Liebestod: Opera Buffa with Leib Goldkorn

Liebestod: Opera Buffa with Leib Goldkorn

Author: Leslie Epstein

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2012-02-13

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 0393081311

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After a trip home to Moravia reveals that his father is not a businessman but actually a great composer, unsuccessful musician Leib Goldkorn returns to New York to launch a production of his father's opera "Rubezahl" to disastrous results.


Hill of Beans

Hill of Beans

Author: Leslie Epstein

Publisher: University of New Mexico Press

Published: 2021-03-01

Total Pages: 442

ISBN-13: 0826362605

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The film Casablanca opens with the words, “With the coming of the Second World War, many eyes in imprisoned Europe turned hopefully, or desperately, toward the freedom of the Americas.” Leslie Epstein’s Hill of Beans is the story of how one nation, one industry, and in particular one man responded to that desperate hope. That man is Jack Warner. His impossible goal is to make world events—most importantly, the invasion of North Africa by British and American forces in 1942—coincide with the release of his new film about a group of refugees marooned in Morocco. Arrayed against him are Stalin and Hitler, as well as Josef Goebbels, Franklin Roosevelt, a powerful gossip columnist, and above all a beautiful young woman with a terrible secret. His only weapons are his hutzpah and his heroism as he struggles to bring cinema and city, conflict and conference together in an epic command performance. Hill of Beans is the novel that Leslie Epstein—the son and nephew of Philip and Julius Epstein, the screenwriters of Casablanca—was born to write.


Playing with Fire

Playing with Fire

Author: Tess Gerritsen

Publisher: Ballantine Books

Published: 2016-08-02

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 1101884363

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A gripping standalone thriller by the New York Times bestselling author of the Rizzoli & Isles series INTERNATIONAL THRILLER WRITERS AWARD FINALIST • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY LOS ANGELES TIMES AND SUSPENSE MAGAZINE In a shadowy antiques shop in Rome, violinist Julia Ansdell happens upon a curious piece of music—the Incendio waltz—and is immediately entranced by its unusual composition. Full of passion, torment, and chilling beauty, and seemingly unknown to the world, the waltz, its mournful minor key, its feverish arpeggios, appear to dance with a strange life of their own. Julia is determined to master the complex work and make its melody heard. Back home in Boston, from the moment Julia’s bow moves across the strings, drawing the waltz’s fiery notes into the air, something strange is stirred—and Julia’s world comes under threat. The music has a terrifying and inexplicable effect on her young daughter, who seems violently transformed. Convinced that the hypnotic strains of Incendio are weaving a malevolent spell, Julia sets out to discover the man and the meaning behind the score. Her quest beckons Julia to the ancient city of Venice, where she uncovers a dark, decades-old secret involving a dangerously powerful family that will stop at nothing to keep Julia from bringing the truth to light. Praise for Playing with Fire “Compelling . . . I defy you to read the first chapter and not singe your fingers reading the rest.”—David Baldacci “One of the best and most original thrillers of the year.”—Providence Journal “[A] novel brimming with emotion, literary description, and psychological suspense.”—The Huffington Post “Will make readers drop everything to immerse themselves in its propulsive dual narrative.”—Los Angeles Times


Einstein's Jewish Science

Einstein's Jewish Science

Author: Steven Gimbel

Publisher: JHU Press

Published: 2012-05-21

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 1421405547

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This volume intertwines science, history, philosophy, theology, and politics in fresh and fascinating ways to solve the multifaceted riddle of what religion means - and what it means to science.


The Eighth Wonder of the World

The Eighth Wonder of the World

Author: Leslie Epstein

Publisher: Handsel Books

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 480

ISBN-13:

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From the author of "King of the Jews" and "San Remo Drive" comes a new novel that strikingly reimagines Fascist Italy.


Pinto and Sons

Pinto and Sons

Author: Leslie Epstein

Publisher: Quid Pro Books

Published: 2014-09-19

Total Pages: 555

ISBN-13: 1610272706

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In the fall of 1846, young medical student Adolph Pinto witnesses a demonstration of anesthesia and sets off on a lifelong quest to bring "life without pain" to the masses. A darkly comic and sweeping novel in which Pinto endures every tribulation with hope. This ironic comedy by the author of the acclaimed Leib Goldkorn series and King of the Jews follows Pinto, a Hungarian Jew and former medical student, who takes the wrong ship and winds up out West during the craze of the California Gold Rush. Never discouraged, he tries to bring scientific enlightenment to a band of boys from the local Modoc Indian tribe. But strikes and explosions erupt at the nearby gold mine where the Modocs have been enslaved, turning his attempt at utopia into Dante's hell. "A greathearted saga of ambition, hope and loss... Pinto and Sons is a fantastic epic of the heroic age of applied science, a fit book to put on the shelf with the great tall tales of American expansion.... Only lengthy quotation would do justice to the hilarity, the excitement, the passion of this enterprise." — New York Times Book Review "A wild wacky, wonderful novel.... The wonderful affirmation of this novel gives it its final power." — Kevin Starr, Boston Globe


King of the Jews

King of the Jews

Author: Leslie Epstein

Publisher: Other Press, LLC

Published: 2010-06-22

Total Pages: 396

ISBN-13: 1590514327

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New in Paperback This 1979 classic tells the darkly humorous story of I.C. Trumpelman, a man whose fancy determines the fate of others. Chosen as the head of a Judenrat, Trumpelman thrives on the power granted him and creates an authoritarian regime of his own within the ghetto. By turns a con man, charismatic leader and merciless dictator, Trumpelman reveals himself as an extraordinarily complex protagonist. Now available in a new paperback edition from Handsel Books, King of the Jews will continue to be an extraordinary vision of occupied Poland, and offer stunning insight through the trappings of history to questions of equal moral complexity today. "Mature, brilliantly sustained, thoroughly engrossing." -Newsweek "The best book yet to be written on the Holocaust. A superb novel." -San Francisco Chronicle "Remarkable. A lesson in what artistic restraint can do to help us imagine the dark places in our history." -The New York Times Book Review "Profoundly daring...Epstein can summon up life from the bottom of despair." -The Boston Globe "Epstein has done the impossible. He has shown what the power of art--of his art—can reveal of the depths of the unspeakable." -The Philadelphia Inquirer


Ice Fire Water: A Leib Goldkorn Cocktail

Ice Fire Water: A Leib Goldkorn Cocktail

Author: Leslie Epstein

Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company

Published: 2011-08-08

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 039334262X

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"At once a travel tale, a historical meditation, a Holocaust revenge fantasy, and a bedroom farce."—D. T. Max, New York Times Book Review Leib Goldkorn, aged musician, first appeared almost a quarter-century ago in The Steinway Quintet. Now Leib has replaced his magic flute with his phallus: it is love, longing, and the quest for sexual fulfillment that must stave off both his own death and the imminent destruction of the Jews. In Ice he rescues the celebrated skater Sonja Henie from Hitler's clutches. In Fire his paramour is Carmen Miranda. And in Water he engages in a South Sea Island intrigue with a famous swimming star of the 1940s. Meanwhile, in the present, Leib seeks consummation with three other inamoratas: Clara, his wife; Hustler model Miss Crystal Knight; and the critic Michiko Kakutani (causing a real-life literary scandal). In this "wickedly funny" (Elle) and no less heartbreaking novel, Leib Goldkorn emerges as one of American literature's most enduring, and endearing, creations. A New York Times Notable Book; a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year.


Goldkorn Tales

Goldkorn Tales

Author: Leslie Epstein

Publisher:

Published: 1998

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780870744358

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Epstein first introduced Leib Goldkorn in "The Steinway Quintet," a novella which received the American Academy of Arts and Letters' award for Distinguished Achievement in Literature. In this volume, Goldkorn--Holocaust survivor, flautist, and pianist--is back in an expanded account of the original novella along with two other long tales that continue his richly comic spiral of misadventures that are at once comedies of manners and serious accounts of culture colliding with casual violence.