Most Popular Books by Isaac Bashevis Singer

From the Nobel Prize–winning writer, a new collection of literary and personal essays Old Truths and New Clichés collects nineteen essays—most of them previously unpublished in English—by Isaac Bashevis Singer on topics that were central to his artistic vision throughout an astonishing and prolific literary career spanning more than six decades. Expanding on themes reflected in his best-known work—including the literary arts, Yiddish and Jewish life, and mysticism and philosophy—the book illuminates in new ways the rich intellectual, aesthetic, religious, and biographical background of Singer’s singular achievement as the first Yiddish-language author to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Like a modern Montaigne, Singer studied human nature and created a body of work that contributed to a deeper understanding of the human spirit. Much of his philosophical thought was funneled into his stories. Yet these essays, which Singer himself translated into English or oversaw the translation of, present his ideas in a new way, as universal reflections on the role of the artist in modern society. The unpublished essays featured here include “Old Truths and New Clichés,” “The Kabbalah and Modern Times,” and “A Trip to the Circus.” Old Truths and New Clichés brims with stunning archival finds that will make a significant impact on how readers understand Singer and his work. Singer’s critical essays have long been overlooked because he has been thought of almost exclusively as a storyteller. This book offers an important correction to the record by further establishing Singer as a formidable intellectual.

Collections of interviews with notable modern writers

This a selection of forty-seven stories chosen by the [Nobel-Prize-winning] author from eight prior collections [1957-1981].

Love and Exile contains the three volumes of the Nobel Prize Winner''s spiritual autobiography, covering his childhood in a rabbinical household in Poland, his young manhood in Warsaw and his beginning as a writer, and his emigration to New York before the outbreak of war, with the concomitant displacement of a Yiddish writer in a strange land.

Set in seventeenth-century Poland, The Slave tells the story of Jacob, a young Talmudic scholar sold into slavery after the Chmielnicki massacres - and who falls in love with his master''s daughter, Wanda. Even after he is ransomed, he finds he can''t live without her, and the two escape together to a distant Jewish community. Racked by his consciousness of sin in taking a wife who is not Jewish, and by the difficulties of concealing her identity, Jacob stands firm as the violence of the era threatens to destroy the ill-fated couple.

This work chronicles 10 years in the life of Isacc Bashevis Singer, as shared by a fellow writer close to him at the time. Goran recounts the course of their friendship. This is an opportunity to learn about the Yiddish writer who often concealed hie real beliefs, feelings and personal history.

In an age of darkness Poland lives under the iron fist of Krol Rudy until their leader, returns with the knowledge of an outside civilised world.

An authentic literary great, Singer was an author whose extraordinary talents won him a worldwide audience. And with this impressive novel, he proved that he was at the height of his creative power until his recent death at age 86. Scum evokes the teeming life of 1906 Warsaw''s backstreets. Max Barabander, distraught over the recent death of his son, flees the life of wealth and respectability he has attained in Buenos Aires, to return to the poverty and shadows of his youth spent in Warsaw. He fears impotence which leads him to the pursuit of mindless sex with five different women who view him only as an escape from their drab lives. The author recalls the teeming life of 1906 Jewish Warsaw in this impressive novel of changing mores and values. . .

A Jewish refugee who escaped Hitler''s Holocaust and is living in New York with his second wife faces a dilemma when he discovers that his first wife is still alive.

Shosha is a hauntingly lyrical love story set in Jewish Warsaw on the eve of its annihilation. Aaron Greidinger, an aspiring Yiddish writer and the son of a distinguished Hasidic rabbi, struggles to be true to his art when faced with the chance at riches and a passport to America. But as he and the rest of the Writers'' Club wait in horror for Nazi Germany to invade Poland, Aaron rediscovers Shosha, his childhood love-still living on Krochmalna Street, still mysteriously childlike herself-who has been waiting for him all these years.

‘[A] delightful and distinguished book [of seven tales] from middle European folklore [by the winner of the 1978 Nobel Prize for Literature].’ —BL. 1967 Newbery Honor Book Notable Children''s Books of 1940–1970 (ALA) 1966 Fanfare Honor List (The Horn Book) "Best of the Best" Children''s Books 1966–1978 (SLJ) Best Illustrated Children''s Books of 1966 (NYT) Children''s Books of 1966 (Library of Congress) Children''s Books of the Year 1966 (CSA)

The fiftieth anniversary of a lost classic--a deceptively sophisticated tale of sexual compulsion and one man''s flight from love Yasha Mazur is a Houdini-like performer whose skill has made him famous throughout eastern Poland. Half Jewish, half Gentile, a freethinker who slips easily between worlds, Yasha has an observant Jewish wife, a Gentile assistant who travels with him, and a mistress in every town. For Yasha is an escape artist not only onstage but in life, a man who lives under the spell of his own hypnotic effect on women. Now, though, his exploits are catching up with him, and he is tempted to make one final escape--from his wife and his homeland and the last tendrils of his father''s religion. Set in Warsaw and the shtetls of the 1870s--but first published in 1960--Isaac Bashevis Singer''s second novel hides a haunting psychological portrait inside a beguiling parable. At its heart, this is a book about the burden of sexual freedom. As such, it belongs on a small shelf with such mid-century classics as Rabbit, Run; The Adventures of Augie March; and The Moviegoer. As Milton Hindus wrote in The New York Times Book Review, "The pathos of the ending may move the reader to tears, but they are not sentimental tears . . . [Singer] is a writer of far greater than ordinary powers."

From the Upper West Side to Miami''s pastel resorts, "Shadows on the Hudson" traces the intertwined destiny of survivors in the aftermath of the Holocaust.

The Manor and The Estate—combined in this one-volume edition—bold tales of Polish Jews in the latter half of the nineteenth century, a time of rapid industrial growth and radical social change that enabled the Jewish community to move from the ghetto to prominent positions within Polish society.

Presents a collection of fifty-four short stories, including "Gimpel the Fool," "Yentl the Yeshiva Boy," and "The Mirror."

Joseph Shapiro, a New York businessman, experiences a mid-life crisis. He leaves his wife, his mistress, his business and goes to Israel in search of religious Orthodoxy.

Gimpel The Fool to The Letter Writer.

Like Isaac Bashevis Singer''s fiction, this poignant memoir of his childhood in the household and rabbinical court of his father is full of spirits and demons, washerwomen and rabbis, beggars and rich men. This rememberance of Singer''s pious father, his rational yet adoring mother, and the never-ending parade of humanity that marched through their home is a portrait of a magnificent writer''s childhood self and of the world, now gone, that formed him.