Life in the Temperate Zone

Wexelblatt, Robert

Rutgers University Press

Love shared, love in secret, celebrated, exploded. Unrequited longing and love that’s mellowed through the years. Love at long distance, across continents, so close there’s no space to breathe, or never quite close enough. Love lost and love found. Love from the inside out and love from the outside in. Love Notes has it all: a collection of poetry as diverse as the experience of falling in love itself. A shared candied apple, a farewell at Paddington Station, a name scribbled in a notebook, a face that leaves us breathless, a single word that changes our life forever. Love Notes is a rich tapestry of verse woven from fragments of life and those moments that make falling in love so irresistible. And so inevitable. Love is unique, love is universal. Love is everywhere.

Love Notes: A Collection of Romantic Poetry

Literature & Fiction

Hunt, C.V.

Kahn, Aunia

Leila A. Fortier

Neun, Fawn

McNerney, Joan

Moreland, Robert B.

McNabb, Natalie

Petersen Schoonover, Kristi

Ulea, V.

Blaydon, Louise

Poetry

Vagabondage Press

Life In The Temperate Zone (Rutgers Press Fiction)

Literary

Professors at Play

Robert Wexelblatt writes, in the preface to this book of his essays: "I write fiction when I am up to it, poetry when I can't help it, letters when I must, essays the rest of the time. The pieces collected in this book were composed because of a wish to share something, out of fullness of heart, for pleasure, for relief, sometimes for an audience. None was produced merely to hold on to my job as a professor. In a sense, Professors at Play has been written by a professor at play." 
A writer and a professor, Wexelblatt reflects in these seventeen often playful but always provocative essays on teaching, writing, and thinking. He does all three with uncommon clarity and grace. As a teacher he has a knack for creating in the classroom a separate universe in which it is possible for him to impersonate Oscar Wilde (as he does in his essay, "Not Being Earnest") or develop the Platonic concept of chairness into a dizzying exposition of modernism ("Chairness"). As a writer he can turn the simple question, "What Do You Write On?" into an amusing meditation on the act of writing that nonetheless tells the nonwriter what it means to be a writer. As a thinker, Robert Wexelblatt is everywhere, patiently explaining to parents what it means for their children to be in college, exploring Kafka and marriage, musing on mad scientists and heroes, probing the nothing and faculty, making sense out of a subject as unpromising as complaining. 
These essays are worth reading because they are always surprising and always gracefully written. The essay is among the more difficult forms: there is nothing to hide behind. Robert Wexelblatt has nothing to hide. It is a pleasure to watch him at play in this delightful collection.

United States

"Loaded with wit, bristling irony, draped in erudition and studded with metaphysics": so wrote The New York Times Book Review about Robert Wexelblatt's work. Now comes a novel of equal intelligence. Zublinka is a beloved friend, author, and philosopher who, at the age of seventy, lives a rich and varied life of the mind and spirit. Actually, he lives several lives, writing poems and stories under pseudonyms, two of them female. He is also engaged by the lives of others. His dear friend Julia is having some marital difficulties that distress him. Julia's daughter, whom he calls George, adores him, and he writes stories for her, one under the pseudonym, Don Corleone, about "Finbad the Failer." A feminst philosopher condemns and flirts with him. But the story that begins to emerge from the ordinary chronicle of Zublinka's life and mind is far different from that of an academic. Once as a teacher in a country behind the Iron Curtain, Zublinka claimed responsibility for a subversive pamphlet he did not write-and it led to his fleeing to the West. This past continues to weigh on Zublinka, who not only left behind the life he knew but two women he loved-and still loves. He returns to that country after the fall of communist rule and discovers the shocking truth behind his memories. This warm and witty novel of ideas shows that goodness is possible-and in Zublinka palpable-but that goodness is seldom unalloyed. As Zublinka and we learn in the course of this richly rewarding story, the discovery of truth and one's self is the work of a lifetime. Wisdom is possible and hard won. Robert Wexelblatt is Professor of Humanities at Boston University's College of General Studies. He is the author of two story collections, Life in the Temperate Zone and The Decline of Our Neighborhood, and contributor to dozens of literary journals.

