Part history, part cultural biography, and part literary mystery, "The Orientalist traces the life of Lev Nussimbaum, a Jew who transformed himself into a Muslim prince and became a best-selling author in Nazi Germany.
Born in 1905 to a wealthy family in the oil-boom city of Baku, at the edge of the czarist empire, Lev escaped the Russian Revolution in a camel caravan. He found refuge in Germany, where, writing under the names Essad Bey and Kurban Said, his remarkable books about Islam, desert adventures, and global revolution, became celebrated across fascist Europe. His enduring masterpiece, "Ali and Nino-a story of love across ethnic and religious boundaries, published on the eve of the Holocaust-is still in print today.
But Lev's life grew wilder than his wildest stories. He married an international heiress who had no idea of his true identity-until she divorced him in a tabloid scandal. His closest friend in New York, George Sylvester Viereck-also a friend of both Freud's and Einstein's-was arrested as the leading Nazi agent in the United States. Lev was invited to be Mussolini's official biographer-until the Fascists discovered his "true" identity. Under house arrest in the Amalfi cliff town of Positano, Lev wrote his last book-discovered in a half a dozen notebooks never before read by anyone-helped by a mysterious half-German salon hostess, an Algerian weapons-smuggler, and the poet Ezra Pound.
Tom Reiss spent five years tracking down secret police records, love letters, diaries, and the deathbed notebooks. Beginning with a yearlong investigation for "The New Yorker, he pursued Lev's story across ten countries and found himself caught up in encounters as dramatic andsurreal, and sometimes as heartbreaking, as his subject's life. Reiss's quest for the truth buffets him from one weird character to the next: from the last heir of the Ottoman throne to a rock opera-composing baroness in an Austrian castle, to an aging starlet in a Hollywood bungalow full of cats and turtles.
As he tracks down the pieces of Lev Nussimbaum's deliberately obscured life, Reiss discovers a series of shadowy worlds-of European pan-Islamists, nihilist assassins, anti-Nazi book smugglers, Baku oil barons, Jewish Orientalists-that have also been forgotten. The result is a thoroughly unexpected picture of the twentieth century-of the origins of our ideas about race and religious self-definition, and of the roots of modern fanaticism and terrorism. Written with grace and infused with wonder, "The Orientalist is an astonishing book.

WINNER OF THE 2013 PULITZER PRIZE FOR BIOGRAPHY
General Alex Dumas, is a man almost unknown today, yet his story is strikingly familiar--because his son, the novelist Alexandre Dumas, used his larger-than-life feats as inspiration for such classics as "The Count of Monte Cristo" and "The Three Musketeers."
But, hidden behind General Dumas's swashbuckling adventures was an even more incredible secret: he was the son of a black slave--who rose higher in the white world than any man of his race would before our own time.
Born in Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), Alex Dumas made his way to Paris, where he rose to command armies at the height of the Revolution--until he met an implacable enemy he could not defeat.
"TIME" magazine called "The Black Count" "one of those quintessentially human stories of strength and courage that sheds light on the historical moment that made it possible." It is also a heartbreaking story of the enduring bonds of love between a father and son.

"Essad Bey, the sickly son of an oil millionaire from Baku, Azerbaijan, receives permission from his father to spend the summer with his "milk brother" (that is, with whom he was nursed by the same Caucasian nanny) Ali Khan, passing the holiday in his home village in the wild Caucasus. So the two set out, under the custody of a wise attendant, into an archaic world in which chivalry counted more than buying power and poets were more highly regarded than princes - into a country in which, as a kind of curiosity shop of world history, all that is outlived and forgotten was loyally preserved." This is Essad Bey's second book, which was first published in English in 1931. In it the author draws upon his Oriental imaginative powers, conjuring a vast panorama of the Caucasus, its people and customs. The result is a fresh and densely atmospheric work, even if not always laying claim to scientific accuracy. Often adding a touch of imagination, the author succeeds in bringing the heart and soul of this archaic world to life, which he had himself experienced and learned to love as a child.

