You may have to Search all our reviewed books and magazines, click the sign up button below to create a free account.
An NPR 'Great Read of 2014' A brilliant and hilarious satirical novel about the state of twenty-first century Israel On a rock-strewn hilltop in the heart of the West Bank stands a lone second-hand shipping container, a generator and some goats. On this contested land, Othniel Assis – under the wary gaze of the neighbouring Palestinian village – installs his ever-expanding family. As he cheerfully manipulates government agencies, more settlers arrive and, with a hodge-podge of bankers, teachers, kibbutzniks and townies, religious and secular, the outpost takes root. But when a curious journalist stumbles into their midst, the settlement becomes the focus of an international diplomatic scandal.
Israeli crime fiction that “sets the bar high for subsequent Noir offerings. The genre is hot, Tel Aviv is exotic, and this volume is outstanding” (Library Journal, starred review). Akashic Books continues its groundbreaking series of original noir anthologies, launched with the summer ’04 award-winning bestseller Brooklyn Noir. Each book is comprised of all-new stories, each one set in a distinct neighborhood or location within the respective city. For Tel Aviv Noir, Etgar Keret and Assaf Gavron have masterfully assembled some of Israel’s top contemporary writers into a compulsively readable collection. Along with Gon Ben Ari’s story “Clear Recent History”—winner of the Priv...
Eitan Enoch -- nicknamed “Croc” -- is a thirty-something Tel Aviv yuppie whose life is turned upside down one morning when he narrowly escapes the suicide bombing of the bus he takes to work. Two days later, Croc finds himself in a second explosion, and manages to again emerge unscathed. A week after that, he’s sitting in a café in Jerusalem when another suicide bomber strikes. Again he survives. With the coincidence of these three attacks, Croc is turned into a (reluctant) media celebrity. To the Israeli resistance, he is “The Man They Couldn’t Kill!” So, of course, the Palestinian terrorists who have been organizing the attacks feel he must be taken out. Meanwhile, Fahmi, a young Palestinian bomb-maker with a conscience, is lying in a coma in a hospital somewhere in Israel. As Fahmi tells us his own story, we begin to realize that there is a fourth bombing to come -- one that involves both Famhi and Croc.
A darkly comic novel about the bizarre realities of life in Israel today.
A groundbreaking collection of essays by celebrated international writers bears witness to the human cost of fifty years of Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza. In Kingdom of Olives and Ash, Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman, two of today's most renowned novelists and essayists, have teamed up with the Israeli NGO Breaking the Silence—an organization comprised of former Israeli soldiers who served in the occupied territories and saw firsthand the injustice there—and a host of illustrious writers to tell the stories of the people on the ground in the contested territories. Kingdom of Olives and Ash includes contributions from several of today’s most esteemed storytellers includ...
EIGHTY PIECES OF SHORT FICTION AND NONFICTION ON MANHOOD BY SOME OF THE WORLD'S BEST WRITERS, PRESENTED BY COLUM MCCANN, ESQUIRE, AND NARRATIVE 4 To help launch the literary nonprofit Narrative 4, Esquire asked eighty of the world's greatest writers to chip in with a story, all with the title, "How to Be a Man." The result is The Book of Men, an unflinching investigation into the essence of masculinity. The Book of Men probes, with the poignant honesty and imagination that only these writers could deliver, the slippery condition of manhood. You will find men striving and searching, learning and failing to learn, triumphing and aspiring; men who are lost and men navigating their way toward re...
When Miss Hazelstone of Jacaranda Park kills her Zulu cook in a sensational crime passionel, the gallant members of the South African police force are soon on the scene: Kommandant van Heerden, whose secret longing for the heart of an English gentleman leads to the most memorable transplant operation yet recorded; Luitenant Verkramp of the Security Branch, ever active in the pursuit of Communist cells; Konstabel Els, with his propensity for shooting first and not thinking later - and also for forcing himself upon African women in a manner legally reserved for male members of their own race. In the course of the strange events which follow, we encounter some very esoteric perversions when the Kommandant is held captive in Miss Hazelstone's remarkable rubber room; and some even more amazing perversions of justice when Miss Hazelstone's brother, the Bishop of Barotseland, is sentenced to be hanged on the ancient gallows in the local prison. Not a 'political' novel in any previously imagined sense, Riotous Assembly provided a completely fresh approach to the South African scene - an approach startling in its deadpan savagery and yet also outrageously funny.
"The short dirk in the hands of Muriel Spark has always been a deadly weapon," said The New York Times, and "never more so than in The Abbess of Crewe." An elegant little fable about intrigue, corruption, and electronic surveillance, The Abbess of Crewe is set in an English Benedictine convent. Steely and silky Abbess Alexandra (whose aristocratic tastes run to pâté, fine wine, English poetry, and carpets of "amorous green") has bugged the convent, and rigged her election. But the cat gets out of the bag, and--plunged into scandal--the serene Abbess faces a Vatican inquiry.
This sweet celebration of the magic and wonder of books will delight readers of all ages through André Letria's whimsical illustrations of a book as a kite, a tent, a ship, and more are paired with José Jorge Letria's thoughtful musings on the joys of reading. In the hands of this internationally acclaimed father-and-son duo, a book becomes a mountaintop with a spectacular vista ("If I were a book, I'd be full of new horizons"), and an endless staircase of imagination ("If I were a book, I would not want to know at the beginning how my story ends"). Seamlessly weaving together art and prose, this petite tribute to a reader's best friend makes a timeless addition to every bookshelf.
"Dolly City—a city without a base, without a past, without an infrastructure. The most demented city in the world." In the midst of a futuristic-primitive metropolis, the accumulation of all our urban nightmares, Doctor Dolly (certified by the University of Katmandu) finds a newborn baby in a black plastic bag, and decides to become a mother. Overcome by unfamiliar maternal urges, Dolly dispenses with her private lab of rare diseases and turns all her surgical passion onto her son. Ceaselessly cutting and sewing, Dolly is the scalpel-wielding version of the all-too-familiar Jewish Mother archetype, forever operating upon her son with destructive, invasive love. In this grotesque satire of war and the defensive measures taken to survive it, Orly Castel-Bloom, one of Israel's most provocative and original writers, turns her own scalpel upon that most holy of institutions, the myth of motherhood—and its implications in the life of a nation.