Böcker av Harry Ringel

Abraham! We know him as the father of three of the world's great religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Yet his story begins abruptly, with two words from Genesis: "Lech Lecha" - "Go to yourself" as it is often translated. Who was the unknown Abraham of before God calls him? This unique novel uses Talmudic legends, Apocryphal writings, and Kabbalistic sources to trace Abraham's footsteps into these hidden corners of his beginnings. We travel with him from Ur to Charan 3,000 years ago. We spend time with his wife Sarai (and Iscah, her prophetess alter ego), Shem and post-Ark Noah, the angel Gabriel. Stops are made in Babylon and at the Tower of Babel, where Abraham confronts his nemesis Nimrod. The Hand Above the Lid may be read as fiction, as historical fantasy. Yet it speaks not only to the past but to the present - in each and every one of us. The Hand Above the Lid challenges readers to "go to yourselves" as well.

1965. Young Tito Scaffone loves vintage horror movies more than life itself. He is especially enamored of Lon Chaney's 1925 The Phantom of the Opera-the majesty of the sets, the silent-celluloid beauty of Mary Philbin, but most of all the mastery of Chaney's makeup as the hideously disfigured phantom. But monsters in movies are one thing, in life quite another. And Tito cannot face life. His only friend is Jan Klosek, a good-hearted South Philadelphia roughneck whose uncles run Independent Film Exchange, a distribution hub for low-grade film product. Through IFE Tito is given a chance to manage the Dreamland in the Skid Row section of the city. A century old, the Dreamland hangs on as an all-night movie house. It also happens to be haunted. Living alone at the theater, Tito enters a world of horror more terrifying than any he has encountered in the films he so adores. The story takes place in the shadow-ridden Philadelphia that inspired David Goodis' existential pulp novels, David Lynch's Eraserhead. Along the way, stops are made at the film domains of Rondo Hatton and Val Lewton, the 50-Foot Woman and 4D man, and others. But Tito's journey into darkness truly begins in the pages of a lost diary kept by the theater's owner in the late 1800's. In these tortured pages, Tito unmasks the true face of the Dreamland's horror.The Phantom of Skid Row is a ghost story, of sorts. It is also a love letter to the magic of classic and not-so-classic movies; to the eccentric charms of film exhibition in the days before theaters became homogenized; to the mystery of love in sheltered young hearts.