Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone!

Judd Steiner and Artie Straus have it all: wealth, intelligence, and the world at their feet as part of the elite, upper-crust Jewish community of 1920s Chicago. Artie is handsome, athletic, and popular, but he possesses a hidden, powerful sadistic streak and a desire to dominate. Judd is a weedy introvert, a genius who longs for a companion whom he can idolize and worship. Obsessed with Nietzsche's idea of the superhuman, both boys decide to prove that they are above the laws of man by arbitrarily picking and murdering a Jewish boy in their neighborhood. This new edition of Meyer Levin's classic literary thriller Compulsion reintroduces the fictionalized case of Leopold and Loeb -- once considered the "crime of the century" -- to a new generation. This incisive psychological portrait of two young murderers seized the imagination of an era and is generally recognized as paving the way for the first non-fiction novel. Compulsion forces us to ask what drives some further into darkness, and some to seek redemption. Heartbreaking as it is gripping, Compulsion is written with a tense and penetrating force that led the Los Angeles Times to call Levin, "the most significant Jewish writer of his times."

This is a new release of the original 1940 edition.

This is a new release of the original 1947 edition.

First published in 1937, Meyer Levin's novel The Old Bunch recounts the lives of 19 teenagers-11 boys and 8 girls- from the same neighborhood on Chicago's West Side. Too young for World War I, they will later be too old for World War II. But they are not too young or too old for the Great Depression that begins to unravel their lives. Their choices are not easy: whether or not to identify with the suffering of the Jewish people, to seek love rather than status in marriage, to see African Americans as fellow sufferers. Harold Strauss called the book "a landmark in the development of the realistic novel" that "brilliantly succeeds in taking the reader on a memorable tour of the world in which the old bunch lived." Levin later became well known for his novel Compulsion, but here he argues for the growth that comes when we learn to speak for ourselves. The Old Bunch is a novel pulsing with life, still vital 75 years after its original publication. It is the story of ordinary neighborhood kids-Jewish boys and girls who, to their immigrant parents' bewilderment, take the spirit of a great American city into their hearts. Newly designed and typeset by Waking Lion Press.

Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone!

Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone!

Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone!

Kessinger Publishing is the place to find hundreds of thousands of rare and hard-to-find books with something of interest for everyone!