Synopses & Reviews
Set in Greece, the Caribbean, Manhattan, a white-collar prison and outer space, these nine stories are a mesmerizing introduction to Don DeLillo's iconic voice, from the rich, startling, jazz-infused rhythms of his early work to the spare, distilled, monastic language of the later stories.
In "Creation," a couple at the end of a cruise somewhere in the West Indies cant get off the island — flights canceled, unconfirmed reservations, a dysfunctional economy. In "Human Moments in World War III," two men orbiting the earth, charged with gathering intelligence and reporting to Colorado Command, hear the voices of American radio, from a half century earlier. In the title story, Sisters Edgar and Grace, nuns working the violent streets of the South Bronx, confirm the neighborhoods miracle, the apparition of a dead child, Esmeralda.
Nuns, astronauts, athletes, terrorists and travelers, the characters in The Angel Esmeralda propel themselves into the world and define it. DeLillo's sentences are instantly recognizable, as original as the splatter of Jackson Pollock or the luminous rectangles of Mark Rothko. These nine stories describe an extraordinary journey of one great writer whose prescience about world events and ear for American language changed the literary landscape.
Review
“A beautiful book for all time”—San Francisco Chronicle
Review
“A vital addition to DeLillo’s corpus…expertly realized…The gods have equipped DeLillo with the antennae of a visionary. There is right field, and there is left field. He comes from third field—aslant, athwart. And I love The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories.”—Martin Amis, The New Yorker
Review
“A terrific overview of [DeLillo’s] many strengths, from pitch-perfect character descriptions to surprising humor to soaring lyricism...The literary fireworks of the title piece alone are a stunning example of how the ordinary can become extraordinary in a gifted artist’s hands…Behold and be dazzled.”—Josh Emmons, People
Review
“Many of [DeLillo’s] deceptively simple sentences will leave you awestruck…This slim volume is a marvel—a masterpiece of short fiction.”—Carmela Ciuraru, USA Today
Review
“I was dazzled…Reading this collection confirms DeLillo as one of our very best short story writers…The richness of his work, the pleasures on offer—intellectual, visceral, poetic, comic—are unrivalled.”—Sam Lipsyte, author of The Ask
Review
“Magnificent.”—Richard Eder, The Boston Globe
Review
“[DeLillo’s] prose is masterly and austere…Even the most fragmentary of [the stories] provides the pleasure of reading the inimitably elegant sentences that DeLillo has been fashioning for four decades.”—Troy Jollimore, The Washington Post
Review
“The typical DeLillo tale reads like a diagnosis of a zeitgeist malady we never knew we had, and in these stories the malady is one of spellbound fixation. DeLillo has achieved a very particular kind of greatness…and his gifts…are, for a contemporary American writer, unsurpassed.”—Charles Baxter, The New York Review of Books
Review
Winner, 2013 Franz Kafka Prize"[An] intricately interwoven skein of eight new stories. . . “Between Friends” richly satisfies. . . One savors these moody miniatures of the kibbutz past (gracefully translated by Sondra Silverston) for their jazzlike variations; each elegantly underscores the uncertain fates awaiting both the lonely individual and the community."—Forward
"Oz traces the emotional terrain of kibbutz life in this. . . gorgeous, rueful collection of eight linked stories about life in fictional Kibbutz Yekhat. . . Written in deliberately unadorned prose (beautifully translated by Sondra Silverston), [Between Friends] lays bare the deepest human longings."
—Chicago Tribune
"The mind is a place Oz explores masterfully in all its contradiction, texture and heartache. Between Friends paints the daily lives behind utopian dreams, fully realized."
—New York Daily News
"[A] deeply affecting chamber piece [that] draws on…the contradictory urges that lie at the heart of Israels psyche."
—Ben Lawrence, The Telegraph (UK)
"Oz lifts the veil on kibbutz existence without palaver. His pin-point descriptions are pared to perfection… His people twitch with life."
—Scotsman (UK)
"Lucid and heartbreaking… Oz explores the always uncertain relationships between men and women, parents and children, friends and enemies, in a clear, clipped language perfectly suited to the laconic tone of the narrative and impeccably rendered into English by Sondra Silverston"
—Alberto Manguel, Guardian (UK)
"A collection of stories….that boasts the sense, scope and unity of a novel…Breathtaking."
