Where To Buy The Same Embrace A Novel by Michael Lowenthal At The Lowest Price?

Why Buy A The Same Embrace A Novel by Michael Lowenthal?
The endless conflict between sameness and difference is at the heart of Michael Lowenthals novel The Same Embrace, in which identical twins Jacob and Jonathan battle themselves and one another to become individuals even as they are inextricably linked through genes, family, and history. Empathetically close as children, the brothers begin to separate in their teen years, most decidedly by Jacobs decision to come out and Jonathans turn to Orthodox Judaism. The conflict of brother against brother, biblical in its resonance yet filled with contemporary image and idiom, is also the grounding that allows Lowenthal to write about his main concern: how humans must create themselves as individuals while remaining part of a larger social fabric. Just as Jacob and Jonathan wrestle with one another over questions of sexuality and religion, The Same Embrace embodies two distinct and not usually conflated genres: the novel of gay identity and the Jewish family novel. Like the brothers move towards reconciliation, one of the novels strengths–along with its understanding of the human heart–is its ability to join these themes into a unified, extremely satisfying entirety that both moves and enlightens us. –Michael Bronski

Over 24 Five Star Customer Reviews On Amazon!

Couldn’t put it down.
Now this is a good book. I don’t share Lowenthal’s perspective, so hopefully it’s of some value that as a “general reader” I found this an utterly compelling read. He holds his own with my favorite classic novelists.

Brother to brother
Reading this again four years after I first read it, I’m still amazed at the scope and impact of the story. “The Same Embrace” centers on Jacob, gay and Jewish, whose twin brother Jonathan has embraced Orthodox Judaism and now lives in Israel. While mostly about the struggle of the two brothers to reconnect after years apart, the book also deals with the legacy of the Holocaust, the impact of family secrets, and the essence of family. For me though, it is the story of the two brothers that resonates so clearly and brilliantly. And by having the brothers be so similar and yet so different, Lowenthal presents the reader with a fascinating portrait of what could almost be two halves of a whole: one man trying to bring together his sexuality and his religious beliefs. Even without this context in mind (whether it’s intended or not), “The Same Embrace” is a marvelous, insightful, and ultimately joyous story that expands past the genre distinctions of Jewish fiction and gay literature to a wholly American novel of family.

Embracing Differences
Lowenthal, Michael. “The Same Embrace”, Plume, 1999.

Embracing Differences

Amos Lassen

Respecting and embracing differences is the basic theme of Michael Lowenthal’s “The Same Embrace”, the story of Jacob and Jonathan, identical twins, who battle one another and themselves in order to become individuals even though they are heavily linked together. Lowenthal not only studies the twins but the Jewish religion as well. The book looks at the nature of faith and its consequences and the power of family ties. Lowenthal shows the humane intent of Jewish laws and traditions and the rigidity and intolerance of fundamentalist followers of the Jewish religion and all of the issues that determine behavior are here–religion, culture, nurture and genetics.
“The Same Embrace” looks at the long held secrets of a family but more to the point, it looks that siblings and how they struggle to stop being angry and to find a common ground. Jacob is the protagonist. He is intelligent, he is Jewish and he is gay. His parents are not happy about his homosexuality. His twin brother, Jonathan is at school at an Orthodox day school in Israel and he is withdrawn and angry. The boys’ parents convince Jacob to go to Israel to convince Jonathan to come home and while there Jacob becomes interested in the students and some of the teachers. Things begin to really go wrong when Jonathan finds Jacob embracing one of the students. When the twins return home, their grandmother suffers a stroke and Aunt Isabel ho has long been exiled from the family opens the door on another family member who was left behind because he was gay when the family fled Nazi Germany. We find ourselves in a family which is torn apart by bitterness and regret. Jacob increasingly focuses on efforts to reconcile both his heritage and his homosexuality and it is here that Lowenthal is able to bring in some thoughts on religion and sexuality.
When Jacob traveled to Israel in the hopes of finding some common ground between he and his brother, he is forced to re-examine his own sexual and religious identities and his place in his own family’s history and the confrontation between the twins brings to fore the secrets of the family that began during the darkest period of human history–the Holocaust.
It is a pleasure to read a modern novel that really has so much to say. The twins, at twenty-four years old, are wonderful examples of the divisions in the world today. Jacob has always blamed his religion and its indoctrination for his brother’s isolation from the family. The way the book is narrated, alternating between the present and Jacob’s childhood memories with anecdotes of the family and the traditions of Judaism, reflect the coming out process. The book gives the essence of a young gay man’s inner struggle. Jacob is caught in the hypocrisy that his relationship with his family being superficial and that people do not see him for who he really is.
I just reread this book some nine years after it was published and I am as amazed now as I was when I first read it. Lowenthal gives us a fascinating look at two halves of a whole–one man trying to unite his sexuality and his religious beliefs. Here is a beautifully told story and as a gay observant Jew, I found a great deal to identify with but one does not have to be Jewish to appreciate the story–it is universal and an absolutely wonderful read.

