Description: In four elegant chapters, Alter explains the prismlike radiance created by the association of three modern masters: Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, and Gershom Scholem. The volume pinpoints the intersections of these divergent witnesses to the modern condition of doubt, the no-man's-land between traditional religion and modern secular culture.
Brief description: Robert Alter is Professor in the Graduate School and Emeritus Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of Nabokov and the Real World, Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible, and Necessary Angels: Tradition and Modernity in Kafka, Benjamin, and Scholem, among other books. Award-winning translator of the complete Hebrew Bible, Alter has received the National Jewish Book Award for Lifetime Achievement, the PEN Center Literary Award for Translation, and the Robert Kirsch Award from the Los Angeles Times for lifetime contribution to American letters.