A Friend of Kafka

Name: A Friend of Kafka
ISBN: 9780374515386

Isaac Bashevis Singer

A collection of short fiction from Nobel Prize–winning author Isaac Bashevis Singer, featuring stories that traverse the lost world of Eastern European Jewish life and the immigrant experience in America. Blending realism with mysticism, folklore, and sly humor, Singer conjures a cast of dreamers, mystics, con men, and lovers wrestling with faith, memory, and desire. The title story imagines a faded actor's tale of a tenuous brush with literary greatness, setting the tone for a collection that captures both the tragedy and the absurdity of the human condition with Singer's characteristic warmth and irony.

This book of twenty stories is Isaac Bashevis Singer's fifth collection and contains such classics as "The Cafeteria" and "On the Way to the Poorhouse."

About the Author

Isaac Bashevis Singer (1902-1991) was a Yiddish-language novelist and storyteller who chronicled Jewish life in Eastern Europe and America with humor, mysticism, and moral depth. Born in Poland to a rabbinic family, he emigrated to New York in 1935 and wrote for the Forverts (Jewish Daily Forward) for decades. His novels, memoirs, and short stories give voice to the shtetl, the Hasidic court, and the world lost to the Holocaust. His characters, whether rabbis, skeptics, dybbuks, or ordinary people wrestling with faith and desire, embody the tensions between tradition and modernity at the heart of Jewish experience.

Singer received the 1978 Nobel Prize in Literature for his “impassioned narrative art which, with roots in a Polish-Jewish cultural tradition, brings universal human conditions to life.” He won two National Book Awards (1970 and 1974) and Newbery Honors in 1968 and 1969. His Jewish literary honors include the Louis Lamed Prize (1950 and 1956) and Israel’s S.Y. Agnon Gold Medal (1975). The Jewish Book Council selected his novel The Slave for its Harry and Ethel Daroff Memorial Fiction Award, the council’s top prize for English-language fiction of Jewish interest, in recognition of 1962 publications. A master of the short story, he is remembered for classics such as “Gimpel the Fool,” translated into English by Saul Bellow.