Lena is a married, chronically unfaithful, and devoted only to gratifying her ambitions and hard-driving libido. Nathan is a footloose womanizing American author, unable to produce the big novel for which he’s been contracted. Their affair becomes a high-stakes reckless game of jealousy, rivalling ambitions, gender conflict, political combat and artistic outrage. But beneath it all, dark secrets haunt their pasts, while overshadowing their love is a world in which Anti-Semitism is burgeoning, The Holocaust is denied or forgotten and a new kind of totalitarianism threatens to sweep Lena, Nathan, and all of humanity, to the very brink of annihilation.

Alan Kaufman, the Bronx-born son of a French-Jewish Holocaust survivor is a writer, memoirist and poet. He is the author of the memoirs Jew Boy and Drunken Angel, and the novel Matches; and the editor of several anthologies, including The Outlaw Bible of American Poetry, The Outlaw Bible of American Literature (co-edited with Barney Rosset) and The Outlaw Bible of American Art. Writing in the San Francisco Chronicle, James Sullivan said of Kaufman, “Kaufman’s unique voice, by turns manic and wretched, is always intoxicated with language… a latter day extension of the Hubert Selbys and Jean Genets… combines Kerouac’s wide-eyed discovery… and Henry Miller’s resolve to throw open the doors of private lives.” Dave Eggers has said, “He’s not neat, he’s not careful… but there’s more passion here than you see in 20 other books combined.”