by Nathan Englander ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 1, 1999
A debut collection of nine stories that explore the condition of being Jewish with an often hallucinatory, epigrammatic eloquence that is, as advertised, reminiscent of the fiction of Isaac Singer, Saul Bellow, and especially Bernard Malamud. The pieces are set variously in contemporary Brooklyn Heights and Jerusalem, Nazi-ravaged Europe, and Stalinist Russia, and they feature such comically tormented characters as the title story’s sex-starved husband, who is granted “relief” from his wife’s extended menstrual cycle by the rabbi who sends him to a prostitute; a devoutly Orthodox Jew pressured by his materialistic wife into moonlighting as a department-store Santa Claus (“Reb Kringle”); and “The Gilgul of Park Avenue,” an unassuming Wasp who inexplicably “realizes” he has become an Orthodox Jew—to the bellicose dismay of his astonished wife (“You threw out all the cheese, Charles. How could God hate cheese?”). As beguiling as Englander’s comic tales are, though, his skills are even more impressively displayed in several pieces that strike more somber notes. “Reunion,” for example, paints a graphic first-person picture of a manic-depressive Brooklynite whose travels in and out of institutions make a living hell of his marriage and fatherhood. “The Tumblers” fashions its fable-like story of an insular city that resists contact with the outside world into a trenchant allegory of all the stages of Jewry under Nazism, from denial through martyrdom. “The Twenty-Seventh Man” is unpublished writer Pinchas Pelovits, who finds his voice, and completes the work he was born to create, after he is mistakenly rounded up among a group of eminent writers doomed to execution by Stalinist thugs. And the concluding “In This Way We Are Wise” memorably dramatizes the emotions of an American Jew in Jerusalem imperfectly adapting to both ongoing terrorist bombings and the city’s phlegmatic fatalism. An exemplary fusion of what T.S. Eliot called “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” and a truly remarkable debut.
Pub Date: April 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-375-40492-9
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1999
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by Etgar Keret ; translated by Sondra Silverston & Nathan Englander & Jessica Cohen & Miriam Shlesinger & Yardenne Greenspan
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by Tim O’Brien ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 28, 1990
It's being called a novel, but it is more a hybrid: short-stories/essays/confessions about the Vietnam War—the subject that O'Brien reasonably comes back to with every book. Some of these stories/memoirs are very good in their starkness and factualness: the title piece, about what a foot soldier actually has on him (weights included) at any given time, lends a palpability that makes the emotional freight (fear, horror, guilt) correspond superbly. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to." But so much else is so structurally coy that real effects are muted and disadvantaged: O'Brien is writing a book more about earnestness than about war, and the peekaboos of this isn't really me but of course it truly is serve no true purpose. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. A disappointment.
Pub Date: March 28, 1990
ISBN: 0618706410
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 1990
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SEEN & HEARD
IN THE NEWS
SEEN & HEARD
by Flannery O'Connor ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 1, 1971
The thirty-one stories of the late Flannery O'Connor, collected for the first time. In addition to the nineteen stories gathered in her lifetime in Everything That Rises Must Converge (1965) and A Good Man is Hard to Find (1955) there are twelve previously published here and there. Flannery O'Connor's last story, "The Geranium," is a rewritten version of the first which appears here, submitted in 1947 for her master's thesis at the State University of Iowa.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1971
ISBN: 0374515360
Page Count: 555
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Oct. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1971
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by Flannery O'Connor edited by Benjamin B. Alexander
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by Flannery O'Connor edited by W.A. Sessions
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