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Plato famously defined a human being as a "featherless biped." It's hard not to sense the ironic humor in this definition, a reminder that, for all our talk about human dignity, our condition is contingent, vulnerable, and at some level even comic.Perhaps that's why the writer A.G. Mojtabai-known for her dry, understated, subtly humorous but ultimately honest and courageous depictions of the human condition-chose the name for her latest novel, set in the confines of Shady Rest Home for the Aged.Mojtabai offers us a varied cast of characters at Shady Rest, including: Eli, who fancies himself a ladies man; Elora, anxious about her wayward nephew; the aloof but lonely scholar Wiktor; and Maddie, a bit eccentric, true, but more wise and compassionate than most. At the center of it all is Daniel, an old soul in a young man's body, with a strange gift for caring for the elderly.Featherless is one of those rare books that brings us news from the final frontier, the end of life. Its unflinching but humane gaze-informed by the author's own experience-serves as a fitting capstone for a literary career of uncommon distinction.

In Living the Liturgy: A Witness, Father Luigi Giussani (1922-2005) shares his deepest convictions about the nature of the liturgy.

The poems in Matthew Porto's debut collection, Moon Grammar, range from encounters with ancient biblical and mythological tropes to fresh translations of elegiac Anglo-Saxon verse to sojourns from Vermont to Venice.

An old man-poet, playwright, essayist, and scholar-sifts through the broken fragments of his memory as he recounts what it was like to grow up in Warsaw during the German occupation of World War II. The result is Kinderszenen, a searing and controversial memoir by a major post-war Polish writer that has evoked both debate and praise, now translated into English for the first time.The book's title comes from the suite of piano pieces by Robert Schumann which evoke the innocence and joy of childhood-thus providing a wrenching counterpoint to the violence, destruction, and madness that characterize Jaros¿aw Marek Rymkiewicz's coming of age.While the scenes of his youth are depicted in vivid detail, from his boyish encounters with cats, horses, and turtles up to the shocking brutality of murder and mayhem witnessed at first hand, what really sets Kinderszenen apart is its extended meditation on the nature of war, oppression, and fanatical nationalism, and the possibility-however doomed it may seem-of human resistance to those forces. Here is an enduring testimony that remains starkly relevant to our own time.

As A.G. Mojtabai''s Thirst opens, Lena has been summoned to the bedside of her ailing "brother" Theo, an aging country priest who has started to refuse food and drink. What Lena faces is complicated by the fact that she left the faith long ago.First cousins and closest childhood friends, Theo and Lena were raised in a small Catholic farming community in Texas, named for the village their parents left behind in Germany, a place where all questions, asked and unasked, were answered for all time. The known world was bounded by the iron fence of the parish cemetery containing nearly all their dead. Beyond it lurked disorder, the dragons of unbelief.Now faced with the mysteries of mortality and loss, both are struggling to come to terms with the choices that have defined them. Thirst is a book hard to classify-a novella, certainly, but it is also in part a tone poem, a contemporary book of hours, and a meditation engaging issues of faith and doubt, death and healing. Roger Rosenblatt has said of A.G. Mojtabai: "It is rare to find a gorgeous stylist and a writer of substance yoked in the same artist. Her work shows heart and unsentimental kindness that leaves the reader enlightened and wiser."