Лучшие книги Стива Штерна

Steve Stern’s astonishing new novel The Village Idiot begins on a glorious spring day in Paris 1917. Amid the carnage of World War I, some of the foremost artists of the age have chosen to stage a boat race. At the head of the regatta is Amedeo Modigliani, seated regally in a bathtub pulled by a flock of canvasback ducks. But unbeknownst to the competition, he has a secret advantage: his young friend, the immigrant painter Chaim Soutine, is hauling the tub from underwater. Soutine, an unwashed, misfit artist (who incidentally can’t swim) has been persuaded by the Italian to don a ponderous diving suit and trudge along the floor of the river Seine. Disoriented and confused by the artificial air in his helmet Chaim stumbles through the events of his past and future life.

It’s quite an extraordinary life. From his impoverished beginnings in an East European shtetl to his equally destitute days in Paris during the Années Folles, the Crazy Years, from the Cinderella patronage of the American collector Albert Barnes, who raises him from poverty to international attention, to his perilous flight from the Nazi occupation of France, Chaim Soutine remains driven by his unrelenting passion to paint.

To be sure, there are notable distractions, such as his unlikely friendship with Modigliani, who drags him from brothels to midnight felonies to a duel at dawn; there are the romances with remarkable women who compete with and sometimes salvage his obsession. But there is also, always on the horizon, the coming storm that threatens to sweep away Chaim and a generation of gifted Jewish refugees from a tradition that would outlaw their longing to make art.

Wildly inventive, as funny as it is heart-breaking, The Village Idiot is a luminous fever-dream of a novel, steeped in the heady atmosphere of a Paris that was the cultural capital of the universe, a place where anything seemed possible.

Award-winning novelist Steve Stern's exhilarating epic recounts the story of how a nineteenth-century rabbi from a small Polish town ends up in a basement freezer in a suburban Memphis home at the end of the twentieth century. What happens when an impressionable teenage boy inadvertently thaws out the ancient man and brings him back to life is nothing short of miraculous.

“In the 25 years since [Stern] published his first book, younger Jewish writers have run with a similar shtick . . . But Stern was there first.” —The Toronto Globe and Mail

The Book of Mischief triumphantly showcases twenty-five years of outstanding work by one of our true masters of the short story. Steve Stern’s stories take us from the unlikely old Jewish quarter of the Pinch in Memphis to a turn-of-thecentury immigrant community in New York; from the market towns of Eastern Europe to a down-at-the-heels Catskills resort. Along the way we meet a motley assortment of characters: Mendy Dreyfus, whose bungee jump goes uncannily awry; Elijah the prophet turned voyeur; and the misfit Zelik Rifkin, who discovers the tree of dreams. Perhaps it’s no surprise that Kafka’s cockroach also makes an appearance in these pages, animated as they are by instances of bewildering transformation. The earthbound take flight, the meek turn incendiary, the powerless find unwonted fame. Weaving his particular brand of mischief from the wondrous and the macabre, Stern transforms us all through the power of his brilliant imagination.

Through numerous books and stories, Steve Stern has become known for his fantastical (and often wildly comic) stories based on yiddish folklore—Harold Bloom has called him "a throwback to the Yiddish sublime." But with this novella, Stern matches his reverential understanding of that ancient story-telling's power against something he's never written about before: the Holocaust.

The result is a mesmerizing tour-de-force: In a boxcar crammed with Jews headed to a concentration camp, one man attempts to summon up a story vital enough to displace the horror.

The story that comes out is ultimately a swirling, sweeping saga about the stirring obstinacy of the human spirit. And by confronting the ultimate horror with the mythology he has long celebrated, it may also be the crowning achievement of Stern's career.

The New York Times has called Steve Stern "a prodigiously talented writer who arrives unheralded like one of the apparitions in his own stories." The Philadelphia Inquirer has said, "Steve Stern is an astonishing writer." Whatever the source, the critics agree that Stern offers immense delight, and outright laughs, throughout his award-winning books. The Wedding Jester offers a new chance to journey to Stern's magical Jewish otherworld-- where fantastical events are commonplace, and rabbis-- sometimes frequently-- take flight.

Steve Stern, "an astonishing writer . . . who has secured himself a seat in the distinguished history of Jewish-American letters" (The Philadelphia Inquirer), returns with lyrically comic tales about the Pinch, a backwater Jewish community in Memphis, Tennessee, whose misbegotten citizens refer to themselves as "the lost tribe." Stern's dreamers are plagued by history, lust, solitude, and the extravagance of their own fevered imaginations: Zelik Rifkin, nebbishe mama's boy, invades his neighbors' dreams and nightmares, and heroically changes the outcomes; Hyman Weiss, would-be successor to Harry Houdini, failing at every attempt to re-create such illusions as the Tortures of the Procrustean Bed, ends up pulling off the most stupendous stunt of all; and Itchy Kabakoff, outcast and grifter, constantly on the move with a traveling carnival, carries as his baggage the memories of three generations of the Kabakoff clan. Steve Stern, a Sholom Aleichem on the Mississippi, is a consummate spinner of tales, a mythmaker. A Plague of Dreamers brilliantly evokes the American Jewish experience, weaving a tapestry of tradition and assimilation and, ultimately, of transformation.

The nine stories in this collection all share either the theme or the setting of the mythical Jewish neighborhood of North Maine Street in the author's native Memphis, Tenn. He writes about mischievous "cheder" boys who try to lead a "lamedvovnik" into temptation, of the Lord bullying Morton Gruber into a book collaboration, and of his Aunt Esther's very strange, literally unworldly, suitor.