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Writing for Emotional Impact by Karl Iglesias – Save 10% Today!

Why Buy A Writing for Emotional Impact by Karl Iglesias?
Karl Iglesias breaks new ground by focusing on the psychology of the reader. Based on his acclaimed classes at UCLA Extension, Writing for Emotional Impact goes beyond the basics and argues that Hollywood is in the emotion-delivery business, selling emotional experiences packaged in movies and TV shows. Iglesias not only encourages you to deliver emtional impact on as many pages as possible, he shows you how, offering hundreds of dramatic techniques to take your writing to the professional level.

Over 28 Five Star Customer Reviews On Amazon!

BETTER THAN 5 STARS
I bought this book because I read a review by a fellow novelist (Pat Kay) who praised it. Pat Kay wrote a truthful review. Some points served as a refresher and others were thought-provoking and valuable to my own writing.

Thanks, Karl!

Character Journey vs Audience Journey – a must understand
Fascinating book about writing. It’s not for the easily intimidated though. This book assumes a working knowledge of ARCs, Three-Act-Play, Character Development, Etc. It is written for screenwriters, although 99% o f the content applies to novelists as well.
It teaches something very specific – How to connect the two primary emotional ARCs of a story. The emotions of the character on the page. The emotions of the audience beyond the page. Fascinating stuff and he teaches it in a very applicable format.
This earns a place on my very small keeper shelf for writing craft (right next to Swain).

Best screenwriting book ever.
I’ve read this book at least 3 times. I’ve read over 10 books on screenwriting and this, by far, is the best book on screenwriting. This book is for anyone who feels that they are stuck in their screenwriting. What do I mean by stuck? If you feel that you have put your all into writing screenplay, but you’re not winning competitions or selling on the market, this book will get you over the hump. My writing is much better because of Karl’s book. I have never met the guy, but I hope I get the chance. This book is worth more than the price.

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The Last Novel by David Markson – Save 25% Today!

Why Buy A The Last Novel by David Markson?
In recent novels, which have been called “hypnotic,” “stunning,” and “exhilarating,” David Markson has created his own personal genre. In this new work, The Last Novel, an elderly author (referred to only as “Novelist”) announces that since this will be his final effort, he has “carte blanche to do anything he damned well pleases.”

Pressed by solitude and age, Novelists preoccupations inevitably turn to the stories of other artists — their genius, their lack of recognition, and their deaths. Keeping his personal history out of the story as much as possible, Novelist creates an incantatory stream of fascinating triumphs and failures from the lives of famous and not-so-famous painters, writers, musicians, sports figures, and scientists.

As Novelist moves through his last years, a minimalist self-portrait emerges, becoming an intricate masterpiece from David Marksons astonishing imagination. Through these startling, sometimes comic, but often tragic anecdotes we unexpectedly discern the entire shape of a mans life.

Over 6 Five Star Customer Reviews On Amazon!

Markson smartly updated a biblical characterization: “Now Barrabas was a book reviewer.”
The underappreciated US writer Gilbert Sorrentino wrote:

“The critic is either subsumed in his criticism, the latter becoming, relentlessly and imperceptibly, a kind of natural effusion of the collective intelligence; or he is forever identified as “the one who said that…” and reviled for such rank stupidity. Either way, he is denied his reality, becoming in the first instance a public idea that everybody held all the time, and in the second, an idiot whose pronouncements are contemptible when they are not hilarious.”

