FROM THE PUBLISHER

When Isaac Bashevis Singer received the 1978 Nobel Prize in Literature at the age of 74, the award crowned an extraordinary career that began in the thriving, contentious literary milieu of Jewish Warsaw in the 1920s and 1930s and continued through Singer's long residence in New York City. In his last years Singer continued to put together short-story collections in English, drawing from a fund of previously untranslated stories that had appeared in Yiddish newspapers and magazines as well as including more recent work. The resulting array of stories represents the full range of his achievement as a storyteller. As one of three volumes celebrating Singer's mastery of the short-story form, Collected Stories: One Night in Brazil to The Death of Methuselah contains ten stories previously unpublished in English.

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