Touch the Water, Touch the Wind

Touch the Water, Touch the Wind

Amos Oz

Literature & Fiction / Nonfiction

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 Review1939. 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."...
Read online
  • 277
Rhyming Life and Death

Rhyming Life and Death

Amos Oz

Literature & Fiction / Nonfiction

An unnamed author waits in a bar in Tel Aviv on a stifling hot night. He is there to give a reading of his work but as he sits, bored, he begins to conjure up the life stories of the people he meets. Later, when the reading is done he asks a woman for a drink. She declines and the author walks away, only to climb the steps to her flat, later that night. Or does he? In Amos Oz's beguiling, intriguing story the reader never really knows where reality ends and invention begins...
Read online
  • 152
Suddenly in the Depths of the Forest

Suddenly in the Depths of the Forest

Amos Oz

Literature & Fiction / Nonfiction

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.
Read online
  • 132
Where the Jackals Howl

Where the Jackals Howl

Amos Oz

Literature & Fiction / Nonfiction

Oz's first book—beautifully repackaged— 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. Each conveys the tension and intensity of feeling during 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.
Read online
  • 129
Between Friends

Between Friends

Amos Oz

Literature & Fiction / Nonfiction

"Oz lifts the veil on kibbutz existence without palaver. His pinpoint descriptions are pared to perfection . . . His people twitch with life." — ScotsmanIn Between Friends, Amos Oz returns to the kibbutz of the late 1950s, the time and place where his writing began. These eight interconnected stories, set in the fictitious Kibbutz Yekhat, draw masterly 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'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 poignant letters to her husband's mistress—amid this motley group of people, a man named Martin attempts to teach everyone Esperanto.Each of these stories is a luminous human and literary study; together they offer an eloquent portrait of an idea and of a charged...
Read online
  • 98
Judas

Judas

Amos Oz

Literature & Fiction / Nonfiction

Winner of the International Literature Prize, the new novel by Amos Oz is his first full-length work since the best-selling A Tale of Love and Darkness. Jerusalem, 1959. Shmuel Ash, a biblical scholar, is adrift in his young life when he finds work as a caregiver for a brilliant but cantankerous old man named Gershom Wald. There is, however, a third, mysterious presence in his new home. Atalia Abarbanel, the daughter of a deceased Zionist leader, a beautiful woman in her forties, entrances young Shmuel even as she keeps him at a distance. Piece by piece, the old Jerusalem stone house, haunted by tragic history and now home to the three misfits and their intricate relationship, reveals its secrets. At once an exquisite love story and coming-of-age novel, an allegory for the state of Israel and for the biblical tale from which it draws its title, Judas is Amos Oz's most powerful novel in decades.
Read online
  • 91
My Michael

My Michael

Amos Oz

Literature & Fiction / Nonfiction

One of Amos Oz's earliest and most famous novels, My Michael created a sensation upon its initial publication in 1968 and established Oz as a writer of international acclaim. Like all great books, it has an enduring power to surprise and mesmerize.Set in 1950s Jerusalem, My Michael tells the story of a remote and intense woman named Hannah Gonen and her marriage to a decent but unremarkable man named Michael. As the years pass and Hannah's tempestuous fantasy life encroaches upon reality, she feels increasingly estranged from him and the marriage gradually disintegrates.Gorgeously written and profoundly moving, this extraordinary novel is at once a haunting love story and a rich, reflective portrait of place.
Read online
  • 83
Don't Call It Night

Don't Call It Night

Amos Oz

Literature & Fiction / Nonfiction

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year "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) 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. "Vivid, convincing, and haunting." —New York Times Book Review
Read online
  • 78
How to Cure a Fanatic

How to Cure a Fanatic

Amos Oz

Literature & Fiction / Nonfiction

'A hero of mine, a moral as well as literary giant' Simon SchamaAmos Oz, the internationally acclaimed author of A Tale of Love and Darkness and Judas, grew up in war-torn Jerusalem, where as a boy he witnessed first-hand the poisonous consequences of fanaticism. In How To Cure a Fanatic Amos Oz analyses the historical roots of violence and confronts truths about the extremism nurtured throughout society. By bringing us face to face with fanaticism he suggests ways in which we can all respond. From the author of A Tale of Love and Darkness and Man Booker International Prize shortlisted Judas.'He was the conscience of Israel' Roger Cohen, New York Times
Read online
  • 72
Soumchi

Soumchi

Amos Oz

Literature & Fiction / Nonfiction

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.
Read online
  • 72
Judas

Judas

Amos Oz

Literature & Fiction / Nonfiction

Winner of the International Literature Prize, the new novel by Amos Oz is his first full-length work since the best-selling A Tale of Love and Darkness. Jerusalem, 1959. Shmuel Ash, a biblical scholar, is adrift in his young life when he finds work as a caregiver for a brilliant but cantankerous old man named Gershom Wald. There is, however, a third, mysterious presence in his new home. Atalia Abarbanel, the daughter of a deceased Zionist leader, a beautiful woman in her forties, entrances young Shmuel even as she keeps him at a distance. Piece by piece, the old Jerusalem stone house, haunted by tragic history and now home to the three misfits and their intricate relationship, reveals its secrets. At once an exquisite love story and coming-of-age novel, an allegory for the state of Israel and for the biblical tale from which it draws its title, Judas is Amos Oz's most powerful novel in decades.
Read online
  • 69
Rhyming Life and Death

Rhyming Life and Death

Amos Oz

Literature & Fiction / Nonfiction

An unnamed author waits in a bar in Tel Aviv on a stifling hot night. He is there to give a reading of his work but as he sits, bored, he begins to conjure up the life stories of the people he meets. Later, when the reading is done he asks a woman for a drink. She declines and the author walks away, only to climb the steps to her flat, later that night. Or does he? In Amos Oz's beguiling, intriguing story the reader never really knows where reality ends and invention begins...
Read online
  • 66
Scenes from Village Life

Scenes from Village Life

Amos Oz

Literature & Fiction / Nonfiction

A portrait of a fictional village, by one of the world's most admired writers In the village of Tel Ilan, something is off kilter. An elderly man complains to his daughter that he hears the sound of digging under his house at night. Could it be his tenant, a young Arab? But then the tenant hears the mysterious digging sounds too. The mayor receives a note from his wife: "Don't worry about me." He looks all over, no sign of her. The veneer of new wealth around the village—gourmet restaurants and art galleries, a winery—cannot conceal abandoned outbuildings, disused air raid shelters, rusting farm tools, and trucks left wherever they stopped. Amos Oz's novel-in-stories is a brilliant, unsettling glimpse of what goes on beneath the surface of everyday life. Scenes from Village Life is a parable for Israel, and for all of us.
Read online
  • 65
Black Box

Black Box

Amos Oz

Literature & Fiction / Nonfiction

Seven years after their divorce, Ilana breaks the bitter silence with a letter to Alex, a world-renowned authority on fanaticism, begging for help with their rebellious adolescent son, Boaz. One letter leads to another, and so evolves a correspondence between Ilana and Alex, Alex and Michel (Ilana's Moroccan husband), Alex and his Mephistophelian Jerusalem lawyer—a correspondence between mother and father, stepfather and stepson, father and son, each pleading his or her own case. The grasping, lyrical, manipulative, loving Ilana has stirred things up. Now, her former husband and her present husband have become rivals not only for her loyalty but for her son's as well.
Read online
  • 60
155