FROM THE PUBLISHER

Isaac Bashevis Singer once claimed that he preferred writing stories to novels because the short-story form brought perfection within reach. The 65 stories gathered here show Singer striving for and often achieving such perfection, crafting tales that fuse crystalline storytelling with an unnerving exploration of erotic passion and irrational desire, family life and religious piety, and fundamental emotions such as shame, lust, anger, pride, and tenderness. Also on display in stories such as "A Friend of Kafka" and "The Adventure" is Singer's shrewd gift as a comic writer, evoking the Jewish milieu in New York and in Warsaw between the wars with a blend of affection and satire. "His driven, mercurial processions of predicaments and transmogrifications are limitless," Cynthia Ozick writes, "a cornucopia of invention."

FROM THE CRITICS

William Deresiewicz - The New York Times

The sheer abundance of [Singer's] production, along with that famous interest in sex, suggests a Jewish Boccaccio, and Singer is indeed Boccaccian in his exuberance, facility and invention. Rejecting modernism with its deliberate difficulties and programmatic experimentation, he remained faithful to the older pleasures of character and plot. Singer can get a story going in no time flat, conjure characters so vivid you feel as if they're sitting next to you, pour forth an endless supply of situations and surprises. Some of his stories are mere trifles (the third volume in particular contains a fair number of throwaways), but many more are enigmatic or mordant or sly, hauntingly strange or piercingly sad.

Library Journal