After Adam is a prosimetrum, a story told in prose and verse. Mortality is its theme. Populated by rabbis, storytellers, mystics, poets, travelers and philosophers, the book belongs to the same small tribe as The 1001 Nights, Snorri Sturluson's Heimskringla, Dante's Vita Nuova, Sir Philip Sidney's The Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia, and Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire. After Adam also descends from a long line of midrash collections, talmudic tracts and cabbalistic commentaries. In spirit it resembles both Hayim Bialik's Book of Legends, and S.Y. Agnon's anthologies on the giving of the Torah, and the days of Awe. Each chapter in this Old Testament saga corresponds with a Sabbath portion of Moses' five books, as written in the Tanakh, the Hebrew Bible. My synagogue- Congregation Beth Israel in Charlottesville, Virginia-and its traditional, lay-led minyan reading aloud from the Torah scroll every Saturday morning are also Jewish Arcadians, gathered to recount the living history in tale and song. Laurance Wieder's writings include The Last Century: Selected Poems; Words to God's Music: A New Book of Psalms; The Poets' Book of Psalms; Perek Shirah: A Chapter of Song; and, Chapters into Verse: Poetry in English Inspired by the Bible. His poems and essays have appeared in The New Yorker, Scripsi, Commonweal, Books & Culture; The Weekly Standard; First Things, and elsewhere. About The Last Century: "Wieder keeps his readers on their toes: his jokes are the epitaphs of an intense emotion, his puns are invested with a kind of theological longing."-David Lehman; "Larry Wieder is one of the handful of Americans writing now who makes poetry seem like a good idea."-Peter Schjeldahl; "These are the new parables for the new cities, alert to other languages and other times."-John A. Scott. About Words to God's Music: "This book is a sublime and unforgettable achievement. I stand in awe of its brilliance."-Paul Auster; " Wieder] is totally articulate about the things that matter most. An ideal poet, in fact, his ego invisible, his vision clear, with nothing between him and his God but the bright blue sky."-Tom Disch; "Wieder's psalms are ingeniously written and yet deeply felt, timeless and yet immediately accessible to today's readers. Words to God's Music sings for us all."-R. L. Stine