<div>A snapshot of Israel and the West Bank in the 1980s, through the voices of its inhabitants, from the National Jewish Book Award&ndash;winning author of Judas. Notebook in hand, renowned author and onetime kibbutznik Amos Oz traveled throughout his homeland to talk with people&mdash;workers, soldiers, religious zealots, aging pioneers, desperate Arabs, visionaries&mdash;asking them questions about Israel&rsquo;s past, present, and future. Observant or secular, rich or poor, native-born or new immigrant, they shared their points of view, memories, hopes, and fears, and Oz recorded them. What emerges is a distinctive portrait of a changing nation and a complex society, supplemented by Oz&rsquo;s own observations and reflections, that reflects an insider&rsquo;s view of a country still forming its own identity. In the Land of Israel is &ldquo;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&rdquo; (The New York Times). </div>

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In the Land of Israel

<div>Three stories of &ldquo;sensuous prose and indelible imagery&rdquo; that re-create the world of Jerusalem during the last days of the British Mandate (The New York Times). Refugees drawn to Jerusalem in search of safety are confronted by activists relentlessly preparing for an uprising, oblivious to the risks. Meanwhile, a wife abandons her husband, and a dying man longs for his departed lover. Among these characters lives a boy named Uri, a friend and confidant of several conspirators who love and humor him as he weaves in and out of all three stories. The Hill of Evil Counsel is &ldquo;as complex, vivid, and uncompromising as Jerusalem itself&rdquo; (The Nation). &ldquo;Oz evokes Israeli life with the same sly precision with which Chekhov evoked pre-Revolutionary Russian life.&rdquo; &mdash;Los Angeles Times</div>

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The Hill of Evil Counsel

<div>This tale of a conflicted family living on a kibbutz in Israel just before the Six-Day War is &ldquo;Oz&#39;s strangest, riskiest, and richest novel.&rdquo; &mdash;The Washington Post Book World On a kibbutz, the country&rsquo;s founders and their children struggle to come to terms with their land and with each other. The messianic father exults in accomplishments that had once been only dreams; the son longs to establish an identity apart from his father; the fragile young wife is out of touch with reality; and the gifted and charismatic &ldquo;outsider&rdquo; seethes with emotion. Through the interplay of these brilliantly realized characters, Oz evokes a drama that is chillingly, strikingly universal. &ldquo;[Oz is] a peerless, imaginative chronicler of his country&rsquo;s inner and outer transformations.&rdquo; &mdash;Independent (UK)</div>

A Perfect Peace

<div>&ldquo;Thoughtful, self-assured and highly sophisticated, full of the most skillful modulations of tone and texture. A modern Israeli Madame Bovary.&rdquo; &mdash;The 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, pragmatic, but unremarkable geology professor named Michael. Wedded too young, emotionally unprepared for motherhood, and forced to abandon her university studies, Hannah grows bored, frustrated, and increasingly removed from the banal certainty of her immediate world. As years pass, and Michael goes off to war, Hannah&rsquo;s heady fantasy life encroaches upon reality. Hannah grows ever more estranged from her husband, as the marriage begins to disintegrate. &ldquo;A flickering, multi-toned Israeli novel which grapples with time&rsquo;s incursions, love&rsquo;s deceptions, and the diminishment of desire&rdquo; (Kirkus Reviews), My Michael is at once a haunting love story and a rich, reflective portrait of a place and time that &ldquo;takes the reader into the fevered mind of a young woman&rdquo; (The Guardian).</div>

My Michael

<div>Fiction and reality merge inside the mind of a famous Israeli author in this &ldquo;hilarious and profound . . . slyly philosophical novel&rdquo; (Booklist). In this novel, Amos Oz offers a prismatic portrait of the storytelling impulse, with an extended glimpse inside the mind of a celebrated, unnamed Author. On a stiflingly hot night, the Author is in Tel Aviv to give a reading from his new book. As his attention wanders, he begins to invent lives for the strangers he sees around him: here, a self-styled cultural guru, Yakir Bar-Orian Zhitomirski; there, a love-starved professional reader, Rochele Reznik; to say nothing of Ricky the waitress, the real object of his desires. Reality and fiction blend in this ingenious, poignant work by the author of A Tale of Love and Darkness, a winner of the Koret Jewish Book Award. &ldquo;A fable on themes of sex, death and writing pitched somewhere between the fictional universes of JM Coetzee and Milan Kundera.&rdquo; &mdash; The Guardian &ldquo;The witty and melancholy recorder of his country&rsquo;s brilliant sufficiencies. . . . Now Oz takes an equally witty, equally melancholy look at his role as a writer.&rdquo; &mdash;Los Angeles Times &ldquo;From the prodigious Oz comes a delightfully elusive . . . story of imagination, talent and the transitory nature of fame. . . . Stamped with Oz&rsquo;s charm and graceful skill in creating rich characters.&rdquo; &mdash;Publishers Weekly</div>

Rhyming Life & Death

<div>Linked short stories set in a town in the midst of change: &ldquo;One of the most powerful books you will read about present-day Israel.&rdquo; &mdash;The Jewish Chronicle &ldquo;&lsquo;Scenes from Village Life&rsquo; 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&rsquo;s almost a taste in the mouth . . . &lsquo;Scenes from Village Life&rsquo; is a brief collection, but its brevity is a testament to its force. You will not soon forget it.&rdquo; &mdash;The 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 sounds 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&rsquo;s wife gone, vanished without a trace, her note saying &ldquo;Don&rsquo;t worry about me&rdquo;? Around the village, the veneer of new wealth&mdash;gourmet restaurants, art galleries, a winery&mdash;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 Hebrew by Nicholas de Lange &ldquo;Finely wrought . . . Oz writes characterizations that are subtle but surgically precise, rendering this work a powerfully understated treatment of an uneasy Israeli conscience.&rdquo; &mdash;Publishers Weekly, starred review &ldquo;Informed by everything, weighed down by nothing, this is an exquisite work of art.&rdquo; &mdash;The Scotsman</div>

Scenes from Village Life

<div>&ldquo;Powerful&rdquo; essays from a founder of the Peace Now movement and advocate for a two-state solution (Library Journal). The haunting poetry of [Oz&#39;s] prose and the stunning logic of his testimony make a potent mixture.&quot; &mdash;Washington Post Book World Amos Oz was one of the first voices of conscience to advocate for a two-state solution. As a founding member of the Peace Now movement, Oz has spent over thirty-five years speaking out on this issue, and these powerful essays and speeches span an important and formative period for understanding today&#39;s tension and crises. Whether he is discoursing on the role of writers in society or recalling his grandmother&#39;s death in the context of the language&#39;s veracity; examining the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a tragicomedy or questioning the Zionist dream, Oz remains trenchant and unflinching in this moving portrait of a divided land. &quot;[Oz is] the modern prophet of Israel.&quot; &mdash;Sunday Telegraph (UK)</div>

Israel, Palestine and Peace

<div>Winner of the National Jewish Book Award: A &ldquo;gorgeous, rueful collection of eight linked stories&rdquo; capturing the collective dreams of Israel in the 1950s (Chicago Tribune). These eight interconnected stories, set in the fictitious Kibbutz Yekhat, draw masterful 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&rsquo;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 perversely poignant letters to her husband&rsquo;s mistress. 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. Award-winning writer Amos Oz, who spent three decades living on a kibbutz, is at home and at his best in this &ldquo;lucid and heartbreaking&rdquo; award-winning collection (The Guardian). &ldquo;Oz lifts the veil on kibbutz existence without palaver. His pinpoint descriptions are pared to perfection . . . His people twitch with life.&rdquo; &mdash;The Scotsman &ldquo;A collection of stories . . . that boasts the sense, scope and unity of a novel . . . Breathtaking.&rdquo; &mdash;Irish Examiner &ldquo;A complex and melancholic vision of people struggling to transcend their individuality for the sake of mundanely idealist goals.&rdquo; &mdash;The Times Literary Supplement</div>

Between Friends

<div>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 &ldquo;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.&rdquo; 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. &ldquo;A strong, beautiful, disturbing book. It speaks piercingly&mdash;whether wittingly or unwittingly, I know not&mdash;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.&rdquo; &mdash;The New York Times &ldquo;As you read, you feel yourself, in all these stories, sinking deeper into the loam of Oz&rsquo;s sensibility, a paradoxical mix of sensuality and disdain. A good collection by an important international writer.&rdquo; &mdash;Kirkus Reviews (starred review)</div>

Where the Jackals Howl

<div>The acclaimed author presents &ldquo;three passionate lectures about the state of politics in Israel&rdquo; in this &ldquo;humorous, mournful, enraged, and uplifting&rdquo; volume (Kirkus). A National Jewish Book Award Finalist Israeli author Amos Oz has won numerous awards for his novels capturing the cultural and political complexities of his country, including the Frankfurt Peace Prize, the Primo Levi Prize, and the National Jewish Book Award. But these essays on the universal nature of fanaticism and its possible cures, on the Jewish roots of humanism and the need for a secular pride in Israel, and on the geopolitical standing of Israel in the wider Middle East and internationally, &ldquo;may contain his most urgent message yet.&rdquo; (Ruth Eglash, Washington Post). These essays were written, Oz states, &ldquo;first and foremost&rdquo; for his grandchildren: they are a patient, learned telling of history, religion, and politics, to be thumbed through and studied, clung to even, as we march toward an uncertain future. &ldquo;Concise, evocative . . . Dear Zealots is not just a brilliant book of thoughts and ideas&mdash;it is a depiction of one man&rsquo;s struggle, who for decades has insisted on keeping a sharp, strident and lucid perspective in the face of chaos and at times of madness.&rdquo; &mdash;David Grossman, winner of the Man Booker International Prize</div>

Dear Zealots

<div>The National Jewish Book Award–winning author presents an “astonishing . . . galvanic and intoxicating” portrait of a man—and a generation—adrift (The New Yorker). Efraim “Fima” Nisan 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 his beloved 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 his mordant wit and penetrating insight, Amos Oz is widely regarded as “the most accomplished—and, certainly, the most celebrated—of contemporary Israeli novelists.” In Fima, the Franz Kafka Prize-winning author offers a work of deep political conscience through the lens of one man’s Existential crisis (L.A. Times). “One of Oz’s most memorable fictional creations . . . Fima is a cross between Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya and Joyce’s Leopold Bloom.” — Washington Post</div>

Fima

<div>The celebrated author and peace activist addresses the war in Lebanon and the deep political divides within Israel in these articles and essays. As well as being one of Israel’s preeminent writers of fiction, Amos Oz was one of the first Israeli voices of conscience to advocate the creation of a Palestinian state. Through his forcefully argued speeches, articles and essays, he was a leading figure of the Peace Now movement since 1977. This superb collection of political writings from 1982 to 1988 showcases Oz’s eloquent insight into the controversies of the time. In The Slopes of Lebanon, Oz discusses Israel’s offensive into Lebanon; 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. “An interesting, troubling, embittered, passionate, almost - but not quite - disheartened book.” —The New York Times</div>

The Slopes of Lebanon

<div>A tale of “dazzling brilliance . . . a simple story which conveys boundless meanings both modest and diverse, set in Jerusalem directly after WWII” (Historical Novel Society). When Soumchi, an eleven-year-old boy growing up in British-occupied Jerusalem just after World War II, receives a bicycle as a gift from his Uncle Zemach, he is overjoyed—even if it is a girl’s bicycle. Ignoring the taunts of other boys in his neighborhood, he dreams of riding far away from them, out of the city and across the desert, toward the heart of Africa. But first he wants to show his new prize to his friend Aldo. In the tradition of such memorable characters as Huckleberry Finn and Holden Caulfield, Amos Oz’s Soumchi is fresh, funny, and always engaging. “What a difference spirit and talent make! . . . told . . . with zest and buoyant humor, from the dual viewpoint of the alternately crushed and elated Soumchi and the amused author who delights in his boyhood excesses.” —Kirkus Reviews “Oz shows a remarkable ability to stay true to his character and expand him fully into a multi-faceted jewel. Soumchi is a concise read which enhances each person’s view on life, possessions, and how tender life and far-reaching imagination can be at such a sensitive age.” —Historical Novel Society</div>

Soumchi

<div>“A delicate contemporary tale about the quiddities of love and the perpetual mysteries of human motivations” from the bestselling Israeli author of Judas (Los Angeles Times). A New York Times Notable Book of the Year At Tel-Kedar, a settlement in the Negev desert, the longtime love affair between Theo, a sixty-year-old civil engineer, and Noa, a young schoolteacher, is slowly disintegrating. When a pupil dies under difficult circumstances, the couple and the entire town are thrown into turmoil. Amos Oz explores with brilliant insight the possibilities—and limits—of love and tolerance. “A rich symphony of humanity . . . If Oz’s eye for detail is enviable, it is his magnanimity which raises him to the first rank of world authors.” —Sunday Telegraph (UK) “Vivid, convincing, and haunting.” —The New York Times Book Review “A vividly and affectionately detailed picture of Israeli village life—and of what might be called a JulyOctober relationship—by acclaimed essayist and novelist Oz . . . A perfectly pitched comedy, expertly translated, and one of Oz’s most attractive and accomplished books.” —Kirkus Reviews “This novel, his 10th (after Fima), is set in Tel Kedar, a quiet desert town in the Negev that is both a microcosm of Israeli society and a vividly evoked setting whose atmosphere and residents are palpable . . . his story carries thought-provoking implications.” —Publishers Weekly “Skillfully alternating point of view between his two main characters, Oz shows us the painful process by which a couple uncouples, one sinew at a time.” —Booklist</div>

Don't Call It Night

<div>The renowned Israeli author’s debut novel. “An appealing tribute to the persistence of pathos and warmth among human beings clustered against the night.” —Kirkus Reviews Situated only two miles from a hostile border, Amos Oz’s fictional community of Metsudat Ram is a microcosm of the Israeli frontier kibbutz. There, held together by necessity and menace, the kibbutzniks share love and sorrow under the guns of their enemies and the eyes of history. “Immensely enjoyable.” —Chicago Tribune Book World “What Elsewhere, Perhaps eventually reveals is interesting. It is decidedly not what it appears to be at first: A straight-faced slice of kibbutz life told in imitation of the traditional Yiddish narrative voice of the invisible community gossip, who, begging our pardon, knows everything and tells all. No, although the narrator appears initially to be the genial voice of tradition, it soon becomes apparent that it is kidding us. It knows perfectly well we will scoff at Reuven Harish’s verses. For the story it is about to tell is compounded of nothing but ironies . . . It adds up to a charmingly unpious tapestry of Israeli life.” —The New York Times “An exquisite thinker, Oz is a rare blast of sanity and intelligence.” —The Observer “The physical circumstances are established with a painter’s skill . . . It is a rich book, its fruit pressed down and running over.” —The Sunday Times “A generous imagination at work. [Oz’s] language, for all of its sensuous imagery, has a careful and wise simplicity.” —The New York Times Book Review</div>

Elsewhere, Perhaps

<div>“Oz conjures up a fairy story in which we may well recognize ourselves, our history and our nations . . . be prepared simply to be enchanted.” —The Guardian In a gray and gloomy village, all of the animals—from dogs and cats to fish and snails—disappeared years before. No one talks about it and no one knows why, though everyone agrees that the village has been cursed. But when two children see a fish—a tiny one and just for a second—they become determined to unravel the mystery of where the animals have gone. And so they travel into the depths of the forest with that mission in mind, terrified and hopeful about what they may encounter. From the internationally bestselling author Amos Oz, this is a hauntingly beautiful fable for both children and adults about tolerance, loneliness, denial, and remembrance. “In this swiftly moving fable, Oz creates palpable tension with a repetitive, almost hypnotic rhythm and lyrical language that twists a discussion-provoking morality tale into something much more enchanting.” —Booklist “Short, poetic, and haunting, the book operates on a plane of mystery somewhere between fable and fairy tale . . . The great beauty of this story is the rhythm and clarity of its evocative language.” —New York Journal of Books “From the whispered tales of a local monster to the brash, spunky heroes on a quest, internationally acclaimed Israeli author Oz litters his story with fairy-tale tropes that give this narrative a fable-like quality; the atmosphere is intriguingly secretive and shadowed, but the prose is measured and accessible and the length manageable.” —The Bulletin</div>

Suddenly in the Depths of the Forest

<div>The third novel from the international bestselling author of Judas. “A profusion of delightful passages couched in unfailingly lovely language.” —The New York Times Book Review 1939. As the Nazis advance into Poland, a Jewish mathematician and watchmaker named Pomeranz escapes into the wintry forest, leaving behind his beautiful, intelligent wife, Stefa. After the war, having evaded the concentration camps, they begin to build new lives; Stefa in Stalin’s Russia and Pomeranz in Israel, where, as they move toward reunion, another war is brewing. An intricate tale of people seeking escape from a hostile world in thrillingly fantastical ways. “Lyrical . . . Its youthfulness and energy are exhilarating.” —The New Yorker “A masterful aggregate of philosophical speculation, witty social commentary and solid story telling.” —Kirkus Reviews “An outstandingly rich book . . . a pleasure to read.” —Times Literary Supplement</div>

Amos Oz
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Books By Amos Oz (17 Books)