This time-defying odyssey from the 1960s to the Lower East Side of New York at the turn of the 20th century features a detour through heaven on the wings of a derelict angel.

Steve Stern is a consummate spinner of tales whose acclaimed work has been hailed as having the idiosyncratic bounce and antic fever of a Jewish Huck Finn. In his acclaimed new novel he interweaves three narratives about characters who take flight from their ordinary lives and are plunged into extrarordinary circumstances. At the center of it all is an unfinished manuscript — an fictional adventure about a fallen angel named Mocky and his half mortal son Nachman, who both take up residence on New York's Lower East Side circa 1910. Their story has been written by Nathan Hart, a timid proofreader for The Jewish Daily Forward, who woos a young woman named Keni with his exotic tale as he creates it, and who is eventually drawn into a dangerous Jewish underworld of arsonists, horse poisoners, and thieves. More than half a century later, Keni, on her deathbed, gives Nathan's now tattered manuscript to her wayward young nephew, Saul, with the injunction that Saul complete the novel himself. Saul's evasion of the task prompts a picaresque journey into the crucible of the sixties, one fueled by sex, drugs, and the dust of a golem in the attic of a medieval synagogue in Prague. Dexterously juggling the stories of Saul, Nathan, and Mocky, Stern has created a magical tour de force of the storytellers art, one that celebrates the turbulent romance between past and present, art and obsession.

Jewish teachings tell of the angels who link heaven and earth.

Bob Slocum was living the American dream. He had a beautiful wife, three lovely children, a nice house...and all the mistresses he desired. He had it all -- all, that is, but happiness. Slocum was discontent. Inevitably, inexorably, his discontent deteriorated into desolation until...something happened. Something Happened is Joseph Heller's wonderfully inventive and controversial second novel satirizing business life and American culture. The story is told as if the reader was overhearing the patter of Bob Slocum's brain -- recording what is going on at the office, as well as his fantasies and memories that complete the story of his life. The result is a novel as original and memorable as his Catch-22.

"An absolutely dazzling entertainment. . . . Arousing on every level—political, erotic, intellectual, and above all, humorous." —Newsweek "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting calls itself a novel, although it is part fairy tale, part literary criticism, part political tract, part musicology, and part autobiography. It can call itself whatever it wants to, because the whole is genius." —New York Times Rich in its stories, characters, and imaginative range, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is the novel that brought Milan Kundera his first big international success in the late 1970s. Like all his work, it is valuable for far more than its historical implications. In seven wonderfully integrated parts, different aspects of human existence are magnified and reduced, reordered and emphasized, newly examined, analyzed, and experienced.

In the midst of the remarkable revival of interest and belief in angels comes this handsomely illustrated reference work--the fruit of 16 years of research in Talmudic, gnostic, cabalistic, apocalyptic, patristic, and legendary texts. "A wacky and wonderful compendium of angelic lore".--Time. Illustrations.

"In the 25 years since [Stern] published his first book, younger Jewish writers have run with a similar shtick . . . But Stern was there first." —The Toronto Globe and Mail The Book of Mischief triumphantly showcases twenty-five years of outstanding work by one of our true masters of the short story. Steve Stern's stories take us from the unlikely old Jewish quarter of the Pinch in Memphis to a turn-of-thecentury immigrant community in New York; from the market towns of Eastern Europe to a down-at-the-heels Catskills resort. Along the way we meet a motley assortment of characters: Mendy Dreyfus, whose bungee jump goes uncannily awry; Elijah the prophet turned voyeur; and the misfit Zelik Rifkin, who discovers the tree of dreams. Perhaps it's no surprise that Kafka's cockroach also makes an appearance in these pages, animated as they are by instances of bewildering transformation. The earthbound take flight, the meek turn incendiary, the powerless find unwonted fame. Weaving his particular brand of mischief from the wondrous and the macabre, Stern transforms us all through the power of his brilliant imagination.

Retells a folktale in which Lailah, a guardian angel, places the indentation that everyone has on the upper lip just before a baby is born.

Cacciari, academic (aesthetics, U. of Venice) and mayor of Venice as of 1993, surveys the history of angels in Judaic, Islamic, and Christian traditions; and how Dante, Rilke, Kafka, and other writers have used the metaphor of angels to speak about the phenomenology of language. Translated from the

Over 150 tales from the Talmud, the Zohar, Jewish folktales, and Hasidic lore.