Synopses & Reviews
“
Scenes from Village Life is like a symphony, its movements more impressive together than in isolation. There is, in each story, a particular chord or strain; but taken together, these chords rise and reverberate, evoking an unease so strong it’s almost a taste in the mouth . . .
Scenes from Village Life is a brief collection, but its brevity is a testament to its force. You will not soon forget it.”—
New York Times Book Review Strange things are happening in Tel Ilan, a century-old pioneer village. A disgruntled retired politician complains to his daughter that he hears the sound of digging at night. Could it be their tenant, that young Arab? But then the young Arab hears the digging sounds too. And where has the mayor’s wife gone, vanished without a trace, her note saying “Don’t worry about me”?
Around the village, the veneer of new wealth—gourmet restaurants, art galleries, a winery—barely conceals the scars of war and of past generations: disused air-raid shelters, rusting farm tools, and trucks left wherever they stopped. Scenes From Village Life is a memorable novel in stories by the inimitable Amos Oz: a brilliant, unsettling glimpse of what goes on beneath the surface of everyday life.
Translated from the Hebrew by Nicholas de Lange
“Finely wrought . . . Oz writes characterizations that are subtle but surgically precise, rendering this work a powerfully understated treatment of an uneasy Israeli conscience." —Publishers Weekly, starred
“Informed by everything, weighed down by nothing, this is an exquisite work of art.”—The Scotsman
Review
"Finely wrought... Oz writes characterizations that are subtle but surgically precise, rendering this work
a powerfully understated treatment of an uneasy Israeli conscience."
-Publishers Weekly, starred "Highly recommended."
-Library Journal, starred UK Praise for SCENES FROM VILLAGE LIFE: "An impressive and very affecting achievement...These stories, in their humanity, may do more for Israel than any of the decisions we have been led to expect of its leaders in the months to come."
-New Statesman "One of the most powerful books you will read about present-day Israel."
-Jewish Chronicle
Review
PRAISE FOR
THE SAME SEA"In a world full of hype, noise, and confusion, the simple lucidity of The Same Sea is totally unexpected."--The New York Times Book Review
"This lovely, lyrical territory, irrigated by numerous streams of consciousness, reminded me of some of the great things a novel can do."--Chicago Tribune
Review
PRAISE FOR
MY MICHAEL"Slow, thoughtful, self-assured and highly sophisticated, full of the most skillful modulations of tone and texture. A modern Israeli Madame Bovary . . . distinguished by its warmth, its lyricism and remarkable technical control."--The New York Times
"A dazzling, very beautiful, splendidly conceived and composed book."--The New York Review of Books
Review
"Calvino is a supreme storyteller, writing with ease and transparency that make the reader a confidante." --Publishers Weekly
Synopsis
A novel in stories by acclaimed Israeli author Amos Oz.
Synopsis
In the village of Tel Ilan, something is off kilter. An elderly man complains to his daughter that he hears the sound of digging under his house at night. Could it be his tenant, a young Arab? But then the tenant hears the mysterious digging sounds too. The mayor receives a note from his wife: "Dont worry about me." He looks all over, no sign of her. The veneer of new wealth around the village—gourmet restaurants and art galleries, a winery--cannot conceal abandoned outbuildings, disused air raid shelters, rusting farm tools, and trucks left wherever they stopped.
Amos Oz's novel-in-stories is a brilliant, unsettling glimpse of what goes on beneath the surface of everyday life. Scenes from Village Life is a parable for Israel, and for all of us.
Synopsis
Praise for
Scenes from Village Life “In exquisitely controlled prose, renowned Israeli author Oz reminds us of the creepy unsureness that underlies all ‘village’ life, rural or urban—and not just in Israel.” –Library Journal (starred)
“Subtle but surgically precise . . . a powerfully understated treatment of an uneasy Israeli conscience.” –Publishers Weekly (starred)
“The book’s atmosphere of desolation and disquiet is bewitching.” —The Times (UK)
“An impressive and very affecting achievement . . . These stories, in their humanity, may do more for Israel than any of the decisions we have been lead to expect of its leaders in the months to come.” —The New Statesman (UK)
Synopsis
Amos Oz's first book: a disturbing and beautiful collection of short stories about kibbutz life. Written in the '60s, these eight stories convey the tension and intensity of feeling in the founding period of Israel, a brand-new state with an age-old history.
