num_pages: 273
description: Isaac Bashevis Singer, on being awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, was cited for his “impassioned narrative art which, with roots in a Polish-Jewish cultural tradition, brings the universal human condition to life.” His new book, Old Love, is a collection of stories—the eighth in a distinguished series of books that includes Gimpel the Fool, The Spinoza of Market Street, A Friend of Kafka, Short Friday, The Séance, A Crown of Feathers, and Passions.“The love of the old and the middle-aged is a theme that is recurring more and more in my works of fiction,” Mr. Singer writes. “Literature has neglected the old and their emotions. It has not been so obvious that in love, as in other matters, the young are just beginners and that the art of loving matures with age and experience.” The eighteen stories in Old Love again display the author’s incredible range and unpredictability as a storyteller.In “The Psychic Journey,” a New York writer meets a clairvoyant who throws herself at him; when he tries to break with her on their trip to Israel, the consequences are front-page news. “Elka and Meir” takes us into the strange lives of two workers at a burial society who encounter the Angel of Death once too often. The central figure in “One Night in Brazil” is a failed writer, but he has money enough to establish his own publishing firm, Myself Publications. In “The Manuscript,” love inspires an ex-actress to make hazardous wartime trips with the pages of her lover’s novel, but even she is surprised by her final disposition of the work.The other stories in Old Love include “The Bus,” “A Cage for Satan,” “Brother Beetle,” “Tanhum,” “A Party in Miami Beach,” “The Power of Darkness,” “Two,” “The Boy Knows the Truth,” “The Betrayer of Israel,” “Not for the Sabbath,” and “The Safe Deposit.” As Irving Howe has written, “Singer is a genius…He is original in his use both of the traditional Jewish materials and his modernist attitude toward them; he provides a serious if enigmatic moral perspective; and he writes…with a rhythmic and verbal brilliance that, to my knowledge, can hardly be matched.”
language: English
title: Old Love
titlecomplete: Old Love
genres: Jewish, Judaica, Poland, Nobel Prize, Short Stories, Fiction, Literature
ratings_count: 196
publisher: Farrar Straus & Giroux