A look at young Jewish women who are typecast as pious and reserved but have as much imagination and similar desires as other young women.

Mavericks, Mystics, and Misfits: Americans Against the Grain takes the reader on a journey across American history through the lives of exemplary men and women whose stories capture the spirit of their time and place and reveal the American character.

How do you use the word "radical?" Committed to the progressive? The cooperative? The communal? The equalitarian? In so far as social, political, and economic power is sought and wielded in malice, just so far is benevolence radical. The history of social, political, and economic power has been mostly the history of malice. The history of benevolence has been mostly the history of radicalism. The sensibility that loves benevolence has been a radical sensibility. In An Essay in the History of the Radical Sensibility in America, L.S. Halprin argues that before the middle of the nineteenth century the work of all American radicals was organized to defend some form of sentimental faith in millennial progress; that the work of the great writers of the middle of the nineteenth century was the first to be fundamentally free of the constraints of sentimentality; that despite that generation’s accomplishments, the old sentimentalities have persisted, perpetuating the cycle in which illusions designed to make radicalism’s chances seem better than they are become the disillusions which make them seem worse. Along the way, Halprin unfolds something of the contribution of Edgar Alan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Walt Whitman to the specific content of the radical sensibility in America. Since the middle of the nineteenth century, the radical’s work has been primarily to accomplish political power. That work and the frustrations of it often leave little energy for the pursuit of a thoroughgoing self-awareness. Halprin's analysis is particularly useful now to remind readers of both the sentimentalities and the wisdoms from which we come.

Profiles peculiar characters from biblical times to the present that have shaped the character of the Jewish people.

Henry Miller was one of the most distinctive voices in twentieth-century literature, yet he remains misunderstood. Better known in Europe than in his native America for most of his career, he achieved international success and celebrity during the 1960s when his banned “Paris” books—beginning with Tropic of Cancer—were published here and judged by the Supreme Court not to be obscene. The Unknown Henry Miller recounts Miller’s career from its beginnings in Paris in the 1930s but focuses on his years living in Big Sur, California, from 1944 to 1961, during which he wrote many of his most important books, including The Rosy Crucifixion trilogy, married and divorced twice, raised two children, painted watercolors, and tried to live out a credo of self-realization. Written with the cooperation of the Henry Miller and Anaïs Nin estates, The Unknown Henry Miller draws on material previously unavailable to biographers, including interviews with Lepska Warren, Miller’s third wife. Behind the “bad boy” image, Arthur Hoyle finds a man whose challenge of literary sexual taboos was part of a broader assault on the dehumanization of man and commercialization during the postwar years, and he makes the case for restoring this groundbreaking writer to his rightful place in the American literary canon. Skyhorse Publishing, along with our Arcade, Good Books, Sports Publishing, and Yucca imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs. Our list includes biographies on well-known historical figures like Benjamin Franklin, Nelson Mandela, and Alexander Graham Bell, as well as villains from history, such as Heinrich Himmler, John Wayne Gacy, and O. J. Simpson. We have also published survivor stories of World War II, memoirs about overcoming adversity, first-hand tales of adventure, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

In 1913 Marcel Duchamp's Nude Descending a Staircase exploded through the American art world. This is the story of how he followed the painting to New York two years later, enchanted the Arensberg salon, and—almost incidentally—changed art forever. In 1915, a group of French artists fled war-torn Europe for New York. In the few months between their arrival—and America’s entry into the war in April 1917—they pushed back the boundaries of the possible, in both life and art. The vortex of this transformation was the apartment at 33 West 67th Street, owned by Walter and Louise Arensberg, where artists and poets met nightly to talk, eat, drink, discuss each others’ work, play chess, plan balls, organise magazines and exhibitions, and fall in and out of love. At the center of all this activity stood the mysterious figure of Marcel Duchamp, always approachable, always unreadable. His exhibit of a urinal, which he called Fountain, briefly shocked the New York art world before falling, like its perpetrator, into obscurity. Many people (of both sexes) were in love with Duchamp. Henri-Pierre Roché and Beatrice Wood were among them; they were also, briefly, and (for her) life-changingly, in love with each other. Both kept daily diaries, which give an intimate picture of the events of those years. Or rather two pictures—for the views they offer, including of their own love affair, are stunningly divergent. Spellbound by Marcel follows Duchamp, Roché, and Beatrice as they traverse the twentieth century. Roché became the author of Jules and Jim, made into a classic film by François Truffaut. Beatrice became a celebrated ceramicist. Duchamp fell into chess-playing obscurity until, decades later, he became famous for a second time—as Fountain was elected the twentieth century’s most influential artwork.

