New Releases by Robert Alter

From award-winning literary scholar Robert Alter, a masterful exploration of how Nabokov used artifice to evoke the dilemmas, pain, and exaltation of the human condition Admirers and detractors of Vladimir Nabokov have viewed him as an ingenious contriver of literary games, teasing and even outsmarting his readers through his self-reflexive artifice and the many codes and puzzles he devises in his fiction. Nabokov himself spoke a number of times about reality as a term that always has to be put in scare quotes. Consequently, many critics and readers have thought of him as a writer uninterested in the world outside literature. Robert Alter shows how Nabokov was passionately concerned with the real world and its complexities, from love and loss to exile, freedom, and the impact of contemporary politics on our lives. In these illuminating and exquisitely written essays, Alter spans the breadth of Nabokov''s writings, from his memoir, lectures, and short stories to major novels such as Lolita. He demonstrates how the self-reflexivity of Nabokov''s fiction becomes a vehicle for expressing very real concerns. What emerges is a portrait of a brilliant stylist who is at once serious and playful, who cared deeply about human relationships and the burden of loss, and who was acutely sensitive to the ways political ideologies can distort human values. Offering timeless insights into literature’s most fabulous artificer, Nabokov and the Real World makes an elegant and compelling case for Nabokov''s relevance today.

Liberties Journal of Culture and Politics is devoted to educating the general public about the history, current trends, and possibilities of culture and politics.

From the recipient of the National Jewish Book Award for Lifetime Achievement, a "hugely entertaining and irreverent" (Adam Gopnik, New Yorker) account of the art of translating the Hebrew Bible into English In this brief book, award-winning biblical translator and acclaimed literary critic Robert Alter offers a personal and passionate account of what he learned about the art of Bible translation over the two decades he spent completing his own English version of the Hebrew Bible. Alter’s literary training gave him the advantage of seeing that a translation of the Bible can convey the text’s meaning only by trying to capture the powerful and subtle literary style of the biblical Hebrew, something the modern English versions don’t do justice to. The Bible’s style, Alter writes, “is not some sort of aesthetic embellishment of the ‘message’ of Scripture but the vital medium through which the biblical vision of God, human nature, history, politics, society, and moral value is conveyed.” And, as the translators of the King James Version knew, the authority of the Bible is inseparable from its literary authority. For these reasons, the Bible can be brought to life in English only by re-creating its literary virtuosity, and Alter discusses the principal aspects of style in the Hebrew Bible that any translator should try to reproduce: word choice, syntax, word play and sound play, rhythm, and dialogue. In the process, he provides an illuminating and accessible introduction to biblical style that also offers insights about the art of translation far beyond the Bible.

A landmark event: the complete Hebrew Bible in the award-winning translation that delivers the stunning literary power of the original. A masterpiece of deep learning and fine sensibility, Robert Alter’s translation of the Hebrew Bible, now complete, reanimates one of the formative works of our culture. Capturing its brilliantly compact poetry and finely wrought, purposeful prose, Alter renews the Old Testament as a source of literary power and spiritual inspiration. From the family frictions of Genesis and King David’s flawed humanity to the serene wisdom of Psalms and Job’s incendiary questioning of God’s ways, these magnificent works of world literature resonate with a startling immediacy. Featuring Alter’s generous commentary, which quietly alerts readers to the literary and historical dimensions of the text, this is the definitive edition of the Hebrew Bible.

“A pleasure to read. . . . Alter has given fresh life to some of the most beloved . . . books in our heritage.”—Philadelphia Inquirer The Song of Songs; Ruth; Esther; Jonah; and Daniel offer readers a range of pleasures not usually associated with the Bible. As distant in time from the Five Books of Moses as Updike is from Shakespeare, these Late Biblical books are innovative, entertaining literary works. Women often stand center stage. The Song of Songs is a celebration of young love, frankly sensuous, with no reference to God or covenant. It offers some of the most beautiful love poems of the ancient world. The story of Queen Esther’s shrewd triumph is also a secular entertainment, with clear traces of farce and sly sexual comedy. The character of Ruth embodies the virtues of loyalty, love, and charity in a harmonious world. Enigma replaces harmony in Daniel’s feverish night dreams. The apocalyptic strangeness of Daniel echoes in works from the New Testament’s Book of Revelations to the lyrics of Bob Dylan. And Jonah, the tale of a giant fish who, on God’s command, swallows the prophet and imprisons him in his dark wet innards for three days, ends with a question that lingers, unanswered, leaving the reader to ponder the many limitations of humankind.

Amid a conflict between gods and demons, Mulan is faced with a destiny- altering decision: will she allow the world to toil under eternal tyranny, or can she right the universe���s wrongs by making the ultimate sacrifice?

