Advanced Search Request a Book

ORDERS

Readings Orders 0

DEMANDS

Readings Demands 0

The Free Thinkers:Two Novellas
[Hardback - 2000]
layle silbert
On Demand
Availability in 4-6 weeks on receipt of order
List Price: $25
Our Price: Rs.6295 Rs.5351
Standard Discount: 15%
You Save: Rs.944
Category: Fiction
Sub-category: Short Stories
Additional Category: Literary Fiction
Publisher: Seven Stories Press | ISBN: 9781583220252 | Pages: 320
Shipping Weight: .624 | Dimensions: 6.25 x 1.14 x 9.31 inches

More Buying Options

Paperback Rs.3268

Description

Layle Silbert's stories trace struggles and joys of lives overlooked. In The Free Thinkers: Two Novellas, she gives these lost lives a new voice, recovering in exacting detail the world of newly arrived Eastern European Jews in turn-of-the-century-America. Silbert's stories chronicle their arrival in Chicago and New York, and follow them as they trade Yiddish and Russian for English, find work in factories and Jewish newspapers, attend Zionist meetings, and struggle toward the promise of freedom and happiness.
The Free Thinkers tells two tales. The first novella focuses on Ida, an independent woman, a "freethinker" devoted to finding her own way in America. A factory forelady, a patron of the theater, and an instinctive feminist, she is determined to find total freedom in a man's world-no matter where it leads her.
The collection's other novella chronicles the lives of three sisters from the Ukraine as they find husbands and start their own families in America. Two masterful chapters at the heart of the novella describe their mother's arrival, after the great war and the revolution, to a small Indiana town. She is "a vision, in her clothes, her posture, the very air around her, a vision of a sight on a street in the village they'd all come from, suddenly seamlessly transported into this pleasant spring morning to the very middle of America."
In Layle Silbert's tender Stories of the New World, as in the best stories of Chekov, the slightest gesture carries with it the weight of the world. Nothing happens, everything happens. Silbert's writing is delicate, as if dusted by the wings of a visiting angel, here to present for posterity the way things were.

About the Author

Born in 1913 in a Yiddish-speaking household in Chicago, LAYLE SILBERT attended the University of Chicago and pursued a career in social work before before turning, later in life, to photography and fiction. By the 1960s Silbert had moved to New York City, where she was involved in both literary and radical feminist circles. Her acclaimed photographs, primarily of contemporary writers such as Nelson Algren, James Baldwin, and Elizabeth Bishop, were exhibited more than thirty times in the United States and internationally. All the while Silbert was writing in a variety of forms, including poems and a handful of personal essay, but she primarily considered herself a writer of short fiction. Her stories were published in the New York Quarterly, Literary Review, and Salmagundi, among others. The collection of stories included in Yudl, published by Seven Stories, was selected by the author for publication in the last days before her death. Silbert died in 2003.

Bestsellers in Fiction

View All
Before The Coffee Gets Cold: Before The Coffee Gets Cold (Book 1)
[Paperback - 2019]
toshikazu kawaguchi
In Stock
List Price: £8.99
Our Price: Rs.2095 Rs.1885
Standard Discount: 10%
You Save: Rs.210
A Little Life: Tiktok Made Me Buy It!
[Paperback - 2016]
hanya yanagihara
In Stock
List Price: £10.99
Our Price: Rs.2395 Rs.2155
Standard Discount: 10%
You Save: Rs.240
The Seven Husbands Of Evelyn Hugo: Tiktok Made Me Buy It!
[Paperback - 2021]
taylor jenkins reid
In Stock
List Price: £8.99
Our Price: Rs.2395 Rs.2155
Standard Discount: 10%
You Save: Rs.240
The Secret History: Tiktok Made Me Buy It!
[Paperback - 1993]
donna tartt
In Stock
List Price: £9.99
Our Price: Rs.2195 Rs.1975
Standard Discount: 10%
You Save: Rs.220
Book Lovers: Tiktok Made Me Buy It!
[Paperback - 2022]
emily henry
In Stock
List Price: £8.99
Our Price: Rs.2195 Rs.1975
Standard Discount: 10%
You Save: Rs.220
The Atlas Six: The Atlas Six Series (Book 1) Tiktok Made Me Buy It!
[Paperback - 2022]
olivie blake
In Stock
List Price: £9.99
Our Price: Rs.2395 Rs.2155
Standard Discount: 10%
You Save: Rs.240
Twisted Games: Twisted Love (Book 2) (Tiktok Made Me Buy It!)
[Paperback - 2022]
ana huang
Out of Stock
Availability in 2-4 weeks on receipt of order
List Price: £9.99
Our Price: Rs.2295 Rs.2065
Standard Discount: 10%
You Save: Rs.230
It Ends With Us: It Ends With Us (Book 1) (Tiktok Made Me Buy It!)
[Paperback - 2016]
colleen hoover
In Stock
List Price: £7.99
Our Price: Rs.2395 Rs.2155
Standard Discount: 10%
You Save: Rs.240
Twisted Love: Twisted Love (Book 1) (Tiktok Made Me Buy It!)
[Paperback - 2022]
ana huang
Out of Stock
Availability in 2-4 weeks on receipt of order
List Price: £9.99
Our Price: Rs.2195 Rs.1975
Standard Discount: 10%
You Save: Rs.220
King Of Wrath: Kings Of Sin (Book 1)
[Paperback - 2022]
ana huang
In Stock
List Price: £9.99
Our Price: Rs.2245 Rs.2020
Standard Discount: 10%
You Save: Rs.225
Final Offer: Dreamland Billionaires (Book 3) (Tiktok Made Me Buy It!)
[Paperback - 2023]
lauren asher
In Stock
List Price: £9.99
Our Price: Rs.2395 Rs.2155
Standard Discount: 10%
You Save: Rs.240
Icebreaker: The Maple Hills Series (Book 1) (Tiktok Made Me Buy It!)
[Paperback - 2023]
hannah grace
In Stock
List Price: £8.99
Our Price: Rs.2395 Rs.2155
Standard Discount: 10%
You Save: Rs.240