Best Selling Books by Amos

The International Bestselling memoir from award-winning author Amos Oz, "one of Isreal''s most prolific writers and respected intellectuals" (The New York Times), about his turbulent upbringing in the city of Jerusalem in the era of the dissolution of Mandatory Palestine and the beginning of the State of Israel. Winner of the National Jewish Book Award "[An] ingenious work that circles around the rise of a state, the tragic destiny of a mother, a boy’s creation of a new self."—The New Yorker A family saga and a magical self-portrait of a writer who witnessed the birth of a nation and lived through its turbulent history. A Tale of Love and Darkness is the story of a boy who grows up in war-torn Jerusalem, in a small apartment crowded with books in twelve languages and relatives speaking nearly as many. The story of an adolescent whose life has been changed forever by his mother’s suicide. The story of a man who leaves the constraints of his family and community to join a kibbutz, change his name, marry, have children. The story of a writer who becomes an active participant in the political life of his nation. "One of the most enchanting and deeply satisfying books that I have read in many years."—New Republic

The sixth edition of American National Security has been extensively rewritten to take into account the significant changes in national security policy in the past decade. Thorough revisions reflect a new strategic context and the challenges and opportunities faced by the United States in the early twenty-first century. Highlights include: • An examination of the current international environment and new factors affecting U.S. national security policy making• A discussion of the Department of Homeland Security and changes in the intelligence community• A survey of intelligence and national security, with special focus on security needs post-9/11• A review of economic security, diplomacy, terrorism, conventional warfare, counterinsurgency, military intervention, and nuclear deterrence in the changed international setting• An update of security issues in East Asia, South and Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Sub-Saharan Africa, Russia and Central Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean• New material on globalization, transnational actors, and human security Previous editions have been widely used in undergraduate and graduate courses. -- James Schlesinger, former Secretary of Defense, from the foreword

“Thoughtful, self-assured and highly sophisticated, full of the most skillful modulations of tone and texture. A modern Israeli Madame Bovary.” —The New York Times Book Review Set in 1950s Jerusalem, My Michael is the story of a remote and intense woman named Hannah Gonen and her marriage to a decent, pragmatic, but unremarkable geology professor named Michael. Wedded too young, emotionally unprepared for motherhood, and forced to abandon her university studies, Hannah grows bored, frustrated, and increasingly removed from the banal certainty of her immediate world. As years pass, and Michael goes off to war, Hannah’s heady fantasy life encroaches upon reality. Hannah grows ever more estranged from her husband, as the marriage begins to disintegrate. “A flickering, multi-toned Israeli novel which grapples with time’s incursions, love’s deceptions, and the diminishment of desire” (Kirkus Reviews), My Michael is at once a haunting love story and a rich, reflective portrait of a place and time that “takes the reader into the fevered mind of a young woman” (The Guardian).

“A delicate contemporary tale about the quiddities of love and the perpetual mysteries of human motivations” from the bestselling Israeli author of Judas (Los Angeles Times). A New York Times Notable Book of the Year At Tel-Kedar, a settlement in the Negev desert, the longtime love affair between Theo, a sixty-year-old civil engineer, and Noa, a young schoolteacher, is slowly disintegrating. When a pupil dies under difficult circumstances, the couple and the entire town are thrown into turmoil. Amos Oz explores with brilliant insight the possibilities—and limits—of love and tolerance. “A rich symphony of humanity . . . If Oz’s eye for detail is enviable, it is his magnanimity which raises him to the first rank of world authors.” —Sunday Telegraph (UK) “Vivid, convincing, and haunting.” —The New York Times Book Review “A vividly and affectionately detailed picture of Israeli village life—and of what might be called a JulyOctober relationship—by acclaimed essayist and novelist Oz . . . A perfectly pitched comedy, expertly translated, and one of Oz’s most attractive and accomplished books.” —Kirkus Reviews “This novel, his 10th (after Fima), is set in Tel Kedar, a quiet desert town in the Negev that is both a microcosm of Israeli society and a vividly evoked setting whose atmosphere and residents are palpable . . . his story carries thought-provoking implications.” —Publishers Weekly “Skillfully alternating point of view between his two main characters, Oz shows us the painful process by which a couple uncouples, one sinew at a time.” —Booklist

A snapshot of Israel and the West Bank in the 1980s, through the voices of its inhabitants, from the National Jewish Book Award–winning author of Judas. Notebook in hand, renowned author and onetime kibbutznik Amos Oz traveled throughout his homeland to talk with people—workers, soldiers, religious zealots, aging pioneers, desperate Arabs, visionaries—asking them questions about Israel’s past, present, and future. Observant or secular, rich or poor, native-born or new immigrant, they shared their points of view, memories, hopes, and fears, and Oz recorded them. What emerges is a distinctive portrait of a changing nation and a complex society, supplemented by Oz’s own observations and reflections, that reflects an insider’s view of a country still forming its own identity. In the Land of Israel is “an exemplary instance of a writer using his craft to come to grips with what is happening politically and to illuminate certain aspects of Israeli society that have generally been concealed by polemical formulas” (The New York Times).