Winner of the 2021 National Jewish Book Award in Autobiography & Memoir! “A beautiful book… an instant classic of the genre.” —Dwight Garner, New York Times • A New York Times Critics’ Top Book of 2021 • A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • Named a Best Nonfiction Book of 2021 by Kirkus MIT psychologist and bestselling author of Reclaiming Conversation and Alone Together, Sherry Turkle's intimate memoir of love and work For decades, Sherry Turkle has shown how we remake ourselves in the mirror of our machines. Here, she illuminates our present search for authentic connection in a time of uncharted challenges. Turkle has spent a career composing an intimate ethnography of our digital world; now, marked by insight, humility, and compassion, we have her own. In this vivid and poignant narrative, Turkle ties together her coming-of-age and her pathbreaking research on technology, empathy, and ethics. Growing up in postwar Brooklyn,Turkle searched for clues to her identity in a house filled with mysteries. She mastered the codes that governed her mother's secretive life. She learned never to ask about her absent scientist father--and never to use his name, her name. Before empathy became a way to find connection, it was her strategy for survival. Turkle's intellect and curiosity brought her to worlds on the threshold of change. She learned friendship at a Harvard-Radcliffe on the cusp of coeducation during the antiwar movement, she mourned the loss of her mother in Paris as students returned from the 1968 barricades, and she followed her ambition while fighting for her place as a woman and a humanist at MIT. There, Turkle found turbulent love and chronicled the wonders of the new computer culture, even as she warned of its threat to our most essential human connections. The Empathy Diaries captures all this in rich detail--and offers a master class in finding meaning through a life's work.

When Quietism was condemned in 1687 it resulted in an antipathy, if not an open hostility to authentic mystical theology. This situation has lasted down to the present day and has been aggravated by many forms of counterfeit mysticism that are self-centred, not God-centred. The consequences have been disastrous. To restore the balance lost to Christian spirituality, the author returns to the profound mystical teaching that Jesus himself lived and handed on to the early Church through his disciples. His research has resulted in a book that details a practical daily spirituality for all, that mirrors that which was lived by our earliest Christian forebears. It emphasises the original balance between personal and communal prayer in such a way that our whole lives become the place where we continually offer our lives through Christ to the Father.

A provocative re-reading of Stanley Kubrick’s work and its focus on masculine desire The work of Stanley Kubrick amounts to a sustained reflection on the male condition: past, present, and future. The persistent theme of his filmmaking is less violence or sex than it is the pressurized exertion of masculinity in unusual or extreme circumstances, where it may be taxed or exaggerated to various effects, tragic and comic—or metamorphosed, distorted, and even undone. The stories that Kubrick’s movies tell range from global nuclear politics to the unpredictable sexual dynamics of a marriage; from a day in the life of a New York City prizefighter preparing for a nighttime bout to the evolution of humankind. These male melodramas center on sociality and asociality. They feature male doubles, pairs, and rivals. They explore the romance of men and their machines, and men as machines. They figure intensely conflicted forms of male sexual desire. And they are also very much about male manners, style, taste, and art. Examining the formal, thematic, and theoretical affiliations between Kubrick’s three bodies of work—his photographs, his documentaries, and his feature films—Kubrick’s Men offers new vantages on to the question of gender and sexuality, including the first extended treatment of homosexuality in Kubrick’s male-oriented work.

"By patient accumulation of anecdote and detail, Rustad evolves Shetler’s story into something much more human, and humanly tragic, into a layered inquisition and a reportorial force....suffice it to say Rustad has done what the best storytellers do: tried to track the story to its last twig and then stepped aside." —New York Times Book Review In the vein of Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild, a riveting work of narrative nonfiction centering on the unsolved disappearance of an American backpacker in India—one of at least two dozen tourists who have met a similar fate in the remote and storied Parvati Valley. For centuries, India has enthralled westerners looking for an exotic getaway, a brief immersion in yoga and meditation, or in rare cases, a true pilgrimage to find spiritual revelation. Justin Alexander Shetler, an inveterate traveler trained in wilderness survival, was one such seeker. In his early thirties Justin Alexander Shetler, quit his job at a tech startup and set out on a global journey: across the United States by motorcycle, then down to South America, and on to the Philippines, Thailand, and Nepal, in search of authentic experiences and meaningful encounters, while also documenting his travels on Instagram. His enigmatic character and magnetic personality gained him a devoted following who lived vicariously through his adventures. But the ever restless explorer was driven to pursue ever greater challenges, and greater risks, in what had become a personal quest—his own hero’s journey. In 2016, he made his way to the Parvati Valley, a remote and rugged corner of the Indian Himalayas steeped in mystical tradition yet shrouded in darkness and danger. There, he spent weeks studying under the guidance of a sadhu, an Indian holy man, living and meditating in a cave. At the end of August, accompanied by the sadhu, he set off on a “spiritual journey” to a holy lake—a journey from which he would never return. Lost in the Valley of Death is about one man’s search to find himself, in a country where for many westerners the path to spiritual enlightenment can prove fraught, even treacherous. But it is also a story about all of us and the ways, sometimes extreme, we seek fulfillment in life. Lost in the Valley of Death includes 16 pages of color photographs.