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"The most interesting and experimental novelist in Israel."--Review Of Contemporary Fiction
Truly eye-opening, KATSCHEN & THE BOOK OF JOSEPH makes an amazing American debut for Israeli writer Yoel Hoffmann. THE BOOK OF JOSEPH tells the tragic story of a widowed Jewish tailor and his son in 1930's Berlin; KATSCHEN gives an astounding child's-eye-view of a boy orphaned in Palestine. These two intensely moving novellas display the poetry of Hoffmann's language, which one reviewer has called "utterly enchanting . . . like nothing else". Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.
Yoel Hoffmann—“Israel’s celebrated avant-garde genius” (The Forward)—supplies the magic missing link between the infinitesimal and the infinite Part novel and part memoir, Yoel Hoffmann’s Moods is flooded with feelings, evoked by his family, losses, loves, the soul’s hidden powers, old phone books, and life in the Galilee—with its every scent, breeze, notable dog, and odd neighbor. Carrying these shards is a general tenderness, accentuated by a new dimension brought along by “that great big pill of Prozac.” Beautifully translated by Peter Cole, Moods is fiction for lovers of poetry and poetry for lovers of fiction—a small marvel of a book, and with its pockets of joy, a curiously cheerful book by an author who once compared himself to “a praying mantis inclined to melancholy.”
"A wonderful introduction the Japanese tradition of jisei, this volume is crammed with exquisite, spontaneous verse and pithy, often hilarious, descriptions of the eccentric and committed monastics who wrote the poems." --Tricycle: The Buddhist Review Although the consciousness of death is, in most cultures, very much a part of life, this is perhaps nowhere more true than in Japan, where the approach of death has given rise to a centuries-old tradition of writing jisei, or the "death poem." Such a poem is often written in the very last moments of the poet's life. Hundreds of Japanese death poems, many with a commentary describing the circumstances of the poet's death, have been translated in...
When The Sound of the One Hand came out in Japan in 1916 it caused a scandal. Zen was a secretive practice, its wisdom relayed from master to novice in strictest privacy. That a handbook existed recording not only the riddling koans that are central to Zen teaching but also detailing the answers to them seemed to mark Zen as rote, not revelatory. For all that, The Sound of the One Hand opens the door to Zen like no other book. Including koans that go back to the master who first brought the koan teaching method from China to Japan in the eighteenth century, this book offers, in the words of the translator, editor, and Zen initiate Yoel Hoffmann, the clearest, most detailed, and most correct picture of Zen that can be found. What we have here is an extraordinary introduction to Zen thought as lived thought, a treasury of problems, paradoxes, and performance that will appeal to artists, writers, and philosophers as well as Buddhists and students of religion."
The Heart Is Katmandu tells a tale of new love--of paradise gained.
The Christ of Fish is a gorgeous novel conjured out of a mosaic of 233 pieces of Aunt Magda's life in Tel Aviv. Originally from Vienna, Hoffmann's heroine is a widow who still speaks German after decades in Israel: we see many views of Aunt Magdaher childhood, her marriage, her nephew, her best friend Frau Stier, Wildegans' poetry, apple strudel, visions and dreams, two stolen handbags, a favorite cafe, and a gentleman admirer.
The reflections of Bernhardt Stein, a Jew from Berlin, as he observes World War II from his refuge in Palestine. A philosophical novel by an Israeli writer, author of Katschen and the Book of Joseph.
The old Zen master Joshu (Zhaozhou also Chao-chou is one of those prototypical figures in classical Zen literature, the unpredictable protagonist of many of the key cases in the major koan collections. Come to think of it, many of our standard stereotypes of the Zen Master can be traced to this figure--irascible and blunt, down-to-earth and practical, prone to answer religious questions with seemingly off-the wall non-sequiturs and paradoxes if not a good sharp smack in the face. Regardless of the now probably untraceable layers of historical fact and later legend swirled about within this image, then, it's of vital importance in understanding the Zen tradition and its development, not to mention its current sense of identity. And so the classic Zen text purporting to be Chao-chou's recorded sayings, wonderfully translated in this book by Yoel Hoffman, is as extremely significant as it is quizzically enjoyable and underhandedly inspiring.--Amazon.com.
Two novellas by an Israeli writer. The Book of Joseph is the tragic story of a Jewish tailor and his son at the hands of the Nazis in 1930s Berlin, while Katschen is about an orphaned boy in Palestine. By the author of The Christ of Fish.