Robert Alter’s award-winning translation of the Hebrew Bible continues with the stirring narrative of Israel’s ancient history. To read the books of the Former Prophets in this riveting Robert Alter translation is to discover an entertaining amalgam of hair-raising action and high literary achievement. Samson, the vigilante superhero of Judges, slaughters thousands of Philistines with the jawbone of a donkey. David, the Machiavellian prince of Samuel and Kings, is one of the great literary figures of antiquity. A ruthless monarch, David embodies a life in full dimension as it moves from brilliant youth through vigorous prime to failing old age. Samson and David play emblematic roles in the rise and fall of ancient Israel, a nation beset by internal divisions and external threats. A scattering of contentious desert tribes joined by faith in a special covenant with God, Israel emerges through the bloody massacres of Canaanite populations recounted in Joshua and the anarchic violence of Judges. The resourceful David consolidates national power, but it is power rooted in conspiracy, and David dies bitterly isolated in his court, surrounded by enemies. His successor, Solomon, maintains national unity through his legendary wisdom, wealth, and grand public vision, but after his death Israel succumbs to internal discord and foreign conquest. Near its end, the saga of ancient Israel returns to the supernatural. In Elijah’s fiery ascent to heaven many would find the harbinger of a messiah coming to save his people in their time of need.

Three decades ago, renowned literary expert Robert Alter radically expanded the horizons of biblical scholarship by recasting the Bible as not only a human creation but a work of literary art deserving studied criticism. In The Art of Biblical Poetry, his companion to the seminal The Art of Biblical Narrative, Alter takes his analysis beyond narrative craft to investigate the use of Hebrew poetry in the Bible. Updated with a new preface, myriad revisions, and passages from Alter''s own critically acclaimed biblical translations, The Art of Biblical Poetry is an indispensable tool for understanding the Bible and its poetry.

From celebrated translator of the Hebrew Bible Robert Alter, the "groundbreaking" (Los Angeles Times) book that explores the Bible as literature, a winner of the National Jewish Book Award. Renowned critic and translator Robert Alter''s The Art of Biblical Narrative has radically expanded our view of the Bible by recasting it as a work of literary art deserving studied criticism. In this seminal work, Alter describes how the Hebrew Bible''s many authors used innovative literary styles and devices such as parallelism, contrastive dialogue, and narrative tempo to tell one of the most revolutionary stories of all time: the revelation of a single God. In so doing, Alter shows, these writers reshaped not only history, but also the art of storytelling itself.

In this book, biblical translator and literary critic Robert Alter traces some of the fascinating ways that American novelists--from Melville, Hemingway, and Faulkner to Bellow, Marilynne Robinson, and Cormac McCarthy--have drawn on the rich stylistic resources of the canonical English Bible to fashion their own strongly resonant styles and distinctive visions of reality. --from publisher description.

"An award-winning author and professor adds a new volume to his series of translations and commentary on the Hebrew Bible, focusing on the rational moral order described in Job, Proverbs and Ecclesiastes. "

In Imagined Cities, Robert Alter traces the arc of literary development triggered by the runaway growth of urban centers from the early nineteenth century through the first two decades of the twentieth. As new technologies and arrangements of public and private space changed the ways people experienced time and space, the urban panorama became less coherent—a metropolis defying traditional representation and definition, a vast jumble of shifting fragments and glimpses—and writers were compelled to create new methods for conveying the experience of the city.In a series of subtle and convincing interpretations of novels by Flaubert, Dickens, Bely, Woolf, Joyce, and Kafka, Alter reveals the ways the city entered the literary imagination. He shows how writers of diverse imaginative temperaments developed innovative techniques to represent shifts in modern consciousness. Writers sought more than a journalistic representation of city living, he argues, and to convey meaningfully the reality of the metropolis, the city had to be re-created or reimagined. His book probes the literary response to changing realities of the period and contributes significantly to our understanding of the history of the Western imagination.

Robert Alter''s ''The Book of Psalms'' captures the simplicity, the physicality and rhythmic power of the Hebrew, while shedding light on the obscurities of the text.

À maneira de seu mestre Erich Auerbach, o ponto de partida de Alter, ao analisar a Bíblia, é tão simples quanto ambicioso: longe de servir de adorno a uma obra que seria fundamentalmente teológica, moral e dogmática, os elementos artísticos e narrativos dão forma ao cerne dos livros bíblicos. Afinal, a Bíblia hebraica apresenta-se como uma sequência de relatos que vão da cosmogonia do Gênese aos tempos históricos dos reinos israelitas. Para o autor, a leitura voltada para a composição literária desse material torna-se a via de acesso privilegiado ao sentido dos relatos bíblicos, em sua trama complexa de ficção, história nacional e teologia. Dessa perspectiva, Alter examina todas as questões centrais que a narrativa bíblica suscita. Por que esses textos são escritos em prosa, e não em verso? Por que o diálogo é tão onipresente? Quais convenções regem a caracterização dos personagens e das cenas? Os livros bíblicos são obras coesas ou apenas colchas de retalhos contraditórias e compostos a séculos de distância? Sem abstrações ou anacronismos, Alter visa responder a essas questões por meio de análises de histórias e passagens bíblicas, que assim recobram toda sua vibração e convidam o leitor a revisitar esses textos fundamentais da imaginação ocidental.

The brilliant biblical scholar offers a masterly new translation of the Hebrew Bible that gives readers the definitive editions of the Pentateuch. Alter''s translation is combined with probing commentary that illuminates the text in a lyrical, lucid English.

Poésie et expérience de Dieu ont toujours été liées. Elles le sont de manière éminente dans la Bible, qui recourt à la poésie pour dire ce qui, de Dieu et de l''homme, ne peut se dire que poétiquement. Alors que le récit est sans pareil pour mettre en scène leur rencontre, c''est au poème biblique qu''il appartient d''exprimer l''intensité - l''inouï - de cette rencontre. Dans les Psaumes et les Proverbes comme dans le livre de job, chez les prophètes comme dans le Cantique des Cantiques, les rédacteurs de la Bible se sont ainsi faits poètes pour notre plus grand bonheur. Les poèmes de la Bible font cependant jouer des réflexes de forme et de sens qui ne sont pas toujours immédiatement les nôtres. Pour nous initier à cet art poétique, Robert Alter nous ramène à ce qui en est le ressort secret : le parallélisme sémantique. Avec sagacité, l''auteur révèle le dynamisme du " combien plus " qui anime la ligne versifiée et se déploie de ligne en ligne. En nous faisant lire de plus près des pages fascinantes, il passe en revue tous les genres poétiques illustrés par la Bible prières, proverbes et énigmes, oracles et chants érotiques. Pour le croyant comme pour le lecteur attaché à la révélation de la poésie, des perspectives nouvelles s''ouvrent - sur le texte sacré et sur notre expérience personnelle.

Robert Alter met en évidence les liens qui unissent trois témoins majeurs de notre modernité : Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin et Gershom Scholem, trois théoriciens du doute, no man''s land qui sépare religions traditionnelles et culture séculière moderne. Scholem, le sioniste convaincu et historien du mysticisme juif, aussi bien que Benjamin, le critique marxiste, se réfèrent tous deux à la pensée de Kafka, explorateur de t''aliénation la plus radicale. Le sens inné de la complexité spirituelle de l''écrivain tchèque a inspiré les deux auteurs confrontés aux simplifications meurtrières de la pensée totalitaire. Le premier ange convoqué est celui de Kafka qui relate dans son journal (25 juin 1914) un rêve mettant en scène un ange se métamorphosant sous ses yeux en image peinte de la proue d''un navire. En 1940, Benjamin, consacre la neuvième de ses Thèses sur la philosophie de l''histoire à la description d''un ange peint par Paul Klee, qu''il voit comme précipité dans le futur par la tornade du progrès. Benjamin lèguera cette toile à Scholem. Une toile qui ornera le salon de ce dernier jusqu''en 1989. La clarté prophétique de l''exposé de Robert Alter consacré à ces trois grands maîtres contemporains suffit à battre en brèche l''idée selon laquelle une rupture brutale avec la tradition serait la condition sine qua non d''une accession à la modernité.

Alter explores the ways in which a range of iconoclastic 20th century authors have put to use the stories, language, and imagery found in the Hebrew Bible. Includes attention on Franz Kafka''s "Amerika" and James Joyce''s "Ulysses".

An essential tool for overcoming life''s obstacles - large and small - this new book by psychotherapists Robert and Jane Alter reveals how to heal the psyche and the soul

The story of David, forceful slayer of Goliath, is plucked from the Bible and molded into a piece of literature that stands on its own--a narrative representation of a human life shaped by the pressures of political life and family, the impulses of body and spirit, and the eventual sad decay of the flesh.

L''ouvrage de Robert Alter vient recréer l''imagination littéraire des lecteurs de la Bible que nous sommes. Trésor de la foi des croyants, la Bible hébraïque est aussi l''un des chefs-d''œuvre de la littérature narrative de tous les temps. Encore faut-il que nous apprenions à lire les récits bibliques dans l''art qui leur est propre. En faisant parler les textes avec perspicacité, et en usant du contrepoint d''Homère, de Shakespeare, de Flaubert ou de James, Robert Alter met en lumière les voies et les moyens de la narration biblique : la centralité du dialogue, l''art de la variation dans la répétition, l''usage des scènes types, la réserve du narrateur omniscient, le recours aux sources distinctes dans la multiplication des points de vue. Ces techniques littéraires, montre l''auteur, représentent autant d''options théologiques : il y va, dans cet art de raconter, de la révolution du monothéisme d''Israël, où le dessein du Dieu unique se conjugue aux tours et aux détours de la liberté humaine. Tant d''enjeux dans ces histoires bien composées - elles agrandissent comme à la loupe les trajets de nos libertés devant celle de Dieu -, mais aussi un tel bonheur à lire ! L''ouvrage de Robert Alter est contagieux à cet égard.

A translation of Genesis, which attempts to recover the meanings of the ancient Hebrew and convey them in modern English prose. It is accompanied by a commentary and annotations, and aims to illuminate the original work without any touch of the fake antique.

"Here is the Genesis for our generation and beyond. An occasion for praise, and perennial gratitude as well". -- Robert Fagles