Synopses & Reviews
Acclaimed for its masterful new translation and insightful commentary, is a fresh, vivid rendition of one of the great works in Western literature. Robert Alter's brilliant translation gives us David, the beautiful, musical hero who slays Goliath and, through his struggles with Saul, advances to the kingship of Israel. But this David is also fully human: an ambitious, calculating man who navigates his life's course with a flawed moral vision. The consequences for him, his family, and his nation are tragic and bloody. Historical personage and full-blooded imagining, David is the creation of a literary artist comparable to the Shakespeare of the history plays.
Review
"There is no better place to reassess the character of David than in Robert Alter's masterly new translation.... It will, I hope and expect, prove as influential and popular as his version of Genesis." Jonathan Wilson
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"A remarkable new translation.... Anyone who cares about the Bible or the English language will want to read it.... Alter's extraordinary work shows that Bible scholarship is healthy and getting healthier. Read it and rejoice." New York Times Book Review
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"[Alter's translation is] sober and clear and fluid, judiciously alluding to King James language while accumulating fresh nuance.... Masterful nuance." David Gelernter National Review
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"A splendid new translation of one of the Bible's greatest stories." Edward Rothstein New York Times
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"The most compelling version of [the David] story since the King James Bible." Robert Fagles
Synopsis
Now part of American film and literary lore, Tom Ripley, "a bisexual psychopath and art forger who murders without remorse when his comforts are threatened" (New York Times Book Review), was Patricia Highsmith's favorite creation. In The Boy Who Followed Ripley(1980), Highsmith explores Ripley's bizarrely paternal relationship with a troubled young runaway, whose abduction draws them into Berlin's seamy underworld. More than any other American literary character, Ripley provides "a lens to peer into the sinister machinations of human behavior" (John Freeman, Pittsburgh Gazette).
Synopsis
"Ripley is an unmistakable descendant of Gatsby, that 'penniless young man without a past' who will stop at nothing."'"Frank Richn
Synopsis
"A masterpiece of contemporary Bible translation and commentary."-- Book Review, Best Books of 1999
About the Author
Robert Alter's ongoing translation of the Hebrew Bible, the magnificent capstone to a lifetime of distinguished scholarly work, has won the PEN Center Literary Award for Translation. His immense achievements in scholarship ranging from the eighteenth-century European novel to contemporary Hebrew and American literature earned Alter the Robert Kirsch Award for Lifetime Achievement from the Los Angeles Times. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Philosophical Society, Alter is the Class of 1937 Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley.