This hilarious novel follows the Posner family—two Holocaust survivors and their young son—doing everything they can to avoid one another in Miami in 1972, the site of the Republican and Democratic political conventions, the rise of the counterculture, the Cold War, the desegregation of the old South. This is also the Miami of Gleason, Sinatra, Lansky, and I.B.Singer.

How Sweet It Is!

Literature & Fiction

Rosenbaum, Thane

Literary

Mandel Vilar Press

"Fans of the greater Miami megalopolis rejoice! Finally there's a novel that nails your part of the world!" —Gary Shteyngart, author of Absurdistan and Super Sad True Love Story
"It's hard to resist raising a toast to a book that shows Meyer Lansky, Frank Sinatra, Isaac Bashevis Singer and Muhammad Ali at a Little League Baseball game umpired by Fidel Castro. As Gleason would say, "And awaaaay we go!" —The Washington Post
Set in Miami Beach in 1972, this novel follows the Posner family—two Holocaust survivors, Sophie and Jacob, and their son, Adam—doing everything they can to avoid one another in a city with an infinite supply of colorful diversions. In '72 Miami hosted both the Republican and Democratic political conventions and experienced the rise of the counterculture, the Cold War, and the desegregation of the old South. Miami Beach was to be the Posner's salvation. Instead they discover their lives quickly turning into a Disney World of funhouse mirrors and chaotic rides that give them front row seats through a transformational year in American culture, politics, and history.
Thane Rosenbaum, author of the novels The Stranger Within Sarah Stein, The Golems of Gotham, Second Hand Smoke, and Elijah Visible (winner of the Edward Lewis Wallant Award), is a Senior Fellow at New York University School of Law, where he directs the Forum on Law, Culture, and Society.

Genre Fiction

Raoul Wallenberg, the Swedish diplomat who saved thousands of Budapest Jews in 1944-45, was arrested by the Soviets and taken to Moscow where he disappeared. Now, more than 70 years after these events, many mysteries about Wallenberg’s life and fate persist. As both a literary detective story and historical investigation Alan Lelchuk uses a fictional investigation to explore what really happened.

Searching for Wallenberg: A Novel

LELCHUK, Alan

Yad Vashem, Jerusalem’s memorial to the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis during World War II, also recognizes non-Jewish individuals who risked their lives to save the Jews from the Nazi executioners. One of the trees that line the memorial’s Avenue of the Righteous” was planted to honor Raoul Wallenberg, a Swede. Among the bravest heroes of World War II, he saved about 100,000 Jews. But when the war ended, Wallenberg did not return home to well-earned acclaim. Instead he was arrested by the Soviet troops who marched into Budapest. The Soviet government has declared time and again that he is dead. And, just as often, new witnesses have insisted that Raoul Wallenberg is--or was--still alive in a Soviet prison or a mental hospital. For over seventy years his fate has remained a mystery, and that mystery is the subject of Alan Lelchuk’s novel, Searching for Wallenberg--at once a detective story and an unusual, multilayered love story, with surprising characters, daring plunges into the gaps of history, and an engaging narrative. Here history is enhanced and challenged by fiction

“Homero is one of the planet’s great environmental heroes.”―Jacob Scherr, Director of Global Strategy & Advocacy, Natural Resources Defense Council, Washington, DC  News of the Earth chronicles Homero Aridjis’s relationship with the natural world through his writings and his activism as president of the Grupo de los Cien [Group of 100], Mexico’s influential environmental group composed of one hundred prominent personalities in the arts, culture, and science, which Aridjis founded in 1985. Under his leadership, the group’s efforts led to a ban on the capture and commercialization of sea turtles, legislation reducing the amount of lead in gasoline, daily monitoring of air quality in Mexico City, and official designation of sanctuaries for the monarch butterfly. Aridjis waged a lifelong battle against threats to endangered ecosystems and wildlife in his country, many with global implications, including campaigns to save the gray whale, bottle-nosed dolphin, bee population, giant saguaro cactus, endangered coral reefs, and rainforests of Mexico. This book highlights these crucial battles, with detailed documentation of critical environmental victories.  Homero Aridjis, one of Latin America’s foremost literary figures, is the author of forty-eight books of poetry and prose. He served as Mexico’s Ambassador to Switzerland, The Netherlands, and UNESCO, and as president of PEN International. He received awards from the United Nations (Global 500 Award), the Orion Society, Mikhail Gorbachev, Global Green USA, and the Natural Resources Defense Council.  Betty Ferber Aridjis was born in New York and graduated from Bryn Mawr College. She served as the International Coordinator of the Grupo de los Cien (Group of 100) since its founding in 1985. Her lifelong commitment to the environment was also honored by Mikhail Gorbachev and by Global Green USA with the Green Cross Millennium Award for International Environmental Leadership. She is the translator of several books by Homero Aridjis into English.