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE FOR BIOGRAPHY 2013 'Completely absorbing' Amanda Foreman 'Enthralling' Guardian 'The Three Musketeers! The Count of Monte Cristo! The stories of course are fiction. But here a prize-winning author shows us that the inspiration for the swashbuckling stories was, in fact, Dumas's own father, Alex - the son of a marquis and a black slave... He achieved a giddy ascent from private in the Dragoons to the rank of general; an outsider who had grown up among slaves, he was all for Liberty and Equality. Alex Dumas was the stuff of legend' Daily Mail So how did such this extraordinary man get erased by history? Why are there no statues of 'Monsieur Humanity' as his troops called him? The Black Count uncovers what happened and the role Napoleon played in Dumas's downfall. By walking the same ground as Dumas - from Haiti to the Pyramids, Paris to the prison cell at Taranto - Reiss, like the novelist before him, triumphantly resurrects this forgotten hero. 'Entrances from first to last. Dumas the novelist would be proud' Independent 'Brilliant' Glasgow Herald

The Sopranos hat neue kunstlerische Massstabe gesetzt. Das uber die Episoden fortlaufende Geschehen verlasst die Vertrautheit automatisierter Schemata, die in jeder Folge aktualisiert werden und den meisten TV-Serien bis heute zugrunde liegen. Bisherige, im Wesentlichen englischsprachige Untersuchungen verfolgen mehrheitlich einen interpretativen Ansatz, wahrend dieses Buch sich den Verfahren der Serie widmet. Es ist der erste deutschsprachige Sammelband zur Poetik der Sopranos.

Die zahlreichen literarischen Verknupfungen zwischen den Werken Franz Kafkas und Haruki Murakamis, denen sich diese semiotische Abhandlung widmet, haben bisher in der internationalen Forschung kaum Beachtung gefunden. Dabei zeigt sich im Zwischenspiel der phantastischen Erzahlungen Kafkas und Murakamis nicht nur deren unaufloesliche Verbindung fur die Literatur des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts, sondern auch eine Reihe neuer Erkenntnisse uber das Phantastische in der Literatur an sich. Das Buch versteht sich als Diskussionsbeitrag zur Phantastikforschung, als Konsolidierung der Sonderstellung Kafkas im Diskurs des Phantastischen und schliesslich als ersten Beitrag zu einer literaturwissenschaftlichen Beschaftigung mit den Texten Haruki Murakamis im deutschsprachigen Diskurs.

An Autobiography like Something Out of the Arabian Nights In this lively and witty autobiography, Essad Bey, a.k.a. Lev Nussimbaum, tells us the story of his childhood in Baku, the capital of Azerbaijan, and of his flight from the Russian Revolution in 1917, which brought him first straight through the Caucasus, then to Istanbul - where this book concludes - and finally to Berlin. When Essad Bey speaks of the people of the Caucasus and their customs so strange to us, a sort of anthropological cabinet of curiosities unfolds before our eyes, and we cannot help but be astonished. All the while, through his affectionate and sometimes openly ironic words, even the excesses of the Revolution sound like children's pranks and his hair-raising escape like an adventure novel. "Blood and Oil in the Orient" is an informative and entertaining book; in the 1930s, it was a bestseller in the U.S. and Germany.

The Orientalist unravels the mysterious life of a man born on the border between West and East, a Jewish man with a passion for the Arab world. Tom Reiss first came across the man who called himself 'Kurban Said' when he went to the ex-USSR to research the oil business on the Caspian Sea, and discovered a novel instead. Written on the eve of the Second World War, Ali and Nino is a captivating love story set in the glamorous city of Baku, Azerbaijan's capital. The novel's depiction of a lost cosmopolitan society is enthralling, but equally intriguing is the identity of the man who wrote it. Who was its supposed author? And why was he so forgotten that no one could agree on the simplest facts about him? For five years, Reiss tracked Lev Nussimbaum, alias Kurban Said, from a wealthy Jewish childhood in Baku, to a romantic adolescence in Persia on the run from the Bolsheviks, and an exile in Berlin as bestselling author and self-proclaimed Muslim prince. The result is a thoroughly unexpected picture of the twentieth-century - of the origins of our ideas about race and religious self-definition, and of the roots of modern fanaticism.