—Irish Examiner (Ireland)
"A complex and melancholic vision of people struggling to transcend their individuality for the sake of mundanely idealistic goals."
—Times Literary Supplement (UK)
"All Israeli life is here, rendered in loving detail."
—Mail on Sunday (UK)
Synopsis
From one of the greatest writers of our time, a collection of short stories, written between 1979 and 2011; chronicling--and foretelling--three decades of American culture.
From one of the greatest writers of our time, his first collection of short stories, written between 1979 and 2011, chronicling--and foretelling--three decades of American life
Set in Greece, the Caribbean, Manhattan, a white-collar prison and outer space, these nine stories are a mesmerizing introduction to Don DeLillo's iconic voice, from the rich, startling, jazz-infused rhythms of his early work to the spare, distilled, monastic language of the later stories.
In "Creation," a couple at the end of a cruise somewhere in the West Indies can't get off the island--flights canceled, unconfirmed reservations, a dysfunctional economy. In "Human Moments in World War III," two men orbiting the earth, charged with gathering intelligence and reporting to Colorado Command, hear the voices of American radio, from a half century earlier. In the title story, Sisters Edgar and Grace, nuns working the violent streets of the South Bronx, confirm the neighborhood's miracle, the apparition of a dead child, Esmeralda.
Nuns, astronauts, athletes, terrorists and travelers, the characters in The Angel Esmeralda propel themselves into the world and define it. DeLillo's sentences are instantly recognizable, as original as the splatter of Jackson Pollock or the luminous rectangles of Mark Rothko. These nine stories describe an extraordinary journey of one great writer whose prescience about world events and ear for American language changed the literary landscape.
Synopsis
From one of the greatest writers of our time, his first collection of short stories, written between 1979 and 2011, chronicling — and foretelling — three decades of American life.
Synopsis
A provocative new story collection from the internationally celebrated author of A Tale of Love and Darkness
Synopsis
“Oz lifts the veil on kibbutz existence without palaver. His pinpoint descriptions are pared to perfection . . . His people twitch with life.” — Scotsman In Between Friends, Amos Oz returns to the kibbutz of the late 1950s, the time and place where his writing began. These eight interconnected stories, set in the fictitious Kibbutz Yekhat, draw masterly profiles of idealistic men and women enduring personal hardships in the shadow of one of the greatest collective dreams of the twentieth century.
A devoted father who fails to challenge his daughter’s lover, an old friend, a man his own age; an elderly gardener who carries on his shoulders the sorrows of the world; a woman writing poignant letters to her husband’s mistress—amid this motley group of people, a man named Martin attempts to teach everyone Esperanto.
Each of these stories is a luminous human and literary study; together they offer an eloquent portrait of an idea and of a charged and fascinating epoch. Amos Oz at home. And at his best.
Translated from the Hebrew by Sondra Silverston
Synopsis
Four interlocking novellas (and twenty footnotes) form a richly comic Pynchonesque feast about love, academia, an elusive Tibetan novelist who might be a plagiarizer, and SOFA, a mysterious protest group whose very initials are ambiguous.
Synopsis
Four interlocking narratives set in four American cities form a richly comic feast about love, academia, an elusive Tibetan novelist—and SOFA, a protest group so mysterious its very initials are open to interpretation.
Bad Teeth follows a cast of young literary men and women, each in a period of formation, in four very American cities—Brooklyn, Bloomington, Berkeley, and Bakersfield. A Pynchonesque treat, its four (or more) books in one: a bohemian satire, a campus comedy, a stoners reverie, and a quadruple love story. The plots coalesce around the search for a mysterious author, Jigme Drolma (“the Tibetan David Foster Wallace”), who might in fact be a plagiarist. But how does the self-styled arch-magician Nicholas Bendix figure into this? What will happen when SOFA unleashes the “Apocalypse”? And whats to become of Lump, the cat?
About the Author
Don DeLillo is the author of fifteen novels, including Falling Man, Libra and White Noise, and three plays. He has won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the PEN/Saul Bellow Award for Achievement in American Fiction and the Jerusalem Prize. In 2006, Underworld was named one of the three best novels of the last twenty-five years by the New York Times Book Review, and in 2000 it won the William Dean Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters for the most distinguished work of fiction of the past five years.
Table of Contents
The King of Norway 1
Two Women 19
Between Friends 33
Father 55
Little Boy 81
At Night 101
Deir Ajloun 125
Esperanto 153