse, and greed-battled for dominance. In The Big Fight, Ray comes to terms with both these men and shares a brutally honest and remarkably inspiring portrait of the rise, fall, and ultimate redemption of a true fighter-inside and outside the ring.

The essays in this volume explore the nature of time, our God-given medium of ascent, known, as Augustine puts it, through the ordered study of the "liberal disciplines that carry the mind to the divine (disciplinae liberales intellectum efferunt ad divina)": grammar and dialectic, for example, to promote thinking; geometry and astronomy to grasp the dimensions of our reality; music, an invisible substance like time itself, as an exemplary bridge to the unseen substance of thoughts, ideas, and the nature of God (theology). This ascending course of study rests on procedure, progress, and attainment - on before, following, and afterwards - whose goal is an ascending erudition that lets us finally contemplate, as Augustine says in De ordine, our invisible medium - time - within time itself: time is immaterial, but experienced as substantial. The essays here look at projects that chronicle time "from the beginning," that clarify ideas of creation "in time" and "simultaneous times," and the interrelationships between measured time and eternity, including "no-time." Essays also examine time as revealed in social and political contexts, as told by clocks, as notated in music and embodied in memorializing stone. In the final essays of this volume, time is understood as the subject and medium of consciousness. As Adrian Bardon says, "time is not so much a 'what' as a 'how'": a solution to "organizing experience and modeling events." Contributors are (in order within the volume) Jesse W. Torgerson, Ken A. Grant, Danielle B. Joyner, Nancy van Deusen, Peter Casarella, Aaron Canty, Jordan Kirk, Vera von der Osten-Sacken, Gerhard Jaritz, Jason Aleksander, Sara E. Melzer, Mark Howard, Andrew Eschelbacher, Hans J. Rindisbacher, James F. Knapp, Peggy A. Knapp, Raymond Knapp, Michael Cole, Ike Kamphof and Leonard Michael Koff.

An international team of over 150 experts provide up-to-date satellite imaging and quantitative analysis of the state and dynamics of the glaciers around the world, and they provide an in-depth review of analysis methodologies. Includes an e-published supplement. Global Land Ice Measurements from Space - Satellite Multispectral Imaging of Glaciers (GLIMS book for short) is the leading state-of-the-art technical and interpretive presentation of satellite image data and analysis of the changing state of the world's glaciers. The book is the most definitive, comprehensive product of a global glacier remote sensing consortium, Global Land Ice Measurements from Space (GLIMS, http://www.glims.org). With 33 chapters and a companion e-supplement, the world's foremost experts in satellite image analysis of glaciers analyze the current state and recent and possible future changes of glaciers across the globe and interpret these findings for policy planners. Climate change is with us for some time to come, and its impacts are being felt by the world's population. The GLIMS Book, to be released about the same time as the IPCC's 5th Assessment report on global climate warming, buttresses and adds rich details and authority to the global change community's understanding of climate change impacts on the cryosphere. This will be a definitive and technically complete reference for experts and students examining the responses of glaciers to climate change. World experts demonstrate that glaciers are changing in response to the ongoing climatic upheaval in addition to other factors that pertain to the circumstances of individual glaciers. The global mosaic of glacier changes is documented by quantitative analyses and are placed into a perspective of causative factors. Starting with a Foreword, Preface, and Introduction, the GLIMS book gives the rationale for and history of glacier monitoring and satellite data analysis. It includes a comprehensive set of six "how-to" methodology chapters, twenty-five chapters detailing regional glacier state and dynamical changes, and an in-depth summary and interpretation chapter placing the observed glacier changes into a global context of the coupled atmosphere-land-ocean system. An accompanying e-supplement will include oversize imagery and other other highly visual renderings of scientific data.

Animal-herding (pastoralism) is a subsistence strategy that is practised by populations of low-producing ecosystems worldwide. Increasingly, it is vanishing due to land pressure and ecological degradation, particularly in the developing world. While previous books have examined the social, cultural and economic dimensions of the pastoral way of life, there has been little systematic examination of the biology and health of pastoral groups. The Human Biology of Pastoral Populations fills this gap by drawing together our knowledge of the biology, population structure and ecology of herding populations. It investigates how pastoral populations adapt to limited and variable food availability, the implications of the herding way of life for reproductive patterns, population structure and genetic diversity and the impacts of ongoing social and ecological changes on the health and well-being of these populations. This volume will be of broad interest to scholars in anthropology, human biology, genetics and demography.

Two years of intense and often dramatic negotiations culminated in the signing of a Framework Convention on Climate Change at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. This compelling book reconstructs the dynamics of those negotiations, based on eye-witness accounts. The main contributors, each a principal player in the drama, have been selected to reflect the perspectives of the most important interest groups and institutions involved in the negotiations, including the OECD, oil-importing developing nations, private industry and non-governmental organisations. These individual accounts are integrated into an edited volume that provides a multi-dimensional assessment of the negotiating process, focusing on the competitive and co-operative interactions among nations, regional alliances, international institutions, corporations and non-governmental organisations.

