The face circulates through most things of this world: anything that has presence, that presents itself, that has a front, a surface, an appearance, an aspect, a reputation, or honor – anything that confronts, opposes, or defies – has a face. And the face is a front: from the back it is just a head, a radically different entity. In this exciting new book, distinguished philosopher Marty Roth pursues considerations of the human face in art, literature, philosophy, and other manifestations of human culture.

Kadya Molodowsky, the most prolific woman writer of Yiddish, wrote an autobiographical memoir that left many questions unanswered. Why does she say of her wedding day only that she wore new shoes and fell in the snow? Did she join those who saw communism as the answer to the Jewish problem? Why did she leave Israel after having spent only three years there? It took Zelda Kahan Newman’s research at three archives, the YIVO archive in New York, the Municipal Jewish Library in Montreal, and the Machon Lavon archive in Ne’ot Afeka, Israel, to discover the answers to these questions.

Nietzsche and Joyce Carol Oates explores the American novelist’s The Wonderland Quartet through a reading of the German philosopher’s seminal works. In the four books of The Wonderland Quartet – A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967), Expensive People (1968), the National Book Award-winning Them (1969), and Wonderland (1971) – Oates aestheticizes cultural experiments after the Nietzschean proclamation of “God is dead” permeated American culture from about 1950.

A Russian Jew who spent most of his life in England and America, Alexander Bakshy (1885-1949) was a theater critic and literary translator. He was also an innovative theorist who applied to theater the discourse of self-reflexive modernism, prizing anti-illusionist medium-awareness. Indeed, he was something of a pioneer in the area of “spectatorship” and medium-awareness, going so far as to argue in favor of the modernist idea of overt presentationalism on stage as opposed to disingenuous representationalism.

In Human Journeys and the Quest for Knowledge in African Writing, Adrien Pouille aims to expand the conversation on what human journeys may signify in the African context with several oral and modern narratives. As one of the main informants about African migration, popular journalism has propagated a traumatic and materialistic view of African temporal and spatial movements. Such a reductive conception of the African journeys can also be found on the continent, where leaving home, to the West in particular, may be viewed by many as a quest for nothing more than economic prosperity.

In this visionary book, Michael O’Neill contends that literary fiction may enable individuals to transcend tribe-centered biases by fostering empathetic understanding. Drawing from a wealth of neuroscience research, it investigates how relatable and emotionally resonant characters can encourage readers to identify with others whose lives are markedly different from their own.

The Queen of Kittur by Basavaraj Naikar highlights the themes of honor and glory, patriotism and freedom, betrayal and defeat of the royal family of Kittur as revealed by the life of Rani Chennamma. This novel is a precious jewel in Indian literature.

Cultural Memory, Consciousness, and the Modernist Novel is a study of the novel and consciousness in James Joyce, William Butler Yeats, D. H. Lawrence, and Virginia Woolf. This volume focuses on novels of the 1920s and engages in a study of Joyce’s epiphany and language play, Yeats’s esoteric philosophy, Lawrence’s vitalism, and Woolf’s stream of consciousness techniques.

A multi-faceted creative personality, Rabindranath Tagore is one of the greatest stalwarts of both English and Bengali literatures. He created a Renaissance in India, where people were awakened by the great corpus of creative work produced during the country’s struggle for independence from the British. Tagore was undoubtedly a champion of this literary protest. He produced masterpieces in Bengali literature and later translated them into English.

Jack Foley has been prominent in the San Francisco Bay Area poetry scene since the mid-1980s. The Light of Evening traces the arc of his life since his birth in New Jersey in 1940. Foley has spent his life in the pursuit of ways to continue writing poetry in a world in which the status of poetry has been seriously diminished. This candid autobiography offers a portrait of an artist who has continued to produce experimental as well as traditional work and who created theoretical underpinnings for that work.