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When Germany invaded Poland in 1939, Halina Nelken was a precocious fifteen-year-old, living a middle-class life in Krakow. Like other girls her age, she recorded her personal observations and feelings in a diary. As conditions in Krakow deteriorated and her family was forced into the Jewish ghetto, she continued to write, eventually smuggling her diary out with a Catholic friend. This remarkable book tells the story of Nelken's experiences in the ghetto and later in eight Nazi concentration camps, including Plaszow, Auschwitz, and Ravensbrück. Her diary entries, written between 1938 and 1943, form the core of the volume and are supplemented by recollections written shortly after the war, and by later commentaries and explanatory notes which she added in the mid-1980s. Although there exist numerous published and unpublished memoirs by Holocaust survivors, Nelken's book presents one of the few extant diaries written at the time. Already released in Polish and German editions, it has been hailed as one of the finest works of its kind. Now it is available in English for the first time.

If Emmy Award-winner Peter Coyote’s debut collection represents the culmination of a half-century’s devotion to writing poetry, his second functions as a true encore: triumphant and raw. Thumb to Thumb… and Yet presents eighty-plus years of living — the countercultural adventures, the journey from Zen Buddhist discipleship to priesthood, marriage and divorce, a public career in entertainment, and the private work and rewards of parenthood — not as a retrospective but as a perpetual process of becoming. Coyote captures often-elusive wisdom and infuses these pages with the fullness of human experience: weariness that labor never ceases, that we cannot outgrow suffering, that we’re like “Manteaux ducks, immobilized so the fat / of everything can be forced down our gullets,” the glut of gavage neverending and “no option to stop swallowing”; frustration that ambition and ego persist despite the “pre-dawn Zendo chill” and over five decades spent “thumb-to-thumb sitting” in devoted practice; the satisfaction of pleasure, “smiling in the ruined sheets”; gratitude for life consummated and life ongoing and life that will continue long after us, for the opportunity of existence, for the work itself, for the “single nuthatch [that] bows / upside down on the grand oak” and its reminder during meditation that “everything presents itself as a partner.” The titular qualification of that “and yet” is an argument against and a celebration of conclusion; in a masterful encapsulation of the lyrical moment itself, these poems find Coyote returning to the stage only to perform another finale, every end recycled toward beginning. One song cedes to another, and yet the music flows on. 

If Emmy Award-winner Peter Coyote’s debut collection represents the culmination of a half-century’s devotion to writing poetry, his second functions as a true encore: triumphant and raw. Thumb to Thumb… and Yet presents eighty-plus years of living — the countercultural adventures, the journey from Zen Buddhist discipleship to priesthood, marriage and divorce, a public career in entertainment, and the private work and rewards of parenthood — not as a retrospective but as a perpetual process of becoming. Coyote captures often-elusive wisdom and infuses these pages with the fullness of human experience: weariness that labor never ceases, that we cannot outgrow suffering, that we’re like “Manteaux ducks, immobilized so the fat / of everything can be forced down our gullets,” the glut of gavage neverending and “no option to stop swallowing”; frustration that ambition and ego persist despite the “pre-dawn Zendo chill” and over five decades spent “thumb-to-thumb sitting” in devoted practice; the satisfaction of pleasure, “smiling in the ruined sheets”; gratitude for life consummated and life ongoing and life that will continue long after us, for the opportunity of existence, for the work itself, for the “single nuthatch [that] bows / upside down on the grand oak” and its reminder during meditation that “everything presents itself as a partner.” The titular qualification of that “and yet” is an argument against and a celebration of conclusion; in a masterful encapsulation of the lyrical moment itself, these poems find Coyote returning to the stage only to perform another finale, every end recycled toward beginning. One song cedes to another, and yet the music flows on.