Brought up in a secularized Jewish household on Manhattan's upper Eastside, Nancy Green knows suspiciously little about her parents' past. She knows they were World War II Jewish refugees who were able to escape Germany with precious family heirlooms that are constant reminders of a lost life and world Nancy knows very little about. The longing she has for some kind of spiritual connection first leads her into an encounter with an Hassidic Jewish...

David Plante's dazzling portraits of three influential women in the literary world, now back in print for the first time in decades.
Difficult Women presents portraits of three extraordinary, complicated, and, yes, difficult women, while also raising intriguing and, in their own way, difficult questions about the character and motivations of the keenly and often cruelly observant portraitist himself. The book begins with David Plante’s...

"A rich companion to the first volume of David Plante's memoir, Becoming a Londoner, Worlds Apart explores worlds of experience drawn from the millions of words Plante has put to the page in his diaries over the last fifty years. This new volume doesn't follow sequentially from the first--rather it can be read on its own or as an overlay, building and expanding on the relationships and experiences recalled in Becoming a Londoner. Plante widens the...