The Israeli master’s exceptional final novel SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE 2017 Shmuel – a young, idealistic student – has abandoned his studies in Jerusalem, taking a live-in job as a companion to a cantankerous old man. But Shmuel quickly becomes obsessed with the taciturn Atalia, a woman of enchanting beauty, who also lives in the house. As the household’s tangled, tragic past becomes apparent, so too does story behind the birth of the state of Israel. Journeying back into the deep past, Judas is a love story like no other by a master storyteller at the height of his powers. ‘A hero of mine, a moral as well as literary giant’ Simon Schama ‘One of his boldest works of all’ Boyd Tonkin, Financial Times ‘Amos Oz...brought so much beauty, so much love, and a vision of peace to our lives. Please hold him in your hearts and read his books’ Natalie Portman Judas is the first novel selected for the Amos Oz reading circle established by Natalie Portman.

A tale of “dazzling brilliance . . . a simple story which conveys boundless meanings both modest and diverse, set in Jerusalem directly after WWII” (Historical Novel Society). When Soumchi, an eleven-year-old boy growing up in British-occupied Jerusalem just after World War II, receives a bicycle as a gift from his Uncle Zemach, he is overjoyed—even if it is a girl’s bicycle. Ignoring the taunts of other boys in his neighborhood, he dreams of riding far away from them, out of the city and across the desert, toward the heart of Africa. But first he wants to show his new prize to his friend Aldo. In the tradition of such memorable characters as Huckleberry Finn and Holden Caulfield, Amos Oz’s Soumchi is fresh, funny, and always engaging. “What a difference spirit and talent make! . . . told . . . with zest and buoyant humor, from the dual viewpoint of the alternately crushed and elated Soumchi and the amused author who delights in his boyhood excesses.” —Kirkus Reviews “Oz shows a remarkable ability to stay true to his character and expand him fully into a multi-faceted jewel. Soumchi is a concise read which enhances each person’s view on life, possessions, and how tender life and far-reaching imagination can be at such a sensitive age.” —Historical Novel Society

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A novelist father and his historian daughter describe the intricate relationship between Jews and words, backing up their theory that the Jewish experience is not dependent on historical heroes or rituals, but on the written word passed between generations.

Oz has crafted an intricate tale of people constantly seeking escape from a hostile world, an escape symbolized on its highest level by the watchmaker Pomeranz, a mathematician and musician. By the power of his music, he causes the arid earth to turn into a moist womb that receives him and his wife not in death but in immortality. Translated by Nicholas de Lange. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book

This tale of a conflicted family living on a kibbutz in Israel just before the Six-Day War is “Oz''s strangest, riskiest, and richest novel.” —The Washington Post Book World On a kibbutz, the country’s founders and their children struggle to come to terms with their land and with each other. The messianic father exults in accomplishments that had once been only dreams; the son longs to establish an identity apart from his father; the fragile young wife is out of touch with reality; and the gifted and charismatic “outsider” seethes with emotion. Through the interplay of these brilliantly realized characters, Oz evokes a drama that is chillingly, strikingly universal. “[Oz is] a peerless, imaginative chronicler of his country’s inner and outer transformations.” —Independent (UK)

Three stories of “sensuous prose and indelible imagery” that re-create the world of Jerusalem during the last days of the British Mandate (The New York Times). Refugees drawn to Jerusalem in search of safety are confronted by activists relentlessly preparing for an uprising, oblivious to the risks. Meanwhile, a wife abandons her husband, and a dying man longs for his departed lover. Among these characters lives a boy named Uri, a friend and confidant of several conspirators who love and humor him as he weaves in and out of all three stories. The Hill of Evil Counsel is “as complex, vivid, and uncompromising as Jerusalem itself” (The Nation). “Oz evokes Israeli life with the same sly precision with which Chekhov evoked pre-Revolutionary Russian life.” —Los Angeles Times