The Human Biology of Pastoral Populations draws together the current knowledge of the biology, population structure, and ecology of herding populations. It investigates how pastoral populations adapt to limited and variable food availability, the implications of the herding way of life for reproductive patterns, population structure and genetic diversity, and the impacts of ongoing social and ecological changes on the health and well-being of these populations. This volume will be of broad interest to scholars in anthropology, human biology, genetics, and demography.

Leonard Michaels was a writer of unfailing emotional honesty. His memoirs, originally scattered through his story collections, are among the most thrilling evocations of growing up in the New York of the 1950s and '60s--and of continuing to grow up, in the cultural turmoil of the '70s and '80s, as a writer, teacher, lover, and reader. The same honesty and excitement shine in Michaels's highly personal commentaries on culture and art. Whether he's asking what makes a story, reviewing the history of the word "relationship," or reflecting on sex in the movies, he is funny, penetrating, surprising, always alive on the page.

"The Essays of Leonard Michaels "is the definitive collection of his nonfiction and shows, yet again, why Michaels was singled out for praise by fellow writers as diverse as Susan Sontag, Larry McMurtry, William Styron, and Charles Baxter. Beyond autobiography or criticism, it is the record of a sensibility and of a style that is unmatched in American letters.

Seven men, friends and strangers, gather in a house in Berkeley. They intend to start a men's club, the purpose of which isn't immediately clear to any of them; but very quickly they discover a powerful and passionate desire to talk. First published in 1981, "The Men's Club "is a scathing, pitying, absurdly dark and funny novel about manhood in the age of therapy. "The climax is fitting, horrific, and wonderfully droll" ("The New York Times Book Review").

First acclaimed as a story-length memoir, then expanded into a novel, "Sylvia "draws us into the lives of a young couple whose struggle to survive Manhattan in the early 1960s involves them in sexual fantasias, paranoia, drugs, and the extreme intimacy of self-destructive violence.
Reproducing a time and place with extraordinary clarity, Leonard Michaels explores with self-wounding honesty the excruciating particulars of a youthful marriage headed for disaster. Leonard Michaels (1933-2003) was the author of "Going Places," "I Would Have Saved Them If I Could, "and "The Men's Club," among other books. FSG will publish his "Collected Stories "in June to coincide with the reissue of "Sylvia." First acclaimed as a story-length memoir, then expanded into a novel, "Sylvia "draws us into the lives of a young couple whose struggle to survive Manhattan in the early 1960s involves them in sexual fantasias, paranoia, drugs, and the extreme intimacy of self-destructive violence.
Reproducing a time and place with extraordinary clarity, Leonard Michaels explores with self-wounding honesty the excruciating particulars of a youthful marriage headed for disaster. ""Sylvia" is a fictionalized memoir, first published in 1992, about Michaels's first wife Sylvia Bloch, who committed suicide . . . At 129 pages, the reissue of "Sylvia," though billed as a novel, has the power and the rawness of memoir."--Mona Simpson, "The New York Times Book Review"

"Sprawling, uncoordinated, uneven, noisy, and appealing," wrote one reviewer of the first edition of this book, published on 1 January 1980. "The language is in rude health," wrote another. Exactly a decade later, here is the book anew, with the same editors but with fifty fresh contributors writing essays and poems that engage our language today. Imaginative attention is bestowed on the changes of recent years, changes not only in the language but in how language is understood. In the forefront are the relations between British English, American English, and those other Englishes with which they compete or cooperate. The nervous negotiations of gender and feminism. The darkness of AIDS. The bright flicker of the computer. The old smolderings of "standard English" and correctness. The "bad language" that has lately done so well in our society. How all this has been politicized--or is it rather that its inevitably political nature has only now been recognized? Here these and many other facets of the language catch the various light. What has changed is understood in relation to what has not changed, and what has been gained in relation to what has been lost. There is sweep as well as detail, telescope as well as microscope, in this contemplation of the world of our language as it enters the world of the 1990s. The State of the Language has been prepared in cooperation with the English-Speaking Union of San Francisco. Some titles of essays in the book: Whose English? by Sidney Greenbaum Look, Ma, I'm Talking by Sandra Gilbert Fighting Talk by Marina Warner No Opera Please--We're British by Michael Bawtree Changing What We Sing by Margaret Doody On Not Being Milton: Nigger Talk in England Today by David Dabydeen Talking Black by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. Subway Graffiti by Walter J. Ong Doublespeak by William Lutz It's a Myth, Innit? Politeness and the English Tag Question by John Algeo This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1980.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1988.

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1988.

Conceived as a novelistic journey through the worlds of California, "West of the West" offers a vivid and diverse collection of writings on the state where extremes of every sort are dramatically evident in the weather, geography, and people. This richly fascinating collection represents the experience of California both physical and metaphysical, in fiction, poetry, essays, travel writing, confessions, reportage, and social criticism. The authors are native Californians, born-again Californians, exiles, emigres, critics, and visitors of every kind - Jack Kerouac, Joan Didion, Amy Tan, Simone de Beauvoir, Carey McWilliams, Tom Wolfe, Gore Vidal, Octavio Paz, Jean Baudrillard, Ishmael Reed, and, Allen Ginsberg - to name just a few.