“Electrifying…sparkles with Manger’s song and poetry, and is brilliantly layered with literary and folkloric references.” — Tablet “There is something joyous about Manger’s playful language.” — The Jewish Chronicle The raucously witty Yiddish classic about a Jewish Paradise afflicted by very human temptations and pains — a delightful new translation perfect for fans of Michael Chabon Witty, playful and slyly profound, this story of a young angel expelled from Paradise is the only novel by one of the great Yiddish writers, which was written just before the outbreak of World War II. As a result of a crafty trick, the expelled angel retains the memory of his previous life when he’s born as a Yiddish-fluent baby mortal on Earth. The humans around him plead for details of that other realm, but the Paradise of his mischievous stories is far from their expectations: a world of drunken angels, lewd patriarchs and the very same divisions and temptations that shape the human world. Published here in a lively new translation by Robert Adler Peckerar, The Book of Paradise is a comic masterpiece from poet-satirist Itzik Manger that irreverently blurs the boundaries between ancient and modern and sacred and profane, where the shtetl is heaven, and heaven is the shtetl.

In 1967 the Peace Corps sent P. F. Kluge to paradise - or so the American possessions in Micronesia seemed. His assignment was as noble as it was adventurous: to help the people of those half-forgotten Pacific islands move from old to new, so that paradise would have prosperity and freedom as well as physical beauty. He immersed himself in the lives of the diverse peoples of the islands. He composed speeches for their leaders. He wrote a stirring manifesto that became the Preamble to the Constitution of Micronesia. He began a friendship with a man who would one day be president of Palau. And then, a generation later, P. F. Kluge went back. . . . The result is a book the New Yorker called "remarkably effective," the Economist deemed "terrific"; a book Smithsonian Magazine found to be "written from the heart." The Edge of Paradise shows the impact and ironies of America's presence in an undeveloped part of the world, how perhaps there's no way "a big place can touch a little one without harming it."

A companion to the epic poem Paradise Lost, John Milton's Paradise Regained describes the temptation of Christ. After Adam and Eve are expelled from the Garden of Eden, Satan and the fallen angels stay on earth to lead people astray. But when God sends Jesus, the promised savior, to earth, Satan prepares himself for battle. As an adult, Jesus goes into the wilderness to gain strength and courage. He fasts for 40 days and nights, after which Satan tempts him with food, power, and riches. But Jesus refuses all these things, and Satan is defeated by the glory of God. This is an unabridged version of Milton's classic work, which was first published in England in 1671.

The raucously witty Yiddish classic about a Jewish Paradise afflicted by very human temptations and pains—a delightful new translation perfect for fans of Michael Chabon Witty, playful and slyly profound, this story of a young angel expelled from Paradise is the only novel by one of the great Yiddish writers, which was written just before the outbreak of World War II. As a result of a crafty trick, the expelled angel retains the memory of his previous life when he’s born as a Yiddish-fluent baby mortal on Earth. The humans around him plead for details of that other realm, but the Paradise of his mischievous stories is far from their expectations: a world of drunken angels, lewd patriarchs and the very same divisions and temptations that shape the human world. Published here in a lively new translation by Robert Adler Peckerar, The Book of Paradise is a comic masterpiece from poet-satirist Itzik Manger that irreverently blurs the boundaries between ancient and modern and sacred and profane, where the shtetl is heaven, and heaven is the shtetl.

An astonishing interpretation of the Eden story by the co-author of the bestselling The Book of J. Just as that book turned Biblical scholarship on its ear by concluding that parts of the Hebrew Bible were written by a woman, The Lost Book of Paradise breaks new ground by challenging our assumptions about the world's most powerful creations story--Genesis.