Description: A gorgeously produced edition of Nobel Prize laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer's most famous story, about a hapless yet charmingly resilient baker named Gimpl who is the butt of every joke, appearing for the first time in Singer's own translation alongside his original Yiddish version and the canonical 1953 translation by fellow Nobel laureate Saul Bellow, with illustrations by cartoonist Liana Finck.
Brief description: Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-1991) was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978. An immigrant from Poland, he arrived in New York following the steps of his older brother, Israel Joshua Singer. He wrote essays, stories, and other writings for the Forverts, at times under pseudonym. Saul Bellow translated his story "Gimpel the Fool," which heralded his talent for a young generation of American Jewish readers. For years Singer published his stories in The New Yorker, where he developed a distinct style. His numerous books include Satan in Goray (1935), Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories (1957), The Magician of Lublin (1960), The Slave (1962), The Spinoza of Market Street (1963), A Friend of Kafka and Other Stories (1970), Enemies, a Love Story (1972), Old Love (1979), and Shadows on the Hudson (1997). His work has been translated into dozens of languages.
Review Quotes:
Praise for Isaac Bashevis Singer:
"Singer's stories have plots that unravel not because they are old-fashioned--they are mostly originals and have few recognizable modes other than their own--but because they contain the whole human world of affliction, error, quagmire, pain, calamity, catastrophe, woe: things happen; life is an ambush, a snare; one's fate can never be predicted. His driven, mercurial processions of predicaments and transmogrifications are limitless, a cornucopia of invention."
--Cynthia Ozick
"[Singer] is a spellbinder as clever as Scheherazade; he arrests the reader at once, transports him to a far place and a far, improbable time and does not let him go until the end."
--Jean Stafford, The New Republic
"A peerless storyteller, Singer restores the sheer enchantment with story, with outcome, with what-happens-next that has been denied most readers since their adolescence."
--David Boroff, Saturday Review
"Singer is a genius. He has total command of his imagined world."
--Irving Howe, The New Republic
"Extraordinarily beautiful... It's the integrity of the human imagination that Singer conveys so beautifully."
--Alfred Kazin, The New Leader
"[Singer's]... impassioned narrative art... with roots in a Polish-Jewish cultural tradition, brings universal human conditions to life."
--The Nobel Prize Committee, 1978