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.

The first book from the acclaimed, award-winning author of A Tale of Love and Darkness and the New York Times Notable Book, Scenes from Village Life. The Washington Post praised Israeli author Amos Oz as “one of our essential writers, laying out for our observation, in ever-increasing breadth and profundity, the mad landscape of our time and his place.” Here, in his first book, 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, and convey 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. “A strong, beautiful, disturbing book. It speaks piercingly—whether wittingly or unwittingly, I know not—of a dimension of the Israeli experience not often discussed, of the specter of the other brother, of a haunting, an unhealed wound; it reminds us of polarizations everywhere that bind and diminish us, that may yet rend us.” —The New York Times “As you read, you feel yourself, in all these stories, sinking deeper into the loam of Oz’s sensibility, a paradoxical mix of sensuality and disdain. A good collection by an important international writer.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

In Between God and Beast, Avraham Balaban argues that Oz's fiction has, from the outset, followed Jung's psychological theory. The major psychic processes that are depicted throughout Oz's prose are typically Jungian. For example, the treasure hunt, which is the deep structure of many of Oz's stories and novels, reflects the search for the "self" in which all the vying forces of one's psyche coexist peacefully. Oz uses many of the symbols of the treasure as well as of the self as they are presented by Jung. Many of the symbols examined in this study have never before been discussed in articles about Oz's writings. Balaban also devotes a considerable portion of his study to the religious dimension of Oz's work as well as the impact of his personal life on his writings. Balaban reveals that from the beginning Oz's work has moved in two directions: it demonstrates an unceasing effort to delve ever deeper into the dark side of consciousness while heightening the contrast between the opposing elements vying within his protagonists; and it consistently attempts to bring those oppositions to peaceful coexistence and even to a fruitful mutual relationship.

A rich and varied selection of writings from the early sixties to the present by Amos Oz, one of Israel s leading novelists, public intellectuals, and political activists. The Amos Oz Reader draws on Oz's entire body of work and is loosely grouped into four themes: the kibbutz, the city of Jerusalem, the idea of a "promised land," and his own life story. Included are excerpts from his celebrated novels, among them Where the Jackals Howl, A Perfect Peace, My Michael, Fima, Black Box, and To Know a Woman. Nonfiction is represented by selections from Under This Blazing Light, The Slopes of Lebanon, In the Land of Israel, and Oz s masterpiece, A Tale of Love and Darkness. With an illuminating introduction by Robert Alter. Praise for A Tale of Love and Darkness "A[n] ingenious work that circles around the rise of a state, the tragic destiny of a mother, a boy s creation of a new self." The New Yorker "Detailed and beautiful As he writes about himself and his family, Oz is also writing part of the history of the Jews." Los Angeles Times AMOS OZ is a prize-winning novelist and essayist whose honors include the Prix Femina, the Israel Prize, the Frankfurt Peace Prize, and the Prince of Asturias Award for Letters. Most recently, his memoir, A Tale of Love and Darkness, received the Koret Jewish Book Award. He lives in Arad. NITZA BEN-DOV is Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at Haifa University, as well as a scholar of biblical poetics. ROBERT ALTER is an esteemed scholar and translator. His recent translations include The Book of Psalms and The Five Books of Moses. "

The veteran contributors to this volume take as their central drama, and their essential task for analysis, the enduring literary and political legacy of Israel Prize laureate Amos Oz (1939–2019). Born a decade prior to the establishment of the state of Israel, in what was then Palestine under British rule, Oz's life spanned the country's entire history, and both his fiction and nonfiction restlessly probe and illuminate its fraught conflicts, contradictions, and ambivalences. Throughout his career, Oz grappled frankly with the often-painful realities of Israeli life while also celebrating the ebullience of the Israeli spirit, and his sophisticated understanding of the sociopolitical turmoil of his society was always accompanied by intensely lyrical language and deep penetrations into the vulnerabilities of the human psyche. The volume's twenty contributors bring an exciting diversity of concerns and perspectives to Oz's most celebrated novels (including his powerfully resonant final novel, Judas) as well as to overlooked facets of his oeuvre, illuminating the breathtaking scope of his literary legacy. Together, they offer gripping analyses of his urgent and profoundly universal works about political and romantic dreamers whose heartfelt struggles with both their own human frailties and those of the state ultimately resonate far beyond Israel itself.

We all know we're not supposed to judge books by their covers, but the truth is that we do just that nearly every time we walk into a bookstore or pull a book off a tightly packed shelf. It's really not something we should be ashamed about, for it reinforces something we sincerely believe: design matters. At its best, book cover design is an art that transcends the publisher's commercial imperativesto reflect both an author's ideas and contemporary cultural values in a vital, intelligent, and beautiful way. In this groundbreaking and lavishly illustrated history, authors Ned Drew and Paul Sternberger establish American book cover design as a tradition of sophisticated, visual excellence that has put shape to our literary landscape. By Its Cover traces the story of the American book cover from its inception as a means of utilitarian protection for the book to its current status as an elaborately produced form of communication art. It is, at once, the intertwined story of American graphic design and American literature, and features the work of such legendary figures as Rockwell Kent, E. McKnight Kauffer, Paul Rand, Alvin Lustig, Rudy deHarak, and Roy Kuhlman along with more recent and contemporary innovators including Push Pin Studios, Chermayeff & Geismar, Karen Goldberg, Chip Kidd, and John Gall.

Israel in Exile is a bold exploration of how the ancient desert of Exodus and Numbers, as archetypal site of human liberation, forms a template for modern political identities, radical skepticism, and questioning of official narratives of the nation that appear in the works of contemporary Israeli authors including David Grossman, Shulamith Hareven, and Amos Oz, as well as diasporic writers such as Edmund Jabès and Simone Zelitch. In contrast to other ethnic and national representations, Jewish writers since antiquity have not constructed a neat antithesis between the desert and the city or nation; rather, the desert becomes a symbol against which the values of the city or nation can be tested, measured, and sometimes found wanting. This book examines how the ethical tension between the clashing Mosaic and Davidic paradigms of the desert still reverberate in secular Jewish literature and produce fascinating literary rewards. Omer-Sherman ultimately argues that the ancient encounter with the desert acquires a renewed urgency in response to the crisis brought about by national identities and territorial conflicts.

In Eve's Journey, Nehama Aschkenasy traces the migration of several female images and feminine situations from their early appearances in Biblical writings to their incarnations in modern Hebraic literature. Focusing on the evolution of early female archetypes and prototypes, Aschkenasy uncovers the ancient roots of modern female characters and traces the changing cultural perceptions of women in Hebraic letters. The author draws on the vast body of Hebraic literary documents to illustrate how the female character is a mirror of her times as well as being a product of her creator''s imagination and conception of the woman's role in society and in fiction. The historical spectrum, provided by a discussion of Biblical narratives, Midrashic sources, documents of the Jewish mystics, Hasidic tales, and modern Hebrew works, allows an understanding of the metamorphosis that the female figure has experienced in her literary odyssey.

In Imagining the Kibbutz, Ranen Omer-Sherman explores the literary and cinematic representations of the socialist experiment that became history’s most successfully sustained communal enterprise. Inspired in part by the kibbutz movement’s recent commemoration of its centennial, this study responds to a significant gap in scholarship. Numerous sociological and economic studies have appeared, but no book-length study has ever addressed the tremendous range of critically imaginative portrayals of the kibbutz. This diachronic study addresses novels, short fiction, memoirs, and cinematic portrayals of the kibbutz by both kibbutz “insiders” (including those born and raised there, as well as those who joined the kibbutz as immigrants or migrants from the city) and “outsiders.” For these artists, the kibbutz is a crucial microcosm for understanding Israeli values and identity. The central drama explored in their works is the monumental tension between the individual and the collective, between individual aspiration and ideological rigor, between self-sacrifice and self-fulfillment. Portraying kibbutz life honestly demands retaining at least two oppositional things in mind at once—the absolute necessity of euphoric dreaming and the mellowing inevitability of disillusionment. As such, these artists’ imaginative witnessing of the fraught relation between the collective and the citizen-soldier is the story of Israel itself.