商品簡介
Ed Bonner has assembled a collection of stories about eminent Jewish writers and poets worthy of the title 'People of the Book'. Thirteen Jewish writers have been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, others receiving awards including the Booker and Pulitzer. They have covered diverse fields such as magical realism, satirical humour, historical drama, modern fiction and the Holocaust.
Critic James Wood has nominated Saul Bellow as 'The greatest of American prose stylists in the 20th century, prose written as well as verse - exquisite without being precious'. Franz Kafka was the greatest proponent of magic realism and one of the most influential if least prolific of writers. Israel's Meir Shalev has been compared to Mark Twain for the arch humour lacing his novels. Philip Roth, famous for novels like American Pastoral and Portnoy's Complaint, explored Jewish-American life with a blackly comic lens, as did Howard Jacobson in Britain.
Isaac Asimov was a prolific and masterful science fiction writer, and Ayn Rand became the arch-priestess of capitalism. Isaac Bashevis Singer wrote in both Yiddish and English, his works delving into Jewish folklore and tradition. Leon Uris, author of the hugely influential novel Exodus, explored the history and struggles in the creation of the state of Israel. Nadine Gordimer was a Nobel-winning South African author who explored themes of racism and apartheid; Primo Levi was an Italian survivor and dispassionate recorder of his imprisonment in Auschwitz.
All wrote with skill, clarity and humour borne from centuries of oppression.
