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A rarity of enormous interest, this refurbished Hebrew translation of an Arthurian romance is the only known text of its kind in existence. Based on the writings of an anonymous Italian Jew in 1279, the author presents two stories. The first relates Merlin's role in the seductions of Igerna by Pendragon and the consequent birth of Arthur. The second tells of Arthur's rise to royal glory, of Lancelot's affair with Guinevere, his meeting with the Maid of Askalot, and his skill at a jousting tournament. This romance exists in a unique copy at the Vatican Library, which Curt Leviant personally examined. He offers a highly readable version of that text in corrected Hebrew with graceful English transliteration on facing pages, and an analysis of Jewish aspects of the piece. He also traces its origins to an Old French tale. Not just a literary curiosity, this is at once fine scholarship and compelling proof of the vibrant interaction between Judaism and other cultures of medieval Europe.

In Bociany, Rosenfarb offers completely absorbing portrayals of Jews and Christians from several walks of life in the shtetl. Her primary characters are the scribe's widow Hindele, her son Yacov, the chalk vendor Yossele Abedale, and his daughter Binele. Jewish relations with neighboring Catholics are generally civil, if complicated. Despite living next door to a convent, Hindele finds the nuns' behavior implacably alien.Rosenfarb establishes an indelible sense of place, evoking its charm and the shtetl residents' ease with the natural world. Her vivid characters and portrait of the preurban, pre-Holocaust world ring true. Yet even in isolated Bociany, new ideas-socialism, Zionism, Polish nationalism, secularism-begin to challenge the shtetl's traditional agrarian and mercantile economy.

This collection speaks to common themes and strategies in women's writing about their different worlds, from Margaret Cavendish's seventeenth-century Blazing World of the North Pole to the "men-less" islands of the French writer Scudery to the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century utopias of Shelley and Gaskell, and science fiction pulps, finishing with the more contemporary feminist fictions of Le Guin, Wittig, Piercy, and Michison. It shows that these fictions historically speak to each other and together amount to a literary tradition of women's writing about a better place.

Cited in Adirondack Life as one of the twenty-five most collectible books about the Adirondacks ever to appear, these essays were first published in book form in 1878. Warner's main theme is the small, often-ludicrous figure that the human being cuts in the wilderness. His urbane satire takes the starch out of the tin-can and paper collar tourists who were beginning to flock to the Adirondacks. Warner also appeals to the sensibilities of his readers, then and now, as in the piece on A-Hunting of the Deer, which is written from the deer's point of view. And in dead pan worthy of his friend and neighbor Mark Twain, he frequently pulls the reader's leg, as in his description of a hastily built woods shanty: It needs but a few of these skins to cover the roof, and they make a perfectly watertight roof, except when it rains. Warner's love of nature, combined with his humor and social satire, makes In the Wilderness as good a read now as it was more than a century ago.

This book is really a "best of," as chosen by the author himself. These are Carmer's favorite pieces, drawn from three decades of work. He mixes leisurely reminiscences with folklore, verse, and portraits of Upstate's diverse population.Geographically, they range from Niagara Falls to Montauk Point, and include pieces on the fate of Native Americans, ghost stories, tall stories, character sketches, a piece on the erosion of New York State's natural beauty, as well as poems and works of wit and humor.

Thirty years ago, John Keats and his family purchased a two-acre island in the St. Lawrence River, at a time when boats were still lovingly crafted of wood and an island could be had for $4,000. Depending on the elements and on their own resourcefulness, the Keats family thrives in the rhythms of island life-fishing, learning to navigate the river and read the clouds for weather, acquiring an "Indian" view of time, maintaining a house, several boats, and three children on a windswept rock. But more than a book about a single family's adventures, this one is strong witness that we all need islands of our own in the midst of life. Originally published in 1974, Of Time and an Island was chosen as a Book-of-the-Month Club alternate selection.