Revelatory talks about art and life with internationally acclaimed Israeli novelist Amos Oz In the last years of his life, the writer Amos Oz talked regularly with Shira Hadad, who worked closely with him as the editor of his final novel, Judas. These candid, uninhibited dialogues show a side of Oz that few ever saw. What Makes an Apple? presents the most revealing of these conversations in English for the first time, painting an illuminating and disarmingly intimate portrait of a towering literary figure. In frank and open exchanges that are by turns buoyant, introspective, and argumentative, Oz explains what impels him to begin a story and shares his routines, habits, and challenges as a writer. He discusses the tectonic changes he experienced in his lifetime in relationships between women and men, and describes how his erotic coming of age shaped him not only as a man but also as an author. Oz reflects on his parents, his formative years on a kibbutz, and how he dealt with and learned from his critics, his students, and his fame. He talks about why there is more humor in his later books and gives his exceptional take on fear of death. Resonating with Oz's clear, honest, and humorous voice, What Makes an Apple? offers unique insights about Oz's artistic and personal evolution, and enables readers to explore his work in new ways.

This collection - published here in English for the first time - brings together a number of political, personal, and literary pieces by Israel's most celebrated modern novelist. Lively, questioning, and undogmatic, the author's compelling literary insights make for consistently stimulating reading, while his perceptive commentary on Israel's political and cultural situation seems more relevant then ever in the light of current developments in the Middle East. Topics covered include: an examination of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a dispute between 'right and right'; reflections on the character of Zionism, on the concept of 'homeland', and on the nature of the kibbutz; the meaning of socialism in the Israeli context; and portraits of several Jewish writers and thinkers whose ideas and themes have proved influential or determinative for Amos Oz himself. These essays, which put a unique perspective on the author's own experiences and development, reveal a complex and humane figure of practical political influence as well as of significant literary stature. Their refreshing blend of scepticism and idealism are sure to win for Oz new readers, while delighting those already familiar with his writings, who will recognise here the many qualities which have generated international critical acclaim.

Winner of the National Jewish Book AwardInternational Bestseller " An] ingenious work that circles around the rise of a state, the tragic destiny of a mother, a boy's creation of a new self." -- "The New Yorker" A family saga and a magical self-portrait of a writer who witnessed the birth of a nation and lived through its turbulent history. "A Tale of Love and Darkness" is the story of a boy who grows up in war-torn Jerusalem, in a small apartment crowded with books in twelve languages and relatives speaking nearly as many. The story of an adolescent whose life has been changed forever by his mother's suicide. The story of a man who leaves the constraints of his family and community to join a kibbutz, change his name, marry, have children. The story of a writer who becomes an active participant in the political life of his nation. "One of the most enchanting and deeply satisfying books that I have read in many years." -- "New Republic"

A celebrated novelist and an acclaimed historian of ideas, father and daughter, unravel the chain of words at the core of Jewish life, history, and culture Why are words so important to so many Jews? Novelist Amos Oz and historian Fania Oz-Salzberger roam the gamut of Jewish history to explain the integral relationship of Jews and words. Through a blend of storytelling and scholarship, conversation and argument, father and daughter tell the tales behind Judaism's most enduring names, adages, disputes, texts, and quips. These words, they argue, compose the chain connecting Abraham with the Jews of every subsequent generation. Framing the discussion within such topics as continuity, women, timelessness, and individualism, Oz and Oz-Salzberger deftly engage Jewish personalities across the ages, from the unnamed, possibly female author of the Song of Songs through obscure Talmudists to contemporary writers. They suggest that Jewish continuity, even Jewish uniqueness, depends not on central places, monuments, heroic personalities, or rituals but rather on written words and an ongoing debate between the generations. Full of learning, lyricism, and humor, Jews and Words offers an extraordinary tour of the words at the heart of Jewish culture and extends a hand to the reader, any reader, to join the conversation.

The Israeli master's exceptional final novel SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE 2017 Shmuel - a young, idealistic student - has abandoned his studies in Jerusalem, taking a live-in job as a companion to a cantankerous old man. But Shmuel quickly becomes obsessed with the taciturn Atalia, a woman of enchanting beauty, who also lives in the house. As the household's tangled, tragic past becomes apparent, so too does story behind the birth of the state of Israel. Journeying back into the deep past, Judas is a love story like no other by a master storyteller at the height of his powers. 'A hero of mine, a moral as well as literary giant' Simon Schama 'One of his boldest works of all' Boyd Tonkin, Financial Times 'Amos Oz...brought so much beauty, so much love, and a vision of peace to our lives. Please hold him in your hearts and read his books' Natalie Portman Judas is the first novel selected for the Amos Oz reading circle established by Natalie Portman.

This collection - published here in English for the first time - brings together a number of political, personal and literary pieces by Israel's most celebrated novelist and litterateur. Topics covered include: an examination of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a dispute between 'right and right'; reflections on the character of Zionism, on the concept of 'homeland', and on the nature of the kibbutz; the meaning of socialism in the Israeli context; and portraits of several Jewish writers and thinkers whose ideas and themes in one way or another have proved influential or determinative for Amos Oz himself. These essays, which put a unique perspective on the author's own experiences and development, reveal a complex and humane figure of practical political influence as well as of significant literary stature. They will win for Oz new readers, while delighting those who will recognise here the qualities evident in his other writings.

Internationally acclaimed novelist Amos Oz grew up in war-torn Jerusalem, where as a boy he witnessed firsthand the poisonous consequences of fanaticism. In two concise, powerful essays, the award-winning author offers unique insight into the true nature of fanaticism and proposes a reasoned and respectful approach to resolving the Israeli Palestinian conflict. As an added feature, he comments on contemporary issues--the Gaza pullout, Yasser Arafat's death, and the war in Iraq--in an extended interview at the end of the book.

Oz argues that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not a war of religion or cultures or traditions, but rather a real estate dispute--one that will be resolved not by greater understanding, but by painful compromise. As he writes, "The seeds of fanaticism always lie in uncompromising righteousness, the plague of many centuries."

The brilliant clarity of these essays, coupled with Oz's ironic sense of humor in illuminating the serious, breathes new life into this centuries-old debate. Oz argues that the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is not a war of religion or cultures or traditions, but rather a real estate dispute--one that will be resolved not by greater understanding, but by painful compromise. He emphasizes the importance of imagination in learning to define and respect other's space, and analyzes the twisted historical roots that have led to Middle East violence. In his interview, Oz sends a message to Americans. Why not, he proposes, advocate for a twenty-first-century equivalent of the Marshall Plan aimed at preventing poverty and despair in the region? "What is necessary is to work on the ground, for example, building homes for hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees who have been rotting in camps for almost sixty years now."

Fresh, insightful, and inspiring, "How to Cure a Fanatic" brings a new voice of sanity to the cacophony on Israeli-Palestinian relations--a voice no one can afford to ignore.

Set in the summer of 1947, this is a funny, touching, semi-autobiographical rites-of-passage novel about a lonely boy (nicknamed Profi, short for professor, because he is a bookish, serious kid) growing up in Jerusalem in the last years of British rule. From underground resistance, he is drawn into friendship with the enemy - a British soldier - to whom he gives Hebrew lessons in return for English instruction.

Tragic, comic and incomparable: an autobiographical epic and a comedie humaine for our times, which is both the portrait of an artist and the story of the birth of a nation, spanning several generations and moving with them from Russia, Lithuania, the Ukraine, to Jerusalem. Love and darkness are just two of the powerful forces that run through Amos Oz's extraordinary, moving story. He takes us on a seductive journey through his childhood and adolescence, along Jerusalem's wartorn streets in the 1940s and '50s, and into the infernal marriage of two kind, well-meaning people: his fussy, logical father, and his dreamy, romantic mother. Caught between them is one small boy with the weight of generations on his shoulders. And at the tragic heart of the story is the suicide of his mother, when Amos was twelve-and-a-half years old. Oz's story dives into 120 year of family history and paradox, the saga of a Jewish love-hate affair with Europe that sweeps from Vilna and Odessa, via Poland and Prague, to Israel. Farce and heartbreak, history and humanity make up this magical portrait of the artist who saw the birth of a nation, and came through its turbulent life as well as his own. over.

Oz revisits here the Jerusalem of his childhood in the last days of the British mandate in Palestine. Our hero's name is Proffy (short for Professor), and he is twelve years old, his head filled with dreams of dying heroically in battle. Together with his friends Ben Hur and Chita, he spends the summer of 1947 as a member of a make-believe underground movement fighting the British. Indoctrinated by his patriotic father and his zealous Bible teacher, Proffy becomes "an excited panther in the basement, seething with oaths and vows, knowing exactly...to what he will dedicate his life, for what he will sacrifice it when the moment of truth comes". But when his comrades accuse him of treason for his friendship with Sergeant Dunlop - a fat, good-natured British soldier who revels in the Bible and shares with him the love of language - Proffy must vindicate himself in the eyes of his family and friends.

In "The Silence of Heaven," the world renowned Israeli novelist Amos Oz introduces us to an extraordinary masterpiece of Hebrew literature that is just now appearing in English, S. Y. Agnon's "Only Yesterday." For Oz, Agnon is a treasure trove of a world no longer available to today's writers, yet deeply meaningful for his wonderment about God, the submerged eroticism of his writing, and his juggling of multiple texts from the historical Hebrew religious library. This collection of Oz's reflections on Agnon, which includes an essay on the essence of his ideology and poetics, is a rich interpretive work that shows how one great writer views another.

Oz admires Agnon especially for his ability to invoke and visualize the religious world of the simple folk in Eastern European Jewry, looking back from the territorial context of the Zionist revival in Palestine. The tragedy of Agnon's visions, Oz maintains, lies in his perspicacity. Long before the Holocaust, Agnon saw the degeneration, ruin, and end of Jewish culture in Eastern Europe. He knew, too, that the Zionist project was far from being a secure conquest and its champions far from being happy idealists. Oz explores these viewpoints in a series of thick readings that consider the tensions between faith and the shock of doubt, yearnings and revulsion, love and hate, and intimacy and disgust.

Although Oz himself is interested in particular ideological questions, he has the subtle sensibility of a master of fiction and can detect every technical device in Agnon's arsenal. With the verve of an excited reader, Oz dissects Agnon's texts and subtexts in a passionate argument about the major themes of Hebrew literature. This book also tells much about Oz. It represents the other side of Oz's book of reportage, In the Land of Israel, this time exploring the ideologies of Jewish identity not on the land but in texts of the modern classical heritage. "The Silence of Heaven" hence takes us on a remarkable journey into the minds of two major literary figures.

A teenage son shoots himself under his parents' bed. They sleep that night unaware he is lying dead beneath them. A stranger turns up at a man's door to persude him that they must get rid of his ageing mother in order to sell the house. An old man grumbles to his daughter about the unexplained digging and banging he hears under the house at night. As each story unfolds, Amos Oz, builds a portrait of a village in Israel. It is a surreal and unsettling place. Each villager is searching for something, and behind each episode is another, hidden story. In this powerful, hynotic work Amos Oz peers into the darkness of our lives and gives us a glimpse of what goes on beneath the surface of everyday existence. By the winner of the 2013 Franz Kafka Prize, previous winners of which include Philip Roth, Ivan Klima, Elfriede Jelinek, Harold Pinter and John Banville.

This essential collection of three new essays was written out of a sense of urgency, concern, and a belief that a better future is still possible. It touches on the universal nature of fanaticism and its possible cures; the Jewish roots of humanism and the need for a secular pride in Israel; and the geopolitical standing of Israel in the wider Middle East and internationally.

Amos Oz boldly puts forward his case for a two-state solution in what he calls ‘a question of life and death for the State of Israel’.

Wise, provocative, moving and inspiring, these essays illuminate the argument over Israeli, Jewish and human existence, shedding a clear and surprising light on vital political and historical issues, and daring to offer new ways out of a reality that appears to be closed down.

International Bestseller Winner of the International Literature Prize Finalist for the Man Booker International Prize A New York Times Editors' Choice "[A] magnificent novel . . . Oz pitches the book's heartbreak and humanism perfectly from first page to last." -- New York Times Book Review "Scintillating . . . An old-fashioned novel of ideas that is strikingly and compellingly modern." -- Observer 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 Abravanel, 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 a 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. "Oz has written one of the most triumphant novels of his career." -- Forward "A [big] beautiful novel . . . Funny, wise, and provoking." -- Times (UK)