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The award-winning and internationally acclaimed author of the To the End of the Land now gives us a searing short novel about the life of a stand-up comic, as revealed in the course of one evening's performance. In the dance between comic and audience, with barbs flying back and forth, a deeper story begins to take shape—one that will alter the lives of many of those in attendance.
In a little dive in a small Israeli city, Dov Greenstein, a comedian a bit past his prime, is doing a night of stand-up. In the audience is a district court justice, Avishai Lazar, whom Dov knew as a boy, along with a few others who remember Dov as an awkward, scrawny kid who walked on his hands to confound the neighborhood bullies. Gradually, as it teeters between hilarity and hysteria, Dov's patter becomes a kind of memoir, taking us back into the terrors of his childhood: we meet his beautiful flower of a mother, a Holocaust survivor in need of constant monitoring, and his punishing father, a striver who had little understanding of his creative son. Finally, recalling his week at a military camp for youth—where Lazar witnessed what would become the central event of Dov's childhood—Dov describes the indescribable while Lazar wrestles with his own part in the comedian's story of loss and survival. Continuing his investigations into how people confront life's capricious battering, and how art may blossom from it, Grossman delivers a stunning performance in this memorable one-night engagement (jokes in questionable taste included).
Booker Prize, 2017
"Grossman brings real humanity to this heart-wrenching and well-written novel, offering insight into one man's psychological makeup and how society has damaged him. An excellent translation; highly recommended." — Library Journal
"Arresting ... Entertaining." —San Francisco Chronicle
"I have never read a book like this, or even thought that one could exist ... A hard, fast, and bumpy ride through the deserts of Israel and the soul." —Washington Independent Review of Books
"Astounding ... [A] magnificently comic and sucker-punch-tragic excursion into brilliance ... He has left a trail of blood and sweat on the page that only a true master—a Lenny Bruce, a Franz Kafka—could dream of replicating." —The New York Times Book Review
"Urgent ... Mesmerizing ... A novel as beautiful as it is unusual ... Grossman takes a lot of risks in A Horse Walks into a Bar, and every one of them pays off spectacularly well ... It's nearly impossible to put down." — NPR
"Blistering ... Concise ... Grossman masterfully weaves several complex strands of narrative [and] translator Jessica Cohen turns the performance into fluent, American-style patter." —The Washington Post
"Accomplished and audacious ... An Israeli offspring of Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint and Dostoyevsky's Notes from the Underground [that is] laced with loss and leave-taking ... Grossman has once more proved himself as one of Israel's finest literary alchemists." — Haaretz
"David Grossman has attempted an ambitious high-wire act of a novel, and he's pulled it off spectacularly. A Horse Walks into a Bar shines a spotlight on the effects of grief, without any hint of sentimentality. The central character is challenging and flawed, but completely compelling. We were bowled over by Grossman's willingness to take emotional as well as stylistic risks: every sentence counts, every word matters in this supreme example of the writer's craft." —Judges' Citation, Man Booker International Prize, 2017
This information about A Horse Walks into a Bar was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
David Grossman was born in Jerusalem. He is the author of numerous works of fiction, nonfiction, and children's literature. His work has appeared in The New Yorker and has been translated into thirty languages around the world. He is the recipient of many prizes, including the French Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, the Buxtehuder Bulle in Germany, Rome's Premio per la Pace e l'Azione Umitaria, the Premio Ischia- International Award for Journalism, Israel's Emet Prize, and the Albatross Prize given by the Günter Grass Foundation.
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