The Finkler Question

Author : Howard Jacobson
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 : 1608196127
Total Pages : 319 pages
Book Rating : 4.28/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Finkler Question written by Howard Jacobson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2010-09-10 with total page 319 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "He should have seen it coming. His life had been one mishap after another. So he should have been prepared for this one..." Julian Treslove, a professionally unspectacular and disappointed BBC worker, and Sam Finkler, a popular Jewish philosopher, writer and television personality, are old school friends. Despite a prickly relationship and very different lives, they've never quite lost touch with each other - or with their former teacher, Libor Sevick, a Czechoslovakian always more concerned with the wider world than with exam results. Now, both Libor and Finkler are recently widowed, and with Treslove, his chequered and unsuccessful record with women rendering him an honorary third widower, they dine at Libor's grand, central London apartment. It's a sweetly painful evening of reminiscence in which all three remove themselves to a time before they had loved and lost; a time before they had fathered children, before the devastation of separations, before they had prized anything greatly enough to fear the loss of it. Better, perhaps, to go through life without knowing happiness at all because that way you had less to mourn? Treslove finds he has tears enough for the unbearable sadness of both his friends' losses. And it's that very evening, at exactly 11:30pm, as Treslove hesitates a moment outside the window of the oldest violin dealer in the country as he walks home, that he is attacked. After this, his whole sense of who and what he is will slowly and ineluctably change. The Finkler Question is a scorching story of exclusion and belonging, justice and love, ageing, wisdom and humanity. Funny, furious, unflinching, this extraordinary novel shows one of our finest writers at his brilliant best.

Author : Howard Jacobson
Publisher : A&C Black
ISBN 13 : 1408812045
Total Pages : 317 pages
Book Rating : 4.44/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Finkler Question written by Howard Jacobson and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2010-08-02 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ______________ WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE ______________ 'Full of wit, warmth, intelligence, human feeling and understanding. It is also beautifully written with that sophisticated and near invisible skill of the authentic writer' - Observer 'Wonderful ... Jacobson is seriously on form' - Evening Standard ______________ Julian Treslove, a professionally unspectacular former BBC radio producer, and Sam Finkler, a popular Jewish philosopher, writer and television personality, are old school friends. Despite very different lives, they've never quite lost touch with each other - or with their former teacher, Libor Sevcik. Both Libor and Finkler are recently widowed, and together with Treslove they share a sweetly painful evening revisiting a time before they had loved and lost. It is that very evening, when Treslove hesitates a moment as he walks home, that he is attacked - and his whole sense of who and what he is slowly and ineluctably changes. ______________ 'How is it possible to read Howard Jacobson and not lose oneself in admiration for the music of his language, the power of his characterisation and the penetration of his insight? ... The Finkler Question is further proof, if any was needed, of Jacobson's mastery of humour' - The Times 'There are few writers who exhibit the same unawed respect for language or such a relentless commitment to re-examining even the most seemingly unobjectionable of received wisdoms' - Daily Telegraph

Author : Howard Jacobson
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1416554025
Total Pages : 465 pages
Book Rating : 4.28/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Kalooki Nights written by Howard Jacobson and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2007-04-03 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Max Glickman, a Jewish cartoonist whose seminal work is a comic history titled Five Thousand Years of Bitterness, recalls his childhood in a British suburb in the 1950s. Growing up, Max is surrounded by Jews, each with an entirely different and outspoken view on what it means to be Jewish. His mother, incessantly preoccupied with a card game called Kalooki, only begrudgingly puts the deck away on the High Holy Days. Max's father, a failed boxer prone to spontaneous nosebleeds, is a self-proclaimed atheist and communist, unable to accept the God who has betrayed him so unequivocally in recent years. But it is through his friend and neighbor Manny Washinsky that Max begins to understand the indelible effects of the Holocaust and to explore the intrinsic and paradoxical questions of a postwar Jewish identity. Manny, obsessed with the Holocaust and haunted by the allure of its legacy, commits a crime of nightmare proportion against his family and his faith. Years later, after his friend's release from prison, Max is inexorably drawn to uncover the motive behind the catastrophic act -- the discovery of which leads to a startling revelation and a profound truth about religion and faith that exists where the sacred meets the profane. Spanning the decades between World War II and the present day, acclaimed author Howard Jacobson seamlessly weaves together a breath-takingly complex narrative of love, tragedy, redemption, and above all, remarkable humor. Deeply empathetic and audaciously funny, Kalooki Nights is a luminous story torn violently between the hope of restoring and rebuilding Jewish life, and the painful burden of memory and loss.

Author : Howard Jacobson
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1783198354
Total Pages : 125 pages
Book Rating : 4.51/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Mighty Walzer written by Howard Jacobson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2016-07-05 with total page 125 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Oliver Walzer is shy, bookish, Jewish. He doesn’t know how to talk to girls. But he can slice, flick and spin a ping pong ball better than any teenager in Manchester. Oliver channels his frustrated adolescent lust into the game he loves. That is until the heartbreaking Lorna Peachley and the prospect of a place at Cambridge take his eye off the ball.

Author : Howard Jacobson
Publisher : Hogarth
ISBN 13 : 0804141339
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.38/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Shylock Is My Name written by Howard Jacobson and published by Hogarth. This book was released on 2016-02-09 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Man Booker Prize-winner Howard Jacobson brings his singular brilliance to this modern re-imagining of one of Shakespeare’s most unforgettable characters: Shylock Winter, a cemetery, Shylock. In this provocative and profound interpretation of The Merchant of Venice, Shylock is juxtaposed against his present-day counterpart in the character of art dealer and conflicted father Simon Strulovitch. With characteristic irony, Jacobson presents Shylock as a man of incisive wit and passion, concerned still with questions of identity, parenthood, anti-Semitism and revenge. While Strulovich struggles to reconcile himself to his daughter Beatrice's “betrayal” of her family and heritage—as she is carried away by the excitement of Manchester high society, and into the arms of a footballer notorious for giving a Nazi salute on the field—Shylock alternates grief for his beloved wife with rage against his own daughter's rejection of her Jewish upbringing. Culminating in a shocking twist on Shylock’s demand for the infamous pound of flesh, Jacobson’s insightful retelling examines contemporary, acutely relevant questions of Jewish identity while maintaining a poignant sympathy for its characters and a genuine spiritual kinship with its antecedent—a drama which Jacobson himself considers to be “the most troubling of Shakespeare’s plays for anyone, but, for an English novelist who happens to be Jewish, also the most challenging.”

Author : Howard Jacobson
Publisher : Random House
ISBN 13 : 1473563801
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.03/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Live a Little written by Howard Jacobson and published by Random House. This book was released on 2019-07-04 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'A . . . tender love story . . . This book is alive. It pulses with warmth and intelligence' The Times A wickedly observed novel about falling in love at the end of your life, by the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Finkler Question. At the age of ninety-something, Beryl Dusinbery is forgetting everything – including her own children. She spends her days stitching morbid samplers and tormenting her two carers with tangled tales of her husbands and affairs. Shimi Carmelli can do up his own buttons, walks without a frame and speaks without spitting. Among the widows of North London, he’s whispered about as the last of the eligible bachelors. He forgets nothing –especially not the shame of a childhood incident that has long hung over him. There's very little left remaining for either of them. . . But perhaps just enough to heal some of the hurt inflicted along the way, and find new meaning in what's left. *SHORTLISTED FOR THE WINGATE LITERARY PRIZE 2020*

Author : Howard Jacobson
Publisher : Random House
ISBN 13 : 1446412997
Total Pages : 258 pages
Book Rating : 4.92/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Coming From Behind written by Howard Jacobson and published by Random House. This book was released on 2011-03-31 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In an ever divided Britain, this wryly observed novel is a timely and thought-provoking read from the Booker-winning author of The Finkler Question. 'A very funny, bitterly intelligent novel...do read it' Malcolm Bradbury Sefton Goldberg: mid-thirties, English teacher at Wrottesley Poly in the West Midlands; small, sweaty, lustful, defiantly unappreciative of beer, nature and organised games; gnawingly aware of being an urban Jew islanded in a sea of country-loving Anglo-Saxons. Obsessed by failure - morbidly, in his own case, gloatingly, in that of his contemporaries - so much so that he plans to write a bestseller on the subject. In the meantime he is uncomfortably aware of advancing years and atrophying achievement, and no amount of lofty rationalisation can disguise the triumph of friends and colleagues, not only from Cambridge days but even within the despised walls of the Poly itself, or sweeten the bitter pill of another's success...

Author : Howard Jacobson
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1416599991
Total Pages : 354 pages
Book Rating : 4.99/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Act of Love written by Howard Jacobson and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2009-03-17 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a stunning follow-up to his much-heralded masterpiece, Kalooki Nights, acclaimed author Howard Jacobson has turned his mordant and uncanny sights on Felix Quinn, a rare-book dealer living in London, whose wife Marisa is unfaithful to him. All husbands, Felix maintains, secretly want their wives to be unfaithful to them. Felix hasn't always thought this way. From the moment of his first boyhood rejection, surviving the shattering effects of love and jealousy had been the study of his life. But while he is honeymooning with Marisa in Florida an event occurs that changes everything. In a moment, he goes from dreading the thought of someone else's hands on the woman he loves to thinking about nothing else. Enter Marius into Marisa's affections. And now Felix must wonder if he really is a happy man. The Act of Love is a haunting novel of love and jealousy, with stylish prose that crackles and razor-sharp dialogue, praised by the London Times as "darkly transgressive, as savage in its brilliance, as anything Jacobson has written." It is a startlingly perceptive, subtle portrait of a marriage and an excruciatingly honest, provocative exploration of sexual obsession.

Author : Howard Jacobson
Publisher : Anchor
ISBN 13 : 0307428966
Total Pages : 354 pages
Book Rating : 4.67/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Making of Henry written by Howard Jacobson and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2007-12-18 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Man Booker Prize–Winning Author of THE FINKLER QUESTION Swathed in his kimono, drinking tea from his samovar, Henry Nagle is temperamentally opposed to life in the 21st century. Preferring not to contemplate the great intellectual and worldly success of his best boyhood friend, he argues constantly with his father, an upholsterer turned fire-eater–and now dead for many years. When he goes out at all, Henry goes after other men’s wives. But when he mysteriously inherits a sumptuous apartment, Henry’s life changes, bringing on a slick descendant of Robert Louis Stevenson, an excitable red setter, and a wise-cracking waitress with a taste for danger. All of them demand his attention, even his love, a word which barely exists in Henry’s magisterial vocabulary, never mind his heart. From one of England’s most highly regarded writers, The Making of Henry is a ravishing novel, at once wise, tender and mordantly funny.

Author : Anthony Julius
Publisher : Oxford University Press
ISBN 13 : 0199600724
Total Pages : 870 pages
Book Rating : 4.24/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Trials of the Diaspora written by Anthony Julius and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-02-09 with total page 870 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first ever comprehensive history of anti-Semitism in England, from medieval murder and expulsion through to contemporary forms of anti-Zionism in the 21st century.