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

Novel of the microcosmic world of a kibbutz community located near the Jordanian frontier.

"The Elsewhere." Or, midbar-biblical Hebrew for both "wilderness" and "speech." A place of possession and dispossession, loss and nostalgia. But also a place that speaks. Ingeniously using a Talmudic interpretive formula about the disposition of boundaries, Newton explores narratives of "place, flight, border, and beyond." The writers of The Elsewhere are a disparate company of twentieth-century memoirists and fabulists from the Levant (Palestine/Israel, Egypt) and East Central Europe. Together, their texts-cunningly paired so as to speak to one another in mutually revelatory ways-narrate the paradox of the "near distance."

These intimate stories of South Indian immigrants and the families they left behind center women’s lives and ask how women both claim and surrender power—a stunning debut collection from an O. Henry Prize winner Traveling from Pittsburgh to Eastern Washington to Tamil Nadu, these stories about dislocation and dissonance see immigrants and their families confront the costs of leaving and staying, identifying sublime symmetries in lives growing apart. In “Malliga Homes,” selected by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie for an O. Henry Prize, a widow in a retirement community glimpses her future while waiting for her daughter to visit from America. In "No. 16 Model House Road," a woman long subordinate to her husband makes a choice of her own after she inherits a house. In "Nature Exchange," a mother grieving in the wake of a school shooting finds an unusual obsession. In "A Life in America," a professor finds himself accused of having exploited his graduate students. Sindya Bhanoo’s haunting stories show us how immigrants’ paths, and the paths of those they leave behind, are never simple. Bhanoo takes us along on their complicated journeys where regret, hope, and triumph appear in disguise.

Presents a novel of hope, love, and redemption.