Synopsis
Amos Oz's first book—beautifully repackaged—is a disturbing and moving collection of short stories about kibbutz life.
Each of the eight stories in this volume grips the reader from the first line. Each conveys the tension and intensity of feeling in the founding period of Israel, a brand-new state with an age-old history.
Some are love stories, more are hate stories, and frequently the two urges intertwine.
Synopsis
“Astonishing . . . galvanic and intoxicating.” —
The New Yorker Fima lives in Jerusalem, but feels he ought to be somewhere else. In his life he has had secret love affairs, good ideas, and written a book of poems that aroused expectations. He has thought about the purpose of the universe and where the country lost its way. He has felt longings of all sorts, and the constant desire to pen a new chapter. And here he is now, in his early fifties in a shabby apartment on a gloomy wet morning, engaged in a humiliating struggle to release his shirt from the zipper of his fly. With wit and insight, Amos Oz portrays a man—and a generation—dreaming noble dreams but doing nothing.
“One of Oz’s most memorable fictional creations . . . Fima is a cross between Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya and Joyce’s Leopold Bloom.” — Washington Post
Synopsis
“An exemplary instance of a writer using his craft to come to grips with what is happening politically and to illuminate certain aspects of Israeli society that have generally been concealed by polemical formulas.” —
The New York Times Notebook in hand, Amos Oz traveled throughout Israel and the West Bank in the early 1980s to talk with workers, soldiers, religious zealots, aging pioneers, new immigrants, desperate Arabs, and visionaries, asking them questions about Israel’s past, present, and future. What he heard is set down here in those distinctive voices, alongside Oz’s observations and reflections. A classic insider’s view of a land whose complex past and troubled present make for an uncertain future.
“Oz’s vignettes . . . wondrously re-create whole worlds with an economy of words.” —Philadelphia Inquirer
Synopsis
“In a world full of hype, noise, and confusion, the simple lucidity of
The Same Sea is totally unexpected.” —
New York Times Book Review The Same Sea is Amos Oz’s most adventurous and inventive book, a novel of lyrical beauty and narrative power. We meet the middle-aged Albert; his wife, whom he has lost to cancer; his prodigal son, who wanders the mountains of Tibet hoping to find himself; and his son’s young girlfriend, with whom Albert becomes infatuated. The author himself receives phone calls from his creations, criticizing him for his portraits of them. A fever dream of chaos and order, love and eroticism, loyalty and betrayal.
“A prose poem . . . at once melancholic and sensual.” — The New Yorker
Synopsis
"Thoughtful, self-assured and highly sophisticated, full of the most skillful modulations of tone and texture. A modern Israeli Madame Bovary.”—
New York Times Book Review Set in 1950s Jerusalem, My Michael is the story of a remote and intense woman named Hannah Gonen and her marriage to a decent but unremarkable man named Michael. As the years pass and Hannah’s tempestuous fantasy life encroaches upon reality, she feels increasingly estranged from him and the marriage gradually disintegrates. Gorgeously written, profoundly moving, this extraordinary novel is at once a haunting love story, and a rich reflective portrait of a place.
"A dazzling, very beautiful, splendidly conceived and composed book." —New York Review of Books
Synopsis
After seven years with no communication, a divorcee writes a letter to her ex-husband begging for help with their rebellious son. That single epistle opens a flood gate of correspondence that leads to her ex- and current husband rivaling not only for her loyalty but for her son's as well.
Synopsis
Seven years after their divorce, Ilana breaks the bitter silence with a letter to Alex, a world-renowned authority on fanaticism, begging for help with their rebellious adolescent son, Boaz. One letter leads to another, and so evolves a correspondence between Ilana and Alex, Alex and Michel (Ilana’s Moroccan husband), Alex and his Mephistophelian Jerusalem lawyer—a correspondence between mother and father, stepfather and stepson, father and son, each pleading his or her own case.
The grasping, lyrical, manipulative, loving Ilana has stirred things up. Now, her former husband and her present husband have become rivals not only for her loyalty but for her son’s as well.
Black Box is a record of passion, an ingenious, witty, feeling novel of contemporary life. Amos Oz at his novelistic, human, and poetic best.
Synopsis
From one of Israel's preeminent writers comes a superb collection of essays offering Oz's cogent views on Israel's offensive into Lebanon in 1982; fanaticism of all stripes; the PLO; Israeli terrorism; the new militarism and the growing intolerance toward the Arab population in Israel; the dream of Zionism, and its failures; and much more.
