King of the Fields

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From the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Isaac Bashevis Singer, comes a fictional exploration of primitive history. Singer's novel portrays an era of superstition and violence in a country emerging from the darkness of savagery. Set in Poland in the dark ages, it describes the brutality, prejudice and subjugation that occur when hunter-gatherers and farmers struggle for supremacy over the land. Part parable of modern civilization, part fascinating historical novel, this modern myth is a philosophical examination of man and his beliefs, and reaffirms the author's reputation as a master of narrative invention.

Singer is a writer of far greater than ordinary power

Born in 1902, Isaac Bashevis Singer grew up among fellow Jewish families in Poland. In response to the growing Nazi threat in neighbouring Germany, Singer emigrated to America. Settling in New York, he worked as a journalist for a Yiddish-language newspaper, The Forward. Singer was insistent that even after the Second World War, a wide audience remained for Yiddish texts, and each of his novels were originally written in his native language. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978. Since Singer's death on July 24 1991 his name has been used in honour for a street in Surfside, Florida, and for the full academic scholarship for undergraduate studies at the University of Miami.

A fictional exploration of primitive history, Singer's novel portrays an era of superstition and violence in a country emerging from the darkness of savagery. Set in Poland in the dark ages, it describes the brutality, prejudice and subjugation that occur when hunter-gatherers and farmers struggle for supremacy over the land. Part parable of modern civilization, part fascinating historical novel, this modern myth is a philosophical examination of man and his beliefs, and reaffirms the author's reputation as a master of narrative invention.

Love and Exile

From pre-First World War Warsaw to the New York of the 1930s, Nobel Prize-winner Isaac Bashevis Singer traces the early years of his life in this autobiographical trilogy. In A Little Boy in Search of God, he remembers his bookish boyhood as the son of an Orthodox rabbi, equally absorbed in science, philosophy and cabbala. Later, the pursuit of women came to obsess him almost as much as the pursuit of knowledge, and in A Young Man in Search of Love he chronicles the intricacies of his first love affairs. When he emigrated to the United States from Poland on the eve of the Second World War loneliness and depression overwhelmed him, and he relives those dark years in Lost in America. From beginning to end, Love and Exile sheds new light on Singer's own life and the fictional lives mirrored in it.

An astonishingly intimate record of a writer's inner wanderings

Isaac Bashevis Singer is exhilerating good company . . . His companions and loves, responding to a master's slightest nudge, bound out of his memory and onto the page

Born in 1902, Isaac Bashevis Singer grew up among fellow Jewish families in Poland. In response to the growing Nazi threat in neighbouring Germany, Singer emigrated to America. Settling in New York, he worked as a journalist for a Yiddish-language newspaper, The Forward. Singer was insistent that even after the Second World War, a wide audience remained for Yiddish texts, and each of his novels were originally written in his native language. He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978. Since Singer's death on July 24 1991 his name has been used in honour for a street in Surfside, Florida, and for the full academic scholarship for undergraduate studies at the University of Miami.

From pre-First World War Warsaw to the New York of the 1930s, Isaac Bashevis Singer traces the early years of his life in this autobiographical trilogy. In A Little Boy in Search of God, he remembers his bookish boyhood as the son of an Orthodox rabbi, equally absorbed in science, philosophy and cabbala. Later, the pursuit of women came to obsess him almost as much as the pursuit of knowledge, and in A Young Man in Search of Love he chronicles the intricacies of his first love affairs. When he emigrated to the United States from Poland on the eve of the Second World War loneliness and depression overwhelmed him, and he relives those dark years in Lost in America. From beginning to end, Love and Exile sheds new light on Singer's own life and the fictional lives mirrored in it.

