Robert Alter Books

Shira is Nobel laureate S.Y. Agnon's final, epic novel. Unfinished at the time of his death in 1970, the Hebrew original was published a year later. With this newly revised English translation by Zeva Shapiro, including archival material never before published in English, The Toby Press launches its S.Y. Agnon Library the fullest collection of Agnon's works in new and revised translations. "Shira is S. Y. Agnon's culminating effort to articulate through the comprehensive form of the novel his vision of the role of art in human reality Enacted against the background of Jerusalem life in the gathering shadows of a historical cataclysm of inconceivable proportions, Shira is so brilliantly rendered that, even without an ending, it deserves a place among the major modern novels."

This is a collection of essays on each book of the Bible, and a number that relate to the Bible as a whole. It brings modern literary and historical analysis to this greatest of all works of literature.

A selection of the Best Writing in Israel TodayEdited by Joel Blocker, introduction by Robert AlterThe present volume of Israeli stories reassuringly illustrates the other half of a frequently asserted half-truth. Modern Hebrew literature, it is claimed, liked Yiddish literature, does not really share the large concerns of serious literary activity in the West. The Hebrew writer ordinarily does not address himself to the human situation with all of its far-reaching possibilities of tragedy of comedy, but to the Jewish situation, which is quite another thing. Consequently, Hebrew and Yiddish writers—so goes the claim—develop a system of typology rather than methods of characterization, for they are most essentially interested in the Jewish people, its particular qualities and its present fate or ultimate destiny, while the individual, who is central in other modern literatures, stands at the periphery of their vision.

The question of the canon has been the subject of debate in academic circles for over fifteen years. Pleasure and Change contains two lectures on this important subject by the distinguished literary critic Sir Frank Kermode. In essays that were originally delivered as Tanner Lectures at Berkeley in November of 2001, Kermode reinterprets the question of canon formation in light of two related and central pleasure and change . He asks how aesthetic pleasure informs what we find valuable, and how this perception changes over time. Kermode also explores the role of chance, observing the connections between canon formation and unintentional and sometimes even random circumstance. Geoffrey Hartmann (Yale University), John Guillory (New York University), and Carey Perloff (director of the American Conservatory Theatre) offer incisive comments on these essays, to which Kermode responds in a lively rejoinder. The volume begins with a helpful introduction by Robert Alter. Theresult is a stimulating and accessible discussion of a highly significant cultural debate.

“For many serious readers,” Robert Alter writes in his preface, “the novel still matters, and I have tried here to suggest some reasons why that should be so.” In his wide-ranging discussion, Alter examines the imitation of reality in fiction to find out why mimesis has become problematic yet continues to engage us deeply as readers.Alter explores very different sorts of novels, from the self-conscious artifices of Sterne and Nabokov to what seem to be more realistic texts, such as those of Dickens, Flaubert, John Fowles, and the early Norman Mailer. Attention is also given to such individual critics as Edmund Wilson and Alfred Kazin and to current critical schools. In Alter’s essays, a particular book or movement or juxtaposition of writers provides the occasion for the exploration of a general intellectual issue. The scrutiny of well-chosen passages, the joining of images or themes or ideas, the associative and intuitive processes that lead to the right phrase and the right loop of syntax for the matter at hand-all these come together unexpectedly to illuminate both the text in question and the general issue.Recent discussions of mimesis in fiction generally proceed from a single thesis. By contrast, Motives for Fiction offers an empirical approach, attempting to define mimesis in its various guises by careful critical readings of a heterogeneous sampling of literary texts. Intelligent and good-humored, the book is also old-fashioned enough to wonder whether mimesis might not be a task or responsibility to which much contemporary fiction has not proved entirely adequate.

A brilliant new translation and commentary of one of the Bible s most cherished and powerful books.Like the Five Books of Moses a cornerstone of the scriptural canon, the Book of Psalms has been a source of solace and joy for countless readers over millennia. The cleansing purity of its images invites reflection and supplication in times of sorrow. The musicality of its powerful rhythms moves readers to celebration of good tidings. So today as it has been throughout our past, this is a book to be cherished as the grounding for our daily lives.This timeless poetry is beautifully wrought by a scholar whose translation of the Five Books of Moses was hailed as a "godsend" by Seamus Heaney and a "masterpiece" by Robert Fagles. Robert Alter's The Book of Psalms captures the simplicity, the physicality, and the coiled rhythmic power of the Hebrew, restoring the remarkable eloquence of these ancient poems. His learned and insightful commentary shines a light on the obscurities of the text.Robert Alter is a widely acclaimed literary scholar. He is the Class of 1937 Professor of Hebrew and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley.

Amos Oz (1939-2018) war ein prägender israelischer Autor und Mitbegründer der Friedensbewegung Schalom Achschaw. Seine bekanntesten Werke, darunter „Eine Geschichte von Liebe und Finsternis“, wurden weltweit anerkannt. Robert Alter beschreibt einfühlsam Oz' Leben, seine Familie, das Kibbuz und seinen Kampf für ein pluralistisches Israel.