Where the Jackals Howl: And Other Stories

by Amos Oz and amos-oz

Book Overview

Amos Oz's first book--beautifully repackaged--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. Each conveys 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.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0547747187
• ISBN13: 9780547747187
• Release Date: August 2012
• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Length: 240 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.2" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

Doom and Enclosure

Here is a stunning collection of short fiction from Amos Oz. Like much contemporary Israeli fiction, it is infused with a sense of impending doom. Most of the stories take place in a world familiar to Oz in the early 1960s, the kibbutz. But there are surprises here too. The story A Strange Fire, a masterpiece of short fiction, is set in a middle class Israeli home, among the rising consumer class; Upon this Evil Earth, the last story in the collection, and the longest and least successful, is a type of midrash on the story of Jephthah. This story shows the appeal and distraction of Hebrew fiction: the pull of Biblical Hebrew, both enriching and entrapping. The story itself carries with it that sense of enclosure, as Jephthah is led to his terrible fate without recourse. In this collection of stories all of Oz's characters inhabit a world of exaggerated gesture and doomed outcome.