40 stories in the life of a village schoolteacher.

A warm, witty memoir of Greenwich Village in the late 1950s and ’60s by a young rabbi who led a local synagogue in the midst of it all. In the late fifties and sixties, Greenwich Village was the quirkiest, most charming, jazzy, eccentric, and urban of environments, the center of all that was both quaint and “cool”: brownstones and beatniks, coffeehouses and college students, folksingers and freethinkers, poets and “prophets.” Into this fascinating mix of cultural archetypes came a young rabbi, Harvey M. Tattelbaum, who became known as the Village Rabbi of the Village Temple. The spirit of Sholom Aleichem infuses his Tales of the Village Rabbi, a touching and laugh‐out‐loud-funny memoir of his tenure at a small synagogue in the heart of Greenwich Village. Though his years in this magical place were productive and soul‐filling, rabbinical training had not exactly prepared him for the bikers, thieves, ex‐cons, eccentric old ladies, drug users, cleavage‐baring brides, and other Village denizens he encountered while serving the congregants of his spirited little temple. Rabbi Tattelbaum shares his insider's tales—both downtown and uptown—of wayward weddings (and funerals), contentious Temple boards, irreverent interfaith shenanigans, heartaches, and triumphs. But the Tales also reveal a deep personal struggle with some of the most profound philosophical problems of ancient and modern religion, and are filled with a warm, humane, and rational approach to spirituality and religious meaning.

In a quiet village, disaster strikes in the form of an apparent, vicious murder. This is followed by a series of bizarre deaths. The frightened villagers seek supernatural explanations. All the superstition that lay under the peaceful life of the villagers surface. Who was the murderer? In a tale of murder, mystery, fear and magic, find out if the villagers would be able to comprehend and fight the forces against them in The Village of Shadows.

From a new literary star comes a beautifully crafted story about a group of women in a Colombian village who find their lives changed while their husbands and sons are away fighting a deadly civil war. The women of Mariquita - made widows when their men are swept away by the army or rebel forces - learn hard lessons about love and survival. Forced to grow in extraordinary ways, they challenge the tenets of male-dominated society, discover power with all its pitfalls and strive to create an entirely new social order, an all-female utopia. Their narrative is punctuated by short vignettes of the individual travails of the men and boys - left-wing guerrillas, right-wing paramilitaries, national army officers and civilians - caught amidst these hellish forces. For the first 18 years of his life, the author, James Can, lived in his native Colombia and this pitch-perfect book - darkly comedic, its characters brilliantly etched - is a mighty achievement, an entirely fresh, startling perspective to Colombia's catastrophe where the longest and bloodiest civil war in this hemisphere has raged for 40 years.

Mysterious goings-on in the village of Turnham Malpas... The village school is to get a new head, and the inhabitants of Turnham Malpas await her arrival with curiosity. At first sight, Kate Pascoe seems ideal. She's young, pretty and obviously loves her job. But when she introduces meditation classes for her ten-year-olds, and even tree-hugging, the villagers begin to think again. Then a strange malaise afflicts the whole village: lights are seen in Sykes Wood at night; a dog long dead appears to come to life and a sudden shocking death plunges the village into a state of superstitious dread. And always at the eye of the storm is Kate Pascoe...

Mama Panya is alarmed at the market when her son Adika invites all of their friends to come over for pancakes. However will she feed them all? This clever and heart-warming story about village life teaches children the benefits of sharing as well as introducing simple Swahili phrases.

The Missionary’s Curse tells the story of a Chinese village that has been Catholic since the seventeenth century, drawing direct connections between its history, the globalizing church, and the nation. Harrison recounts the popular folk tales of merchants and peasants who once adopted Catholic rituals and teachings for their own purposes, only to find themselves in conflict with the orthodoxy of Franciscan missionaries arriving from Italy. The village’s long religious history, combined with the similarities between Chinese folk religion and Italian Catholicism, forces us to rethink the extreme violence committed in the area during the Boxer Uprising. The author also follows nineteenth century Chinese priests who campaigned against missionary control, up through the founding of the official church by the Communist Party in the 1950s. Harrison’s in-depth study provides a rare insight into villager experiences during the Socialist Education Movement and Cultural Revolution, as well as the growth of Christianity in China in recent years. She makes the compelling argument that Catholic practice in the village, rather than adopting Chinese forms in a gradual process of acculturation, has in fact become increasingly similar to those of Catholics in other parts of the world.