News of the Earth

Biographies & Memoirs

Ferber, Betty

ARIDJIS, HOMERO

Professionals & Academics

A Finalist for the Best Translated Book AwardSet at the contact zones between Haiti and the Dominican Republic, this is a polyphonic novel, an intense and sometimes funny pharmacopeia of love lost and humanity regained; a most original combination of Caribbean noir and science-fiction addressing issues of global relevance including novel takes on ecological/apocalyptical imbalance bound to make an impact. A Caribbean zombie—smart, gentlemanly, financially independent, and a top executive at an important pharmaceutical company—becomes obsessed with finding the formula that would reverse his condition and allow him to become "a real person." In the process, three of his closest collaborators (cerebral and calculating Isadore, wide-eyed and sentimental Mathilde, and rambunctious Patricia), guide the reluctant and baffled scientist through the unpredictable intersections of love, passion, empathy, and humanity. But the playful maze of jealousy and amorous intrigue that a living being would find easy to negotiate represents an insurmountable tangle of dangerous ambiguities for our "undead" protagonist. Wicked Weeds is put together from Isadore's scrapbook, where she has collected her boss' scientific goals and existential agony, as well as her own reflections about growing up as a Haitian descendant in the Dominican Republic and what it really means to be human. The end result is a precise combination of Caribbean noir and science-fiction, Latin American style. Wicked Weeds, A Zombie Novel combines Cabiya's expertise in fiction, graphic novels and film to create a memorable literary zombie novel of a dead man's search for his lost humanity that can now take its place alongside other leading similar novels like Jonathan Mayberry's Patient Zero, S.G. Browne's Breathers: A Zombie's Lament, Daryl Gregory's Raising Sony Mayhall, World War Z by Max Brooks, and The Reapers Are The Angels by Alden Bell. As for the novel's immersion in orality and Caribbean folk traditions and noir it can very well align with Wade Davis' The Serpent and the Rainbow and Karen Russell's St. Lucy's Home for Girls Raised by Wolves.

Wicked Weeds: A Zombie Novel

Cabiya, Pedro

United States

In this bewitching tale, fictional characters,the African American couple Horace and Joleen Littlejohn, interact with a real historical character, boxing champion Max Baer. Presenting themselves as husband and wife, Horace and Joleen are, in fact, brother and sister. They become constant companions and sometime lovers to Max in this story about Max’s life in and out of the ring.

Max Baer and the Star of David: A Novel

Neugeboren, Jay

This novel is inspired by a true historical event. Before Theodore Herzl there was Mordecai Manuel Noah, an American journalist, diplomat, playwright, and visionary. In September 1825 he bought Grand Island, downriver from Niagara Falls, from the local Native Americans as a place of refuge for the Jewish people and called it Ararat.” But no Jews came. What if they had followed Noah’s call? In Nava Semel’s alternate history Jews from throughout the world flee persecution and come to Ararat. Isra Isle becomes the smallest state in the US. Israel does not exist, and there was no Holocaust. In exploring this what-if scenario, Semel stimulates new thinking about memory, Jewish/Israeli identity, attitudes toward minorities, women in top political positions, and the place of cultural heritage. The novel is divided into three parts. Part 1, a detective story, opens in September 2001 when Liam Emanuel, an Israeli descendant of Noah, learns about and inherits this island. He leaves Israel intending to reclaim this Promised Land” in America. Shortly after he arrives in America Liam disappears. Simon T. Lenox, a Native American police investigator, tries to recover Israel’s missing son.” Part 2 flashes back to the time and events surrounding Mordecai Noah’s purchase of the island from the local Native Americans. Part 3 poses an alternate history: the rise of a successful modern Jewish city-state, Isra Isle, on the northern New York and Canadian bordera metropolis that looks remarkably like New York City both before and after 9/11in which the Jewish female governor campaigns to become president of the United States. Nava Semel has published novels, short stories, poetry, plays, children's books, and a number of TV scripts. Her books have been translated and published in many countries. Her book, Becoming Gershona, received the 1990 National Jewish Book Award in the US.

