From Powells.com
Our favorite books of the year.
Synopses & Reviews
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 about 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.
Review
"Spectacular." The New Yorker
Review
"Hoffmann is not just a good writer but a great one, with the ability to find, in the moment-to-moment dislocation of daily existence, epiphanies of revelatory force. What Hoffmann has achieved is a kind of magic." David Ulin
Review
"I am confirmed in my admiration for Hoffmann's oblique and elliptical style." Chicago Tribune
Review
"Hoffmann's is an exile literature in exile from itself: self-conscious, and humorously historicized, yet with none of its homage preserved obviously. In his pages, the oldest of folkish tropes are wryly revivified into a third literature, that of a new and Third East-an undiscovered continent of exotically compelling fictions." W. G. Sebald
Review
"Hoffmann writes in a language of miracles." Joshua Cohen, author of Book of Numbers
Review
"Hoffmann writes in a language of miracles." Chicago Tribune
About the Author
Yoel Hoffmann was born in Brasow, Romania in 1937. He is presently a citizen of Israel, and is Professor of Eastern Philosophy at the U. of Haifa. He has had a lifelong scholarly engagement with Hebrew literature, Western philosophy, and Japanese Buddhism. His is the winner of the first Koret Jewish Book Award. His books include The Heart is Katmandu, Bernhardt, The Christ of Fish, and Katschen & The Book of Joseph.
Peter Cole's previous books of poems include Things on Which I've Stumbled (New Directions). Among his volumes of translation are The Poetry of Kabbalah: Mystical Verse from the Jewish Tradition and The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950-1492. Cole, who divides his time between Jerusalem and New Haven, was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2007.