Satan in Goray

A dark and mesmerising story, at once lyrical and terrifying

A gripping parable of reason versus revelation, hysteria in the face of apocalypse

Whatever religion his writing inhabits, it is blazing with life and actuality

Singer set scenes with such vividness that there is almost a smell to his books, the smell of poverty and guttering candles and decaying lives and decaying souls

His storytelling powers are so immense, so natural. He has more creative confidence than any living writer

A remarkably confident debut... Singer was a great writer who managed to make that small world take on universal significance

The richness of Singer's evocation and the ambiguity of his art set the novel apart from pure political satire

Isaac Bashevis Singer was born in 1904, in Poland, the son of a rabbi. Fleeing fascism in 1935, he emigrated to America, penniless and knowing little English. 'I think that the whole of human history is one big Holocaust,' he said in 1987, when asked why there was no direct mention of the Holocaust in his fiction. 'It is not only Jewish history. We can call human history the history of the human Holocaust'. Singer's fiction - novels such as The Family Moskat (1950) and The Magician of Lublin (1960), and story collections such as Gimpel the Fool (1957) and The Spinoza of Market Street (1961) - became admired internationally and he was awarded the Nobel prize in 1978. He died in 1998.

The pogrom that swept through Poland was interpreted as a sign of the Coming of the Lord. In the little town of Goray, laid waste by murder and famine, grief becomes joy as good news arrives of the second coming of the Messiah. Once the town’s pious rabbi is usurped, the townspeople are free to look forward to the End of Days, when they will wear golden jackets and dine on marzipan candy. But such perilously high hopes pave the way to hysteria, and a panic which could threaten the very existence of Goray.

The Family Moskat

A magnificent, terrifying, panoramic view of the decline of the Polish Jewry told by the Nobel Prize winning writer, Isaac Bashevis Singer

A masterpiece, a triumph of realism, precisely finished, exactly located, a miraculous marriage of accuracy and imagination

A loving and detailed portrait of Jewish life in Eastern Europe before the Holocaust.

Guardian '1000 novels everyone must read'

Whatever region his writing inhabits, it is blazing with life and actuality

He makes most contemporary practitioners of the art of fiction look like singers with only one song

Isaac Bashevis Singer celebrates the dignity, mystery and unexpected joy of living with more art and fervour than any other writer-one of the very best storytellers

In the topsy-turvy years between the dawn of the twentieth century and the dark days of 1939, the Moskat family battled on. But like many Jewish families in Poland they can no longer turn a blind eye to the dwindling of their fortunes. In Warsaw, where saints mingle with swindlers, tough Zionists argue with mystic philosophers, and medieval rabbis rub shoulders with ultra-modern painters, life is inexorably changing. Secularism and war inch nearer and the family Moskat clings on.

The Magician of Lublin

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

Singer writes with a love and passion unequalled in contemporary fiction

Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-91) was the author of many novels, stories, children's books, and a memoir. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978.

Yasha the magician - sword swallower, fire eater, acrobat and master of escape - is famed for his extraordinary Houdini-like skills. Half Jewish, half Gentile, a free thinker who slips easily between worlds, Yasha has an observant wife, a loyal assistant who travels with him and a woman in every town. Now, though, his exploits are catching up with him, and he is tempted to make one final escape - from his marriage, his homeland and the last tendrils of his father's religion. Set in Warsaw and the shtetls of the 1870s, Isaac Bashevis Singer's second novel is a haunting psychological portrait of a man's flight from love. 
 
Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature

Enemies: A Love Story

One is forever suspended between laughter and tears by this rich and marvellous novel

Isaac Bashevis Singer is a rare pleasure ... a literary genius

Herman Broder, a refugee and Holocaust survivor, has three women in his life: Yadwiga, the loyal Polish peasant who hid him in a hayloft from the Nazis; Masha, his beautiful and neurotic true love; and Tamara, his first wife. Unsure of who he really is, what he wants and whether he can ever find peace, Herman navigates a crowded, Yiddish New York with a sense of paranoia and impending doom. Published in 1972, Enemies, A Love Story is an astonishing novel that blends humour and pathos to create a rich, humane portrayal of a man who cannot escape his past.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

The Penitent is the story of Joseph Shapiro, a disillusioned and aimless man who discovers a purpose to his life through the Jewish faith. Following his journey as he flees Nazi persecution in Poland in 1939, through wealth and a failed marriage in New York, and on to Israel, it charts his transformation from worldly confusion to spiritual certainty in orthodox Judaism. This powerful work is an examination of the nature of faith, the question of identity and the notion of how to lead a good life.

Isaac Bashevis Singer

The Penitent

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