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Isaac Bashevis Singer: The Collected Stories (3-volume boