Weinstock Among the Dying

WINNER OF THE HAROLD U. RIBALOW PRIZE

Weinstock Among the Dying is a tragi-comic study of one man's attempt to recover from the griefs of his childhood and to enter into a life-giving adulthood of fatherhood and mature love. In it, Michael Blumenthal creates a moving portrait of the human struggle for psychological growth, as well as a witty satire of life at the top of the academic world.

“Blumenthal’s graceful, wise, moving first novel begins as a savage, hilarious satire of academia and the literary word, then plunges into Weinstock s painstaking self-analysis, a process that sometimes become tedious. . . . Blumenthal, a poet and former creative writing director at Harvard, has written an engrossing narrative: death obsessed, life-affirming and, like all good novels, resonant with meaning.” —Publisher's Weekly

“The satire of academia in Weinstock Among the Dying succeeds in the hilarious footsteps of Nabokov's Pnin. In the end, however, wit and cynicism join hands with grief and growth, and enable Weinstock to bury his despair. His journey toward emotional fulfillment was a pleasure to follow for this reader. In turns humorous and sad, but consistently engaging, Blumenthal has written an eloquent, compelling, richly textured first novel.” —Harvard Review, by Jhumpa Lahiri

“The best of Weinstock… is a devastating, idiosyncratic satire of Harvard, where Blumenthal formerly served as director of creative writing, the very post occupied by Weinstock. Mercilessly he bangs away at the pretensions of academe. . . . Blumenthal s Harvard is the only place in America where you have to study for dinner, a temple of Best-0in-the-World elitism that Jewish faculty even if their Jewishness is considered an ugly blemish on the smooth, homogenizing hide of intellectual achievement would never dream of leaving, for it is their one chance in life to become the thing every Jew, deep in his heart of hearts most wants to be . . . The Great Goldberg. . . . Blumenthal insists that Harvard is no more nor less than a dusty archival tomb, in which the collected letters, papers, manuscripts and miseries of the dead were far more significant than the real, passionate, life-giving triumphs and tribulations of the living.” —The Jerusalem Report, by Stuart Schoffman