Picnic Grounds: A Novel in Fragments
" ...at times airy and light, at others leaving behind the aftertaste of broken hearts." --Kirkus Reviews, March 2003"A spare and perfectly painful little book, Oz Shelach's Picnic Grounds sketches an Israel that you won't see on the news.... With ruthless precision, Shelach's novel plots the terrain of complicity, denial, and shared, unspoken culpability that Israel has crafted for itself over the last half-century." – The Village Voice --Review"A spare and perfectly painful little book,... Shelach's Picnic Grounds sketches an Israel that you won't see on the news" --Village Voice"An intriguing debut from a brave new voice in Israeli fiction."  --Planet Magazine"Shelach... critiqu[es] Middle East politics through the creative fuzz of metaphor and suggestion" --San Francisco Bay Guardian"The novel, Shelach's first, is set in an Israel at once familiar, yet utterly alien." --Forward Magazine...a forceful debut whose fragmentary form lends it the feel of a scrapbook --Philip Herter, St. Petersburg Times, April 2003...a mosaic of parable-like reportage, remaindered memories, and demotic prose poems...[Shelach's] metaphors unfold with an unsettling emotional restraint --The Village Voice, July 2003Shelach's prose has an elegant precision borne of his journalistic activities.... [his] ironic understatement provides an eloquent indictment... --San Francisco Bay Guardian, April 30th, 2003a wonderful writer. There is no doubt that, from his very first book, [Shelach] has a great future ahead him. --Ha'aretz, May 16 2003, by Yitzhak Laor