Description: Dov Greenstein, a comedian a bit past his prime, is doing a night of stand-up in a dive in a small Israeli city. In the audience are some whom Dov knew as a boy, an awkward, scrawny kid who walked on his hands to confound the neighborhood bullies. Gradually Dov's patter becomes a kind of memoir: we meet his mother, a Holocaust survivor in need of constant monitoring, and his punishing father, a striver who had little understanding of his creative son; Dov recalls his week at a military camp for youth; and shares a story of loss and survival.
Review Quotes: WINNER OF THE 2017 MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE
A New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book
"[Grossman] has transcended genre; or rather, he has descended deep into the vaults beneath. . . . This isn't just a book about Israel: it's about people and societies horribly malfunctioning." --The Guardian "As cunning and compelling as the stand-up guy at its center. In this funnyman's sad, grotesque performance, Grossman reaffirms his power to entertain and unnerve." --The Boston Globe "Arresting. . . . Grossman seems to be channeling Philip Roth, circa Portnoy's Complaint, with a colloquial voice that badgers, bullies, berates and beseeches." --San Francisco Chronicle "A short, shocking masterpiece . . . in which absurdity and humour are used to probe the darkest corners of the human condition." --The Sunday Times (London) "[A] pitch-black comedy. . . . It takes an author of Mr Grossman's stature to channel not a failed stand-up but a shockingly effective one, and to give him salty, scabrous gags that--in Jessica Cohen's savoury translation--raise a guilty laugh." --The Economist "Grossman has once more proved himself as one of Israel's finest literary alchemists. . . . An unsettling, cathartic, confessional stream-of-consciousness soliloquy." --Haaretz "[A] raw and fiercely emotional book." --The Spectator "In little more than 200 pages, Grossman brings us to the nerve center of his psyche." --The Jerusalem Post "Few writers hold a more unflinching mirror up to Israeli society than Grossman . . . But [his work] is also suffused with compassion, acutely attuned to the complexity of individual lives and the solutions people find to the challenge of that complexity." --Financial Times "A devastating work. . . . A lamentation and a plea for compassion and empathy. . . . A Horse Walks into a Bar is unlike anything Grossman has yet done." --The Irish Times