Alpha and Omega: Stories
Inbunden bok. Barnes and Noble, New York. 2009. 320 sidor.
Nära nyskick. Skyddsomslag i mycket gott skick.
Språk: Engelska. Hardcover 215x145mm.
During his short life, Isaac Rosenfeld was recognized as one of the most gifted writers of his generation. Starting in the early 1940s, he published stories—in magazines such as Partisan Review, The Kenyon Review, and Harper’s—that brilliantly fused contemporary American themes with techniques extended from his European masters, Dostoevsky and Kafka. The results are a visionary fiction, graced by humor, ironic bite, and profound tenderness.Alpha and Omega collects seventeen stories written over the fifteen-year period from 1941 to 1956, the year of Rosenfeld’s death at the age of thirty-eight. In the earliest, “The Hand that Fed Me,” an “underground” man writes unanswered letters to a young woman, letters in which both desire and pride struggle for a hearing. “The Party” is a wry look at the world of splinter politics before the Cold War era. “Wolfie” introduces a new note of naturalism into Rosenfeld’s work, with an emphasis on salvation through the flesh. One of his last stories, “King Solomon” combines realism with fantasy in a place where “the magnificence of Jerusalem mingles raggedly with the dinginess of the Lower East Side,” as Saul Bellow put it in his elegiac memoir of Rosenfeld, reprinted here.Within these pages, readers will discover a unique voice in American literature, a writer of whose premature death Ted Solotaroff lamented, “a precious light had gone out, leaving us that much more in the dark.”
