Since the war Graham Greene has travelled habitually to the world's trouble-spots and has provided leading newspapers and journals with articles about what he saw. While contending that a writer must be free of political affiliations he has commmitted himself to many countries and causes, and while insisting that literature must never be used for political ends he has written novels informed by a political urgency. The Dangerous Edge is about his political reportage and how the observations that formed it were transformed into literature. It is about how a novelist who struggled to record public issues dispassionately became in the process an important political conscience.

This book contains deeply personal dialogues with Jewish American writers, from Mark Krupnick in his final work. When he learned he had ALS and roughly two years to live, literary critic Mark Krupnick returned to the writers who had been his lifelong conversation partners and asked with renewed intensity: how do you live as a Jew, when, mostly, you live in your head? The evocative and sinuous essays collected here are the products of this inquiry. In his search for durable principles, Krupnick follows Lionel Trilling, Cynthia Ozick, Geoffrey Hartman, Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and others into the elemental matters of life and death, sex and gender, power and vulnerability. The editors - Krupnick's wife, Jean K. Carney, and literary critic Mark Shechner - have also included earlier essays and introductions that link Krupnick's work with the ""deep places"" of his own imagination.

Since the war Graham Greene has travelled habitually to the world's trouble-spots and has provided leading newspapers and journals with articles about what he saw. While contending that a writer must be free of political affiliations he has commmitted himself to many countries and causes, and while insisting that literature must never be used for political ends he has written novels informed by a political urgency. The Dangerous Edge is about his political reportage and how the observations that formed it were transformed into literature. It is about how a novelist who struggled to record public issues dispassionately became in the process an important political conscience.

The Edward Lewis Wallant Award was founded by the family of Dr. Irving and Fran Waltman in 1963 and is supported by the University of Hartford's Maurice Greenberg Center for Judaic Studies. It is given annually to an American writer, preferably early in his or her career, whose fiction is considered significant for American Jews. In The New Diaspora: The Changing Landscape of American Jewish Fiction, editors Victoria Aarons, Avinoam J. Patt, and Mark Shechner who have all served as judges for the award, present vital, original, and wide-ranging fiction by writers whose work has been considered or selected for the award. The resulting collection highlights the exemplary place of the Wallant Award in Jewish literature. With a mix of stories and novel chapters, The New Diaspora reprints selections of short fiction from such well-known writers as Rebecca Goldstein, Nathan Englander, Jonathan Safran Foer, Dara Horn, Julie Orringer, and Nicole Krauss. The first half of the anthology presents pieces by winnners of the Wallant award, focusing on the best work of recent winners. The New Diaspora's second half reflects the evolving landscape of American Jewish fiction over the last fifty years, as many authors working in America are not American by birth, and their fiction has become more experimental in nature. Pieces in this section represent authors with roots all over the world - including Russia (Maxim Shrayer, Nadia Kalman, and Lara Vapnyar), Latvia (David Bezmozgis), South Africa (Tony Eprile), Canada (Robert Majzels), and Israel (Avner Mandelman, who now lives in Canada). This collection offers an expanded canon of Jewish writing in North America and foregrounds a vision of its variety, its uniqueness, its cosmopolitanism, and its evolving perspectives on Jewish life. It celebrates the continuing vitality and fresh visions of contemporary Jewish writing, even as it highlights its debt to history and embrace of collective memory. Readers of contemporary American fiction and Jewish cultural history will find The New Diaspora enlightening and deeply engaging. Contributors Include: Edith Pearlman, Sara Houghteling, Eileen Pollack, Ehud Havazelet, Nicole Krauss, Jonathan Rosen, Joan Leegant, Dara Horn, Myla Goldberg, Harvey Grossinger, Thane Rosenbaum, Rebecca Goldstein, Melvin Bukiet, Tova Reich, Steve Stern, Francine Prose, Nadia Kalman, Maxim Shrayer, David Bezmozgis, Avner Mandelman, Joseph Epstein, Scott Nadelson, Margot Singer, Jonathan Safran Foer, Aryeh Lev Stollman, Gerald Shapiro, Joshua Henkin, Curt Leviant, Robert Majzels, Tony Eprile, Rachel Kadish, Nathan Englander, Lara Vapnyar, Julie Orringer, Joseph Skibell, Peter Orner, Jonathon Keats.

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 1974.

"Up Society's Ass Copper: Rereading Philip Roth is the culmination of thirty years of writing about Roth. A collection of essays and reviews, fulminations and daydreams, hasty claims and later retractions, it combines vivid first impressions with conclusions that have been percolating for decades. Its alloy of hunches, impressions, and judgments is the record of a restless and sometimes impatient reader trying to make sense of a turbulent and mercurial writer. I try to get at bedrock issues in Roth's writing without letting those issues distract me from the detours, anecdotes, impersonations, punch lines, send ups, pratfalls, visions, mutterings, and trash talk that are the purest distillations of Roth's art. Its working premise is that Roth "does what he does because he does what he does" and that the surest way to get a handle on him is not to be insistent and to allow each book to be unique, surprising, and strange."--Mark Shechner

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 1974.