Why is this night different from all other nights? Every year when families gather for the Passover holiday, the youngest child poses that question as part of the poetic Four Questions near the start of the Seder. The answers are no less than the story of a people bound in slavery, their suffering in a foreign land, and their ultimate liberation - the story of Passover. Here the Four Questions are presented in breathtakingly luminous paintings by Ori Sherman. Whimsical animals parade through a unique format that can be read straight through in English or turned upside down to focus on the delicate Hebrew calligraphy and ingenious split-frame pictures. Each side of the Seder table can see its own variation of the richly colored scenes as elephants eat matzoh, monkeys dip herbs into water, and lions recline in newfound freedom. Author Lynne Sharon Schwartz answers the questions with refreshing clarity, providing insight into the symbols and rituals of the holiday. Experience a glorious art book, a beautiful gift for the kids who find the afikomen, and a wonderful way to experience Passover and its unique celebration of freedom.

"Schwartz does a fine job of evoking this elusive author."--David Ulin, Los Angeles Times

"If this interesting book of criticism and interviews introduces you to Sebald or encourages you to return to him, it will have served a noble purpose."--The Jerusalem Post

"The great achievement of [Sebald's] work is that he makes it audible to his readers while still honoring the silence."--Evelyn Toynton, Harper's Magazine

When German author W. G. Sebald died in a car accident at the age of fifty-seven, the literary world mourned the loss of a writer whose oeuvre we were just beginning to appreciate. Through published interviews with and essays on Sebald, American novelist and translator Lynne Sharon Schwartz offers a profound portrait of the late author, who has been praised posthumously for his unflinching explorations of modern history, dislocation, and the role of memory. Includes essays from Charles Simic, Ruth Franklin, Michael Silverblatt, and others.

W. G. Sebald was born in Germany in 1944. His novels--The Rings of Saturn, The Emigrants, Vertigo, and Austerlitz--have won a number of international awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Los Angeles Times Book Award, the Berlin Literature Prize, and the Literatur Nord Prize. He is also the author of three books of poems and a book-length essay. He died in December 2001.

Lynne Sharon Schwartz has authored fourteen works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, as well as the widely acclaimed memoir Ruined by Reading. She won the PEN Renato Pogglioli Award for her translation from Italian of Liana Millu's Smoke Over Birkenau.

Two-Part Inventions begins when Suzanne, a concert pianist, dies suddenly of a stroke in the New York City apartment she shares with her producer husband Philip. Rather than mourn in peace, Philip becomes deeply paranoid: their life is based on a fraud and the acclaimed music the couple created is about to be exposed. Philip had built a career for his wife by altering her recordings, taking a portion of a song here and there, from recordings of other pianists. Syncing the alterations seamlessly, he created a piece of flawless music with Suzanne getting sole credit. In this urban, psychological novel, author Lynne Sharon Schwartz brilliantly guides the reader through a flawed marriage and calculated career. Beginning with Suzanne's death and moving backwards in time, Schwartz examines their life together, and her remarkable career, while contemplating the nature of truth, marriage and the pursuit of perfection.

Since Marco Polo's explorations and Montaigne's travels, a lively dialogue has persisted about travel's pros and cons  its excitement, novelties, perils, and misadventures. Lynne Sharon Schwartz joins this dialogue with a memoir that raises serious and amusing questions.Not Now, Voyager takes us on a voyage of self-discovery as the author traces how travel shaped her. She visits Miami Beach as an adolescent with an aunt and uncle and confronts the sensation of not belonging; she goes to Rome as a young woman and ponders the difference between ignorance and innocence; she ventures to Jamaica and witnesses acute political and social unrest; and she takes a family road trip to Montreal and watches her daughters come to their own startling realizations.In this memoir, Schwartz's history takes on new shapes, and her feelings about travel change as she does. Her story exemplifies a mode of travel: the mind on a journey, pausing, sometimes by design, sometimes by serendipity, lingering, backtracking, but always on the move.

For the first time, one of New York City's major resident authors spins a breathtakingly immediate, intimate family novel set around the September 11th attacks. Thirty-four and decidedly independent, Renata has been known to keep her involvement with people - men in particular - to a minimum. Even her job at the library keeps her at a remove from the uncertainty of trusting other people with the stories of her past. Instead, she loses herself in language, always measuring the integrity of words against lived experience. Then Jack, patient, solid and sexy, enters her life. One bright September morning as Renata walks across the Brooklyn Bridge to work, the sky bursts open and change comes without warning. It quickly becomes clear in the days ahead that Renata cannot keep memories of her buried past - of a twin sister, a betrayal, of family truths too ugly to acknowledge - at bay. Written with tremendous compassion and imagination, informed by an abiding love for the people of New York, and crafted by a master storyteller at the height of her powers, "The Writing on the Wall" is a profoundly engaging novel about how one woman saw - and we all continue to ponder - the defining event of our time.

As powerful now as when first published in 1983, Lynne Sharon Schwartz's third novel established her as one of her generation's most assured writers. In this long-awaited reissue; readers can again warm to this acutely absorbing story. According to Lydia Rowe's friend George, a philosophizing psychotherapist, a "disturbance in the field" is anything that keeps us from realizing our needs. In the field of daily experiences, anything can stand in the way of our fulfillment, he explains--an interrupting phone call, an unanswered cry. But over time we adjust and new needs arise. But what if there's disturbance you can't get past? In this look at a girl's, then a wife and mother's, coming of age, Schwartz explores the questions faced by all whose visions of a harmonious existence are jolted into disarray. The result is a novel of captivating realism and lasting grace.

Roy, a psychotherapist, and his first wife, Bea, a caterer, are the linchpins of an extended family dispersed throughout an apartment building on New York's Upper West Side. Around them cluster their four children with assorted friends and lovers; Roy's next two wives, one of them stolen from a neurotic parent; and Bea's lover (the Russian emigres superintendent), lesbian artist sister, and
caustic mother.  

Blending satire and sympathy, Lynne Sharon Schwartz takes aim at contemporary social and sexual behavior as this confused but clever cast of characters, with their entanglements and betrayals, seeks love and happiness in the free- for-all nineties. Blinded by self-deception, and driven by self-gratification, they couple and uncouple as they struggle to redefine the idea of family. In the
Family Way combines the frothiness and bounce of a sitcom with the literary elegance of an accomplished and wryly serious writer. Jane Austen would definitely approve.

Lynne Sharon Schwartz offers deeply felt insight into why people read and how what they read shapes their lives. By interweaving the story of her Brooklyn childhood with vivid memories of particular books, she has created an enchanting celebration of the printed word.

"One marvels at the force of seeing in Schwartz's No Way Out But Through and cannot help but feel a particular gratitude for her abundant humor. Go all in with these poems; you'll reap unknown rewards. She possesses a quick-witted imagination that sanctifies memories and makes room for the wondrous nature of our cosmopolitan lights." -Major Jackson

An Italian-Jewish journalist and schoolteacher who joined the partisans in 1943, Liana Millu was arrested in 1944 and deported to Birkenau. The astonishing stories in this book tell of the women who lived and suffered alongside Liana during her months there. They are stories of violence and tragedy, but also of resistance, of dreaming in the middle of a nightmare, and of the endurance of the human spirit.

An injury at birth left Audrey with a wandering eye. Though flawed, the bad eye functions well enough to permit her an idiosyncratic view of the world, one she welcomes in the stifling postwar Brooklyn of the 1950s. During a journey to Manhattan to see a doctor about her sight, she begins to explore the sexual rites of adulthood. But can her romance last? In this beautifully observed novel, Lynne Sharon Schwartz raises themes of innocence and escape while illuminating the rich inner life of a singular girl.