Synopsis
As well as being one of Israel’s preeminent writers of fiction, Amos Oz was one of the first voices of conscience in Israel to advocate the creation of a Palestinian state and has been a leading figure of the Peace Now movement since 1977. This superb collection of essays offers Oz’s cogent views on Israel’s offensive into Lebanon in 1982; fanaticism of all stripes; the PLO; Israeli terrorism; the new militarism and the growing intolerance toward the Arab population in Israel; Jewish attitudes toward the Holocaust, and its misappropriation by the right and left alike; Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah; the dream of Zionism and its failures; and much more.
Synopsis
A posthumously published collection of short stories that span the breadth of Italo Calvino's career.
Synopsis
“Everybody telephones everybody at every possible moment, and nobody can speak to anybody . . . Distance has been the warp that supports the weft of every love story.” — from
Numbers in the Dark
Written between 1943 and 1984, the stories in Numbers in the Dark span the career of one of fiction’s modern masters: from Italo Calvino’s earliest fables, to tales informed by life in World War II–era Italy, to the delightful experimentation that would define his later work. Here are speculative stories on life in the digital age, genre-bending wonders, and “impossible interviews” with the likes of Montezuma and a Neanderthal. Deftly translated by Tim Parks, Numbers in the Dark shows off Calvino’s lifelong gift for subtle humor and shimmering philosophical insight.
“Numbers in the Dark is a glorious grab-bag . . . [with] enough gems from every phase in Calvino’s career to make it feel indispensable.” — Seattle Times
Synopsis
Appearing here in its first English translation, Into the War contains three stories drawing on Italo Calvino's memories of the Second World War in Italy.
Synopsis
“This book deals both with a transition from adolescence into youth and with a move from peace to war: as for very many other people, for the protagonist of this book ‘entry into life’ and ‘entry into war’ coincide.” — from the Author’s Note
These three stories, set during the summer of 1940, draw on Italo Calvino’s memories of his own adolescence during the Second World War, too young to be forced to fight in Mussolini’s army but old enough to be conscripted into the Italian youth brigades. The callow narrator of these tales observes the mounting unease of a city girding itself for war, the looting of an occupied French town, and nighttime revels during a blackout. Appearing here in its first English translation, Into the War is one of Calvino’s only works of autobiographical fiction. It offers both a glimpse of this writer’s extraordinary life and a distilled dram of his wry, ingenious literary voice.
“All three stories attest to the potentially magical, transformative space of adolescence . . . The seeds of the later Calvino — the fabulist who worked profound moral and ethical points into his narratives — are all here.” — Joseph Luzzi, Times Literary Supplement
Synopsis
The first complete English-language edition of one of Calvino's important early short story collections.
Synopsis
“Calvino . . . managed effortlessly what no author in English could quite claim: his novels and stories and fables were both classically modernist and giddily postmodern, embracing both experiment and tradition, at once conceptual and humane, intimate and mythic.” — Jonathan Lethem, New York Times Book Review Blending reality and illusion with elegance and precision, the stories in this collection take place in a World War II–era and postwar Italy tinged with the visionary and fablelike qualities. A trio of gluttonous burglars invades a pastry shop; two children trespass upon a forbidden garden; a wealthy family invites a rustic goatherd to lunch, only to mock him. In the title story, a compact masterpiece of shifting perspectives, a panicked soldier tries to keep his wits—and his life—when he faces off against a young partisan with a loaded rifle and miraculous aim.
Select stories from Last Comes the Raven have been published in translation, but the collection as a whole has never appeared in English. This volume, including several stories newly translated by Ann Goldstein, is an important addition to Calvino’s legacy.
About the Author
Amos Oz was born in Jerusalem in 1939. He is the author of fourteen novels and collections of short fiction, and numerous works of nonfiction. His acclaimed memoir
A Tale of Love and Darkness was an international bestseller and recipient of the prestigious Goethe prize, as well as the National Jewish Book Award.
Scenes from Village Life, a
New York Times Notable Book, was awarded the Prix Méditerranée Étranger in 2010. He lives in Tel Aviv, Israel.
Nicholas de Lange is a professor at the University of Cambridge and a renowned translator. He has translated Amos Ozs work since the 1960s.
Table of Contents
Heirs • 1
Relations • 19
Digging • 39
Lost • 83
Waiting • 109
Strangers • 129
Singing • 153
In a faraway place at another time • 175