"In Shimon Adaf's Lost Detective Trilogy, what begins as conventional mystery becomes by degrees a brilliant deconstruction not just of genre but of our own search for meaning. Both profound and compulsively readable, these books demand to be devoured." —Lavie Tidhar At age thirty, Elish Ben Zaken has found himself in a life he never imagined. As a university student, Elish was an esteemed rock-music critic for local newspapers; now, disenchanted with an increasingly commercialized music scene, he has joined a private investigation agency where he is content to be a “clerk of small human sins”—a finder of stolen cars and wayward husbands. But when a disconcertingly amiable detective asks him to look into the suicide of an infamous philosophy professor—and the police file contains an unexpected allusion to Dalia Shushan, a celebrated young rock singer whose recent murder remains unsolved—Elish’s natural curiosity is piqued. And when violence begins to dog the steps of his investigation, he knows that dangerous secrets are at hand. Haunted by the ghost of Dalia, a true artist with a transformative voice whose dark brilliance Elish was one of the first to recognize, he must face the long-buried trauma of his own past in order to unravel the intertwining threads of two lives, and their ends. In Elish, Shimon Adaf has created an unforgettable protagonist. A former philosophy student with a questing mind, born to Moroccan parents and raised in an outlying town, he is an eternal outsider in cosmopolitan Tel Aviv. Equally, One Mile and Two Days Before Sunset is a detective novel unlike any other: an incisive portrait of a man and a city, and a meditation on disappointment, on striving for beauty and for intensity of experience, and on the futile desire to truly know another person.

By analyzing its position within the struggles for recognition and reception of different national and ethnic cultural groups, this book offers a bold new picture of Israeli literature. Through comparative discussion of the literatures of Palestinian citizens of Israel, of Mizrahim, of migrants from the former Soviet Union, and of Ethiopian-Israelis, the author demonstrates an unexpected richness and diversity in the Israeli literary scene, a reality very different from the monocultural image that Zionism aspired to create. Drawing on a wide body of social and literary theory, Mendelson-Maoz compares and contrasts the literatures of the four communities she profiles. In her discussion of the literature of the Palestinian citizens of Israel, she presents the question of language and translation, and she provides three case studies of particular authors and their reception. Her study of Mizrahi literature adopts a chronological approach, starting in the 1950s and proceeding toward contemporary Mizrahi writing, while discussing questions of authenticity and self-determination. The discussion of Israeli literature written by immigrants from the former Soviet Union focuses both on authors who write Israeli literature in Russian and of Russian immigrants writing in Hebrew. The final section of the book provides a valuable new discussion of the work of Ethiopian-Israeli writers, a group whose contributions have seldom been previously acknowledged. The picture that emerges from this groundbreaking book replaces the traditional, homogeneous historical narrative of Israeli literature with a diversity of voices, a multiplicity of origins, and a wide range of different perspectives. In doing so, it will provoke researchers in a wide range of cultural fields to look at the rich traditions that underlie it in new and fresh ways.

Shimon Adaf and Lavie Tidhar are two of Israel’s most subversive and politically outspoken writers. Growing up on opposite sides of the Israeli spectrum – Tidhar in the north of Israel in the Zion-ist, socialist Kibbutz; Adaf from a family of religious Mizrahi Jews living in Sderot – the two nevertheless shared a love of books, and were especially drawn to the strange visions and outrageous sensibilities of the science fiction that was available in Hebrew. In Art and War, they engage in a dialogue that covers their approach to writing the fantastic, as they question how to write about Israel and Palestine, about Judaism, about the Holocaust, about childhoods and their end. Extending the conversation even into their fiction, the book contains two brand new short stories – Tutim by Tidhar, and Third Attribute by Adaf – in which each appears as a character in the other’s tale; simultaneously political and fantastical, they burn with an angry, despairing intensity.

"In Shimon Adaf's Lost Detective Trilogy, what begins as conventional mystery becomes by degrees a brilliant deconstruction not just of genre but of our own search for meaning. Both profound and compulsively readable, these books demand to be devoured." —Lavie Tidhar, author of By Force Alone In the summer of 2014, at the height of the Gaza-Israel conflict, Elish Ben-Zaken met the poet and librarian Nahum Farkash in the border town of Sderot. They spoke only briefly, but in that brief encounter, Elish might have missed the key to unraveling the case of a Sderot woman who disappeared for two days, only to reappear with no memory of her time away. In Take Up and Read, Shimon Adaf returns to Farkash’s story. Attempting to defend the legacy of the singer Dalia Shoshan—whose murder Elish investigated several years before—Farkash tries to impede the production of a new documentary about her life. Meanwhile, he reminisces about his past, reflecting on his experiences as a young religious boy growing up in Sderot. Fourteen years later, in a militant Israel that has been distorted by catastrophic war, Elish’s niece and nephew are haunted by their uncle’s death and the failure of his 2014 investigation. As Tahel and Oshri conduct experiments in search of the truth, they draw near to the heart of a great conspiracy. In this masterful conclusion to the Lost Detective Trilogy, Shimon Adaf brings together futuristic biotechnology, parallel universes, and Jewish mysticism. Take Up and Read addresses a central concern of the trilogy, interrogating humankind’s tenuous grasp on the boundaries of our selves, and the arbitrary connections between the body, consciousness, and perception.