I have always been interested in stories about misplaced guilt, probably because my father died when I was very young and I grew up with a strong sense of survivor guilt. Miscarriages of justice for me dramatize the unjust verdicts passed against us in our hearts when we lose a loved one. Whether writing nonfiction for The New York Times Magazine and The Wall Street Journal or fiction for Penguin and Little Brown, this theme influences all my work.
“Someone must have been telling lies about Joseph K., for without having done anything wrong he was arrested one fine morning.” So Kafka introduces us to a baroque, magical-realist, and often hilarious shadow-world of shabby, corrupt justice. This is the finest fictional study—and parody—ever created of conscience gone berserk. I love it most of all for its devout darkness that sparkles with humor. The sly derision of depressive, guilty thoughts is like an escape hatch from the labyrinth of despair.
"Someone must have been telling lies about Josef K., he knew he had done nothing wrong but, one morning, he was arrested." From its gripping first sentence onward, this novel exemplifies the term ""Kafkaesque." Its darkly humorous narrative recounts a bank clerk's entrapment — based on an undisclosed charge — in a maze of nonsensical rules and bureaucratic roadblocks. Written in 1914 and published posthumously in 1925, Kafka's engrossing parable about the human condition plunges an isolated individual into an impersonal, illogical system. Josef K.'s ordeals raise provocative, ever-relevant issues related to the role of government and the nature of…
Alabama lawyer Atticus Finch has an unerring sense of decency and good aim too. In addition to exonerating an innocent man and defying the racism of his day, he shoots a rabid dog in the street, which much impresses his son Jem. What I like most about Atticus Finch, however, is his expansive empathy, which nevertheless does not impair his sense of justice. He’s the lawyer Joseph K. needed!
'Shoot all the bluejays you want, if you can hit 'em, but remember it's a sin to kill a mockingbird.'
Atticus Finch gives this advice to his children as he defends the real mockingbird of this classic novel - a black man charged with attacking a white girl. Through the eyes of Scout and Jem Finch, Lee explores the issues of race and class in the Deep South of the 1930s with compassion and humour. She also creates one of the great heroes of literature in their father, whose lone struggle for justice pricks the conscience of a town steeped…
If you want to know what Kafka’s The Trial would have been like without a sense of humor, try reading Aeschylus. Though this ancient Greek tragedian does not aim for laughs (and does not get any!) his depiction of the furies of conscience has an elemental power and purity like a Beethoven motif or a Picasso masterpiece. The Eumenides may well be the first-ever courtroom drama, with Orestes on trial for killing his mother Clytemnestra. Aeschylus goes straight at the most difficult of human emotions—guilt—and like Sophocles, he explores it specifically in a family context. Who, after all, makes us more guilty than our parents?
Professor Sommerstein here presents a freshly constituted text, with introduction and commentary, of Eumenides, the climactic play of the only surviving complete Greek tragic trilogy, the Oresteia of Aeschylus. Eumenides is of all Athenian tragic dramas the one most consciously designed to be relevant to the situation of the Athenian state at the time of its performance (458 BC), and seems to have contained daring innovations both in technique and in ideas. The introduction and commentary to this edition seek to bring out how Aeschylus shaped to his purpose the legends he inherited, and ended the tragic story of Agamemnon's…
Reading Dostoevsky is not easy, but there’s a reason he was Sigmund Freud’s favorite Russian writer: he wrote unblinkingly about guilt and rage and shame, regardless of how hard it is to contemplate these ugly facets of the self. He is a heroic writer, standing on a precipice, refusing to back down from the cold and snow and biting wind. And in recording the most difficult truths, he warms me up like a winter fire lasting as long into the night as this 1000-page behemoth of classic literature on a patricide trial.
Winner of the Pen/Book-of-the-Month Club Translation Prize
The award-winning translation of Fyodor Dostoevsky's classic novel of psychological realism.
The Brothers Karamasov is a murder mystery, a courtroom drama, and an exploration of erotic rivalry in a series of triangular love affairs involving the “wicked and sentimental” Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov and his three sons―the impulsive and sensual Dmitri; the coldly rational Ivan; and the healthy, red-cheeked young novice Alyosha. Through the gripping events of their story, Dostoevsky portrays the whole of Russian life, is social and spiritual striving, in what was both the golden age and a tragic turning point in…
You may not think of The Merchant of Venice as a trial book, but the majority of Act IV takes place in a Venice courtroom where Shylock, Antonio, Bassanio, and the Duke thrash out the ‘pound of flesh’ business. In a sense, the play itself is a corrupt judgment against Jews, trafficking as it does in nasty anti-Semitic stereotypes. Shakespeare left it to later writers to give a more well-rounded account of Jewish people. But Merchant is at the same time a fine study of the rage that such racial injustice provokes, and as with pretty much everything Shakespeare ever wrote, it’s full of poetic imagery and memorably wise in every line.
In The Merchant of Venice, the path to marriage is hazardous. To win Portia, Bassanio must pass a test prescribed by her father’s will, choosing correctly among three caskets or chests. If he fails, he may never marry at all.
Bassanio and Portia also face a magnificent villain, the moneylender Shylock. In creating Shylock, Shakespeare seems to have shared in a widespread prejudice against Jews. Shylock would have been regarded as a villain because he was a Jew. Yet he gives such powerful expression to his alienation due to the hatred around him that, in many productions, he emerges as…
The Jump Artist is a work of realist, psychological fiction based on the true story of photographer Philippe Halsman, who was falsely convicted of murdering his father in the Tyrolean Alps in 1928. The events scarred him forever, but he kept them secret as he went on to become one of the most famous portrait photographers who ever lived, capturing classic images of everyone from Einstein to Marilyn Monroe. Called “brilliant” by The Guardian, The Jump Artist tells the extraordinarytale of a man who transforms himself from a victim of anti-Semitism into a purveyor of the marvelous. The novel won the 2011 Rohr Prize for Jewish Literature.
I’ve always been fascinated by group dynamics, large and small. Why things functioned well, why they didn’t. It’s possible my ability to empathize and use humor as a consensus-builder is the reason I was elected president of a homeowners association, a music production association, and even an agricultural group. Books were not particularly involved in this fascination! But in recent years, experiencing the breakdown of civility and trust in our political and cultural discourse, I’ve taken a more analytical view of the dynamics. These books, in their very different ways, have taught me lessons about life, understanding those with different beliefs, and finding ways to connect and move forward.
We’ve all experienced the overwhelming level of political and social divisiveness in our country. This invisible “virus” of negativity is, in part, the result of the name-calling and heated rhetoric that has become commonplace among commentators and elected leaders alike.
My book provides a clear perspective on the historical and modern-day causes of our nation's divisive state. It then proposes easy-to-understand solutions—an action plan for our elected leaders and citizens as well. Rather than a scholarly treatment of a complex topic, the book challenges us to take the obvious steps required of those living in a free democracy. And it…
Uniting the States of America: A Self-Care Plan for a Wounded Nation
Lyle Greenfield's "Uniting the States of America―A Self-Care Plan for a Wounded Nation" is a work of nonfiction and opinion. Incorporating the lessons of history and the ideas and wisdom of many, it is intended as both an educational resource and a call-to-action for citizens concerned about the politically and culturally divided state of our Union. A situation that has raised alarm for the very future of our democracy.
First, the book clearly identifies the causes of what has become a national crisis of belief in and love for our country. How the divisiveness and hostility rampant in our political…