Isra-Isle: A Novel

Semel, Nava

Winner of the Modern Language Association’s Fania &amp; Yaakov Leviant Memorial Prize in Yiddish Studies (2018)Ellen Cassedy and Yermiyahu Ahron Taub (the translators) on encountering Blume Lempel’s stories wrote: "When we began reading and translating, we didn’t know we were going to find a mother drawn into an incestuous relationship with her blind son. We didn’t know we’d meet a young woman lying on the table at an abortion clinic. We didn’t know we’d meet a middle-aged woman full of erotic imaginings as she readies herself for a blind date. Buried in this forgotten Yiddish-language material, we found modernist stories and modernist story-telling techniques imagine reading Gabriel Garcia Marquez with the conversational touch of Grace Paley." Lempel (19071999) was one of a small number of writers in the United States who wrote in Yiddish into the 1990s. Though many of her stories opened a window on the Old World and the Holocaust, she did not confine herself to these landscapes or themes. She often wrote about the margins of society, and about subjects considered untouchable. her prize-winning fiction is remarkable for its psychological acuity, its unflinching examination of erotic themes and gender relations, and its technical virtuosity. Mirroring the dislocation of mostly women protagonists, her stories move between present and past, Old World and New, dream and reality. While many of her stories opened a window on the Old World and the Holocaust, she also wrote about the margins of society, about subjects considered untouchable, among them abortion, prostitution, women's erotic imaginings, and even incest. She illuminated the inner lives of her charactersmostly women. Her storylines migrate between past and present, Old World and New, dream and reality, modern-day New York and prewar Poland, bedtime story and passionate romance, and old-age dementia and girlhood dreams. Immigrating to New York when Hitler rose to power, Blume Lempel began publishing her short stories in 1945. By the 1970s her work had become known throughout the Yiddish literary world. When she died in 1999, the Yiddish paper Forverts wrote: "Yiddish literature has lost one of its most remarkable women writers." Ellen Cassedy, translator, is author of the award-winning study "We Are Here", about the Lithuanian Holocaust. With her colleague Yermiyahu Ahron Taub, they received the Yiddish Book Center 2012 Translation Prize for translating Blume Lempel. Yermiyahu Ahron Taub is the author of several books of poetry, including "Prayers of a Heretic/Tfiles fun an apikoyres" (2013),"Uncle Feygele"(2011), and "What Stillness Illuminated/Vos shtilkayt hot baloykhtn (2008)."

Oedipus in Brooklyn and Other Stories

Lempel, Blume

A year in Jerusalem questioning American Jews who "return" to Israel and to traditional religion changes Wendy Goldberg's life forever.
Every year, 700,000 Americans visit Israel. Wendy Goldberg spends a year in Jerusalem questioning the lives of American Jews who do "Aliya"—a return both to Israel itself and to traditional religious practices. Are they sincere? Are they happier? The unexpected answers and Wendy's experiences (a bus bombing, a funeral, an unexpected suicide, a love affair, and a lawsuit) lead her to reconsider her own true Jewish identity.
The ambitious graduate student is certain she's on the path to academic glory. But from the moment her plane takes off Wendy is confronted with unanswerable questions of faith and identity. As she becomes immersed in the rhythm of Israeli life, her sense of distance from it fades. Her ability to be an outside observer terminates abruptly when a student commits a horrible act immediately after his interview with her. Wendy is not sure how or if she is implicated in his action, but in her search for understanding, she is led to knowledge and love in unforeseen places.
Beth Kissileff, a resident of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, has received fellowships from Yaddo and the National Endowment for the Humanities. She has taught at Carleton College, the University of Minnesota, Smith College, and Mount Holyoke College. Her fiction and nonfiction on Israeli cultural, literary, and religious topics appears regularly in many publications including the New York Times, The Forward, and The Jerusalem Post. She also the editor of a new book, Reading Genesis: Beginnings.

Questioning Return: A Novel

Kissileff, Beth

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Books by Mandel Vilar Press

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Mandel Vilar Press publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

How Sweet It Is!

How Sweet It Is!

Searching for Wallenberg: A Novel

Searching for Wallenberg: A Novel

News of the Earth

Wicked Weeds: A Zombie Novel

Max Baer and the Star of David: A Novel

Isra-Isle: A Novel

Oedipus in Brooklyn and Other Stories

Questioning Return: A Novel