Paul M Levitt: 8 books

Set during the Great Depression, when fascism was looking increasingly attractive to many, Paul M. Levitt’s latest novel surrounds attempts to boycott the 1936 Berlin Olympics and the counterforces at work: the American Nazi Party, Avery Brundage, a German assassin, and those American athletes—eighteen...

New York City in 1922 saw showpeople like Fanny Brice and Harry Houdini rubbing shoulders with confidence men and bootleggers like Arnold Rothstein, the gambler reputed to have fixed the 1919 World Series. Henrietta Fine, a precocious sixteen-year-old apprentice locksmith, weaves in and out of this...

"[The Weighty Word Book] will appeal to kids who want to sound as smart as they are. It offers a clever, funny way to introduce new words into the vocabulary. . . . There's one word for every letter of the alphabet--wait until you see what they do with dogmatic, juxtapose and zealot."--The Gazette...

Avraham Bahar leaves debt-ridden and depressed Albania to seek a better life in, ironically, Stalinist Russia. A professional barber, he curries favor with the Communist regime, ultimately being invited to become Stalin’s personal barber at the Kremlin, where he is entitled to live in a government...

In 1910 the Cohen family, in search of the Golden Medina, undertakes a dangerous journey from Russia to the United States, where the new world exposes family secrets, cultural conflicts, the corruption of the American Dream, and love's divides. Traveling in steerage to Ellis Island, the family...

Set in Hungamon (aka Bogalusa), Louisiana 1988-89, Provenance takes the reader through progressive historical discoveries to the sources of a Hungarian painting that escaped the grasping fingers of Nazis and Communists, and to the secrets of two families, one Jewish, the owners of the Hungarian painting, and the other gentile, the owners of an American painting, which hides a dark tale.

When the classical scholar Phineas Ort, Bogus U.’s first choice for president, disappears, the search committee decides to recruit a hit man to keep the fractious faculty in line. Phineas has been abducted by the Robaccia gang, who aim to install their own candidate in the president’s office to...

Denunciation became so commonplace under Stalin that people regarded it as their patriotic duty to spy on others and even expose members of their own family. The original Bolsheviks, for reasons of ideological purity, put great store in transparency. But under Stalin, transparency evolved into a state...