David Markson in his latest work agrees with Sorrentino as he instructs and test reviewers, and other readers. “Novelist’s personal genre. In which part of the experiment is to continue keeping him offstage to the greatest extent possible – while compelling the attentive reader to perhaps catch his breath when things achieve an ending nonetheless.” Aware of how pompous that may sound, and how difficult the task is, Markson immediately follows with: “Conclusions are the weak point of most authors. George Eliot said.” “The Last Novel” is constituted of notes and quotations, which seem random, but they reveal their depth through repetition and elaboration. Certain threads – painting (”If more than ten percent of the population likes a painting it should be burned. Said Shaw.”), music (”That scoundrel Brahms. What a giftless bastard! Tchaikovsky’s diary says.”), and art (”People who actually believe that Christo’s tangerine-colored bedsheets fluttering about in New York’s Central Park had something even remotely to do with art.”) – are of intense interest to the Novelist.

However, a thread that is more consuming combines his loneliness (”Nobody comes. Nobody calls.”) with the deaths of historical figures (”Karl Marx died sitting at his desk. Antonin Artaud, sitting up at the foot of his bed.”) and friends. Personal remarks by Novelist stand out because they’re touching – “Dialing the deceased, in the likelihood that no one would have yet disconnected their answering machines – and contemplating their voices one eerie final time” – or for their sheer ludicrousness: “The presumably apocryphal tale about a production of Othello by touring actors in the nineteenth-century American West – near the last lines of which a cowboy in the audience shot Iago dead on the spot.”

“The Last Novel” is the capstone to “Reader’s Block” (1996), “This Is Not a Novel” (2001) and “Vanishing Point” (2004). Like those novels, it can be read on its own. The narrator remarks: “Wondering if there is any viable way to convince critics never to use the word tetralogy without also adding that each volume can be readily read by itself?” Markson’s long career – which one hopes the title does not indicate is winding up – has given him the experience to devise a DIY review that removes his novel from the hands of Sorrentino’s idiot.

Novelist is “Old. Tired. Sick. Alone. Broke. All of which obviously means that this is the last book Novelist is going to write.” Liberty “gives Novelist carte blanche to do anything here he damned well pleases.” What will be the reaction? “Listen, I bought your latest book. But I quit after about six pages. That’s all there is, those little things?” Those who receive his novels free and are paid to review them are even more obtuse. “Reviewers who protest that Novelist has lately appeared to be writing the same book over and over. Like their grandly perspicacious uncles – who groused that Monet had done those damnable water lilies nine dozen times already also.”

Those who are less well-read have responded to the veracity of “those little things,” and Markson rebuts them sharply: “Reviewers who have accused Novelist of inventing some of his anecdotes and/or quotations – without the elemental responsibility to do the checking that would verify every one of them.” That’s a just charge that can’t be refuted.

“For no reason whatsoever, Novelist has just flung his cat out one of his four-flights-up front windows.” This is startling, as well as puzzling. A few pages later all is revealed: “Novelist does not own a cat, and thus most certainly could not have thrown one out a window.” (Not quite; not having his own cat doesn’t preclude Novelist from throwing some other cat out a window.) “Nonetheless he would lay odds that more than one hopscotching reviewer will be reading carelessly enough here to never notice these two sentences and announce that he did so.” That’s a neat trick to get a reviewer re-reading – or more precisely, reading in the first place. (Yet Markson himself has been lured by the tendency to read quickly. As he said in an interview with Bookslut in 2005, “all those intellectual bits and pieces in my later books, I’ve had to do a lot of browsing to hunt them out. At times it’s almost gotten me into a habit of skimming instead of seriously reading. It’s something I have to fight, repeatedly.”)

“Taking no more account of the wind that comes out of their mouths than that which they expel from their lower parts. Leonardo described his response to critics as.” Despite this quotation, Markson might have appreciated Catherine Texier’s opinion in the “New York Times” that “The Last Novel” is a “tour de force” that “manages to keep us enthralled… and even moved to tears at the end.” By the close we are more conscious of Novelist’s deepening crisis, and to the emotional resonance of the work. Novelist talks of his economic state, his isolation, the lack of recognition, and the unhappy results of a bone scan. We are brought, with elegance and style, with dry wit and orneriness, to elegy.

But what do I know? In “Vanishing Point” Markson smartly updated a biblical characterization: “Now Barrabas was a book reviewer.”

Jeff Bursey
Reviewer

Postmodern Gem
“The Last Novel” is David Markson’s latest artistic triumph over mortality. It luminously demonstrates the author’s (or Author’s, as he is called in this book) ready wit, wide learning, and acute insights into the predicaments shared by aging artists, scientists, philosophers, and others who must struggle against the bathetic mundanities of life in order to produce their work, more often than not for a world that is incapable or unwilling to appreciate them in any but the most irrelevant terms. Markson is in fine form in this trenchant, memorable piece that one dearly hopes will not be his last.

THE GODLIKE POWER OF DAVID MARKSON
For nearly 50 years, David Markson’s obscure genius has gone little noticed outside the close-knit New York literary world he inabits. In France they’d give him a medal and a pension, but this ain’t France. “The Last Novel” is as good an entryway as any to the mind and soul of one of America’s greatest living writers.

cult to mainstream
isn t it about time to move this modern master from cult figure to mainstream? the stormy genius of his writing is long overdue for recognition by the major literary world david markson’s power and orginality are unmatched among american novelists

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Where To Buy Tattoo Thompson Earl by Earl Thompson At The Lowest Price?

Why Buy A Tattoo Thompson Earl by Earl Thompson?
TATTOO continues the earthy, honst, and ultimately triumphant story begun by Earl Thompson in A Garden of Sand. It is an epic account of a generation–America in the 1940s.

Over 11 Five Star Customer Reviews On Amazon!

A book that gets under your skin
Having worked for many years in the navy, reading books has occupied a great deal of my time. The first occasion on which I read the book tattoo, I was struck by the sheer depth to the charachters that enabled these american individuals in an alien culture to my own, to be brought to life and appreciated by myself, an english sailor. I have read the book many times since and will continue to do so in the future. Along with Orwell’s 1984, it is my favourite.

Boldly exposes the America of the 40s
“Tatoo” is the second book in Earl Thompson’s sweeping tale of a young man coming of age in the underside of the 1940’s. This is my favorite of all three, and the one that received the most media coverage in its first publishing.

Thompson wasn’t afraid to write of the people he knew, and the characters he created are never one-dimensional — they eat, sleep, drink, fight, and indulge in sex. This is what life was really like for so many hard-working people during the WWII era, despite the rosy message musicals of that time force-fed the public.

Steinbeck, Faulkner, and Dreiser are lauded as great novelists for their accurate display of human plight. Thompson is no less prolific and realistic, but because of his depiction of raw sex, I’d bet his novels will never be taught in any public school. The stark sexual themes — including incest and rape — will offend the masses but will never appeal to the “Debbie Does Dallas” set. Still,his protagonist is so real and the story so fun that this ranks high on my “Top 10 read every year” list.

A True American Epic
Simply put, this is one of the greatest novels ever written. Perhaps it was the circumstances for which I discovered this book … I was a young Marine on the U.S.S. Raleigh … I was in the ship’s “library” which was about as big as a trailer house toilet … maybe 400 books tops … and I see this book … having a couple tattoos myself I thought “why not …” Whew!!!! I’ve probably read this book 30 times as well as Thompson’s others … what a writer. There are only a small number of books that I’ve actually purchased for other people to read … and this is one of them … I’ve also told people that this book, in many ways, mirrors my own life … talk about some funny looks after they’ve read it … but it’s true. Seriously … I would strongly recommend that if you’re going to read one book this year … any book … make it this one. You’re going to be in for a ride. Keep an open mind … roll with the punches … and you will find yourself a better, more blessed person for the experience.

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How to Write Sell Your First Novel by Frances Spatz Leighton – Save 25% Today!

Why Buy A How to Write Sell Your First Novel by Frances Spatz Leighton?
For over twenty years, How to Write & Sell Your First Novel has been giving the writing and marketing instruction you need to get that first novel published. Authors Oscar Collier and Frances Spatz Leighton will walk you through every step of the process from choosing the type of novel you want to write to publicity and self-promotion basics, and all the steps in between, such as:

• Establishing daily writing routines
• Developing compelling characters, realistic dialogue, and an engaging plot
• Revising and editing your manuscript for submission
• Deciding whether or not an agent is right for you
• Handling contract negotiations

  In addition to all of this great instructional advice, How to Write & Sell Your First Novel also includes interviews with novelists about their publishing experience, as well as the working methods, attitudes, and specific strategies superstar novelists–like Stephen King, John Grisham, Mary Higgins Clark, and others–used to get published. Use their tips to help you build your own success!

  Features

  • Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices
  • Condition: NEW
  • ISBN13: 9780898797701
  • Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.

  Over 13 Five Star Customer Reviews On Amazon!

  write your first novel.
  great condition. perfectly new. no bends in pages. no writing on pages. perfect. came in expected time.

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