This book is journalist Jean Rolin's highly personalized account of the lives of the Arab Christian population in Palestine. Set on the eve of the Iraq War, when Rolin visited Bethlehem, Ramallah and Jerusalem, this detailed portrayal reveals a people torn between their religious beliefs and their Arab patriotism, loathe to criticize their Muslim leaders and eager to blame their misfortune on the Israelis. Despite the importance of the community as guardians of the holy sites of Christianity, the Palestinian Christians suffer under a society governed by increasingly radicalized fundamentalist Islamic beliefs. As a consequence of the ongoing Middle East conflict, the Palestinian Christian rate of emigration is so high that they are now on the verge of extinction, despite their presence in Palestine for over 2,000 years. Abandoned by their leadership and the international community, Palestinian Christianity will soon die if a peaceful resolution cannot be found between Israel and Palestine.

Norman Moonbloom is a loser, a drop-out who can't even make it as a deadbeat. His brother, a slumlord, hires him to collect rent in the buildings he owns in Manhattan. Making his rounds from apartment to apartment, Moonbloom confronts a wildly varied assortment of brilliantly described urban characters, among them a gay jazz musician with a sideline as a gigolo, a Holocaust survivor, and a brilliant young black writer modeled on James Baldwin. Moonbloom hears their cries of outrage and abuse; he learns about their secret sorrows and desires. And as he grows familiar with their stories, he finds that he is drawn, in spite of his best judgment, into a desperate attempt to improve their lives. Edward Lewis Wallant's astonishing comic tour de force is a neglected masterpiece of 1960s America.

Joe Allston is a retired literary agent who is, in his own words, "just killing time until time gets around to killing me." His parents and his only son are long dead, leaving him with neither ancestors nor descendants, tradition nor ties. His job, trafficking the talent of others, had not been his choice. He passes through life as a spectator. A postcard from a friend causes Allston to return to the journals of a trip he had taken years before, a journey to his mother's birth-place where he'd sought a link with the past. The memories of that trip, both grotesque and poignant, move through layers of time and meaning, and reveal that Joe Allston isn't quite spectator enough.

Sixty years after fighting in Israel's War of Independence, Yoram Kaniuk tries to remember what exactly did and did not happen in his time as a teenage soldier in the Palmach. The result is a touchingly poignant and hauntingly beautiful memoir that the author himself considers a work of fiction, for what is memory but one's own story about the past. Eschewing self-righteousness in favor of self-criticism, Kaniuk's book, winner of the 2010 Sapir Prize for Literature, is the tale of a younger man told by his older, wiser self the self who realizes that wars are pointless, and that he and his friends, young men from good homes forming an offbeat band of brothers, were senseless to see glory in the prospect of dying young. But it is also a painful, shocking, and tragically relevant homage to the importance of bearing witness to the follies of the past, even, or especially, when they are one's own.

A story of misadventure, anxiety, and the everyday battles and triumphs of parenthood.

A look at the tail end of the Cold War as seen through the eyes of a brilliant fifteen-year-old pianist.