Zublinka Among Women

Ken Arnold Books

These tales will take you into the lives of characters you will long remember:      -a peasant boy in war-torn Sui China survives a perilous journey and finds his vocation as a poet       -an American novelist is invited to the European city he has never visited but in which he sets all his books.       -a coed seduces the conductor of a German orchestra then is trapped with both in the middle of a Middle Eastern war.       -an elderly Frenchwoman is interviewed about her time as a model for two famous modernists      In the title story, dream and memory unveil the profound tale of a persecuted Chinese artist and his Americanized daughter.

The Artist Wears Rough Clothing

Lamar University Press

“If these stories were mousetraps, we should all be mice. They are enticing and snap without warning, but the real surprise is their grace. The survivors escape a wee bit wiser, more alert, and creatively perturbed.”  —R. S. Deese, author of Surf Music and We Are Amphibians   “Robert Wexelblatt’s Petites Suites are sweets for the ear and food for the brain. The author’s fertile imagination offers scenarios, sketches, and movements for the mind on every theme and subject under the sun, families, artists, presidents for life, almost lovers, fading lions and hungry cubs. While the themes are stated with a musical precision, developments come smartly and the resolutions are sure and often subtle. A banker who knows where the bucks are hidden prevents a war. A GPS becomes the voice of wisdom. Odysseus confronts a different sort of fidelity. Wexelblatt brings a poet’s phrasing to his verbal music and a philosopher’s depth to his understanding of people, places, art, politics, generational angst, shameful survivors, and necessary compromises. You’ll tune in for a suite, but you'll stay for whole program and you won’t want to miss a note.”  —Robert Knox, author of Suosso's Lane and Gardeners Do It With Their Hands Dirty   The brilliant and inventive author invokes the structure of music in what is too lively to call a collection of stories. As I read, I kept remembering a favorite necklace made of antique beads: some glitter; some shine; some are inscribed with mysterious patterns; some are dark, all connected with invisible thread. Entering into the worlds of these stories is enchanting, invigorating, and often delightfully disorienting. Wexelblatt is a master of leading you down a familiar garden path to an altogether unexpected country. Read at random or from beginning to end. You will find yourself wanting one more story, just one more, and another and another.  —Elizabeth Cunningham, author of The Maeve Chronicles and Murder at the Rummage Sale

Petites Suites

BlazeVOX Books

Fiction. The fourteen stories in HEIBERG'S TWITCH were not selected for their resemblance to one another, but for their differences in character, tone, and form. The aim is to deploy imagination and invention to furnish tales about the variety of human conditions, the scope of thought, the diversity of experience. Settings range from a Scandinavian island to ancient Chinese courts, from the streets of Hyde Park in Boston to the galleries of midtown Manhattan, from Southern California to Eastern Europe, from Africa to South America—in one story, both continents at once. The stories are populated by schoolboys and poets, dictators and delinquents, college girls and composers, businessmen and scientists. Each tale conjures its own world, has its own language, aims to illuminate a distinct experience, a unique situation. Like human life, the stories in HEIBERG'S TWITCH are comic sad, pathetic, perplexing, and tragic.

Heiberg's Twitch

Pelekinesis

After performing a perilous service for the future Emperor, the peasant Chen Hsi-wei turns down the customary rewards in favor of receiving an education. The Court is astonished by this unheard-of request, but orders the strict teacher Shen Kuo to do what he can with the boy. In the course of copying out the words of the ancient masters, Hsi-wei begins writing poems of his own. As a young man, Hsi-wei leaves the capital for a vagabond life, supporting himself by making straw sandals. He encounters people of all stations and occupations, trekking through landscapes both flat and mountainous. He learns of the terrible price of building the Grand Canal, the miseries caused by floods, droughts, and endless wars. To his astonishment, Hsi-wei gains a degree of fame, first as a curiosity, then as a writer whose poems are beloved by the people and pass into the vast life of China.

Hsi-wei Tales

Regal House Publishing

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