“Oz conjures up a fairy story in which we may well recognize ourselves, our history and our nations . . . be prepared simply to be enchanted.” —The Guardian In a gray and gloomy village, all of the animals—from dogs and cats to fish and snails—disappeared years before. No one talks about it and no one knows why, though everyone agrees that the village has been cursed. But when two children see a fish—a tiny one and just for a second—they become determined to unravel the mystery of where the animals have gone. And so they travel into the depths of the forest with that mission in mind, terrified and hopeful about what they may encounter. From the internationally bestselling author Amos Oz, this is a hauntingly beautiful fable for both children and adults about tolerance, loneliness, denial, and remembrance. “In this swiftly moving fable, Oz creates palpable tension with a repetitive, almost hypnotic rhythm and lyrical language that twists a discussion-provoking morality tale into something much more enchanting.” —Booklist “Short, poetic, and haunting, the book operates on a plane of mystery somewhere between fable and fairy tale . . . The great beauty of this story is the rhythm and clarity of its evocative language.” —New York Journal of Books “From the whispered tales of a local monster to the brash, spunky heroes on a quest, internationally acclaimed Israeli author Oz litters his story with fairy-tale tropes that give this narrative a fable-like quality; the atmosphere is intriguingly secretive and shadowed, but the prose is measured and accessible and the length manageable.” —The Bulletin

Fima er midaldrende, fraskilt og har en fortid som lovende digter. Han hutler sig igennem tilværelsen, men har mange menneskelige relationer og deltager aktivt i debatten om dagens israelske samfund

A novel in stories by acclaimed Israeli author Amos Oz.

Seven years after their divorce, Ilana breaks the bitter silence with a letter to Alex, a world-renowned authority on fanaticism, begging for help with their rebellious adolescent son, Boaz. One letter leads to another, and so evolves a correspondence between Ilana and Alex, Alex and Michel (Ilana''s Moroccan husband), Alex and his Mephistophelian Jerusalem lawyer—a correspondence between mother and father, stepfather and stepson, father and son, each pleading his or her own case. The grasping, lyrical, manipulative, loving Ilana has stirred things up. Now, her former husband and her present husband have become rivals not only for her loyalty but for her son''s as well.

Author''s account of his long night." "He spends the rest of the night wandering, smoking, inventing, regretting and thinking till dawn, when he learns, by chance, of the death of a once famous poet, now barely remembered." --Book Jacket.

The Labyrinth of the World and the Paradise of the Heart is a book by Johan Amos Comenius. It depicts a spiritual quest for personal piety that enmeshes with Protestant thought.

As an Israeli secret service agent, Yoel Ravid''s ability to sense the truth made him invaluable. Now widowed and retired, he lives with his mother, his mother-in-law, his daughter, and the haunting memory of his wife. A New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Translated by Nicholas de Lange. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book

Some great writers write and rewrite the first sentence of a book a hundred times and never get beyond it. Others, presumably, give up altogether and, perhaps in despair, decide to begin just as it comes to them.

“Brilliant and insistent . . . The prose is sharp as a cameo, simple yet compelling, smoky, precise, lustrous, eerie.” — Boston Sunday Globe Here Amos Oz captures the atmosphere of hatred in which Jews have lived, died, and struggled for understanding. In Crusade, a band of soldiers journeys toward the Holy Land, killing any Jews they encounter; but soon the Crusaders face their own reckoning, as disease and deprivation take their toll. Late Love portrays an aged lecturer in modern Israel with paranoid visions of the destruction of his people at the hands of the Soviets. He is out of touch with a younger and saner generation, but knows they must be warned. “Powerfully written, with subtlety and flagrance delicately balanced.” — Austin American-Statesman

The first book from the acclaimed, award-winning author of A Tale of Love and Darkness and the New York Times Notable Book, Scenes from Village Life. The Washington Post praised Israeli author Amos Oz as “one of our essential writers, laying out for our observation, in ever-increasing breadth and profundity, the mad landscape of our time and his place.” Here, in his first book, is a disturbing and moving collection of short stories about kibbutz life. Each of the eight stories in this volume grips the reader from the first line, and convey the tension and intensity of feeling in the founding period of Israel, a brand-new state with an age-old history. Some are love stories, more are hate stories, and frequently the two urges intertwine. “A strong, beautiful, disturbing book. It speaks piercingly—whether wittingly or unwittingly, I know not—of a dimension of the Israeli experience not often discussed, of the specter of the other brother, of a haunting, an unhealed wound; it reminds us of polarizations everywhere that bind and diminish us, that may yet rend us.” —The New York Times “As you read, you feel yourself, in all these stories, sinking deeper into the loam of Oz’s sensibility, a paradoxical mix of sensuality and disdain. A good collection by an important international writer.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

From “a great and true voice of our time” (Washington Post Book World), comes this story of Proffy, a twelve-year-old living in Palestine in 1947. When Proffy befriends a member of the occupying British forces who shares his love of language and the Bible, he is accused of treason by his friends and learns the true nature of loyalty and betrayal. Translated by Nicholas de Lange.

The celebrated author and peace activist addresses the war in Lebanon and the deep political divides within Israel in these articles and essays. As well as being one of Israel’s preeminent writers of fiction, Amos Oz was one of the first Israeli voices of conscience to advocate the creation of a Palestinian state. Through his forcefully argued speeches, articles and essays, he was a leading figure of the Peace Now movement since 1977. This superb collection of political writings from 1982 to 1988 showcases Oz’s eloquent insight into the controversies of the time. In The Slopes of Lebanon, Oz discusses Israel’s offensive into Lebanon; fanaticism of all stripes; the PLO; Israeli terrorism; the new militarism and the growing intolerance toward the Arab population in Israel; Jewish attitudes toward the Holocaust, and its misappropriation by the right and left alike; Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah; the dream of Zionism and its failures; and much more. “An interesting, troubling, embittered, passionate, almost - but not quite - disheartened book.” —The New York Times

A man who has lost his wife to cancer takes in the girlfriend of the son who is wandering the mountains of Tibet.

In The Silence of Heaven, the world renowned Israeli novelist Amos Oz introduces us to an extraordinary masterpiece of Hebrew literature that is just now appearing in English, S. Y. Agnon''s Only Yesterday. For Oz, Agnon is a treasure trove of a world no longer available to today''s writers, yet deeply meaningful for his wonderment about God, the submerged eroticism of his writing, and his juggling of multiple texts from the historical Hebrew religious library. This collection of Oz''s reflections on Agnon, which includes an essay on the essence of his ideology and poetics, is a rich interpretive work that shows how one great writer views another. Oz admires Agnon especially for his ability to invoke and visualize the religious world of the simple folk in Eastern European Jewry, looking back from the territorial context of the Zionist revival in Palestine. The tragedy of Agnon''s visions, Oz maintains, lies in his perspicacity. Long before the Holocaust, Agnon saw the degeneration, ruin, and end of Jewish culture in Eastern Europe. He knew, too, that the Zionist project was far from being a secure conquest and its champions far from being happy idealists. Oz explores these viewpoints in a series of thick readings that consider the tensions between faith and the shock of doubt, yearnings and revulsion, love and hate, and intimacy and disgust. Although Oz himself is interested in particular ideological questions, he has the subtle sensibility of a master of fiction and can detect every technical device in Agnon''s arsenal. With the verve of an excited reader, Oz dissects Agnon''s texts and subtexts in a passionate argument about the major themes of Hebrew literature. This book also tells much about Oz. It represents the other side of Oz''s book of reportage, In the Land of Israel, this time exploring the ideologies of Jewish identity not on the land but in texts of the modern classical heritage. The Silence of Heaven hence takes us on a remarkable journey into the minds of two major literary figures.

"Perceptions of Jewish History scintillates with original ideas and insights. It will appeal to a broad audience." --Michael A. Signer, University of Notre Dame "Students of the Jewish past will welcome this volume; it will also attract readers with the widest possible range of interests." --Robert Chazan, New York University "Perceptions of Jewish History scintillates with original ideas and insights. It will appeal to a broad audience." --Michael A. Signer, University of Notre Dame "Students of the Jewish past will welcome this volume; it will also attract readers with the

The renowned Israeli author’s debut novel. “An appealing tribute to the persistence of pathos and warmth among human beings clustered against the night.” —Kirkus Reviews Situated only two miles from a hostile border, Amos Oz’s fictional community of Metsudat Ram is a microcosm of the Israeli frontier kibbutz. There, held together by necessity and menace, the kibbutzniks share love and sorrow under the guns of their enemies and the eyes of history. “Immensely enjoyable.” —Chicago Tribune Book World “What Elsewhere, Perhaps eventually reveals is interesting. It is decidedly not what it appears to be at first: A straight-faced slice of kibbutz life told in imitation of the traditional Yiddish narrative voice of the invisible community gossip, who, begging our pardon, knows everything and tells all. No, although the narrator appears initially to be the genial voice of tradition, it soon becomes apparent that it is kidding us. It knows perfectly well we will scoff at Reuven Harish’s verses. For the story it is about to tell is compounded of nothing but ironies . . . It adds up to a charmingly unpious tapestry of Israeli life.” —The New York Times “An exquisite thinker, Oz is a rare blast of sanity and intelligence.” —The Observer “The physical circumstances are established with a painter’s skill . . . It is a rich book, its fruit pressed down and running over.” —The Sunday Times “A generous imagination at work. [Oz’s] language, for all of its sensuous imagery, has a careful and wise simplicity.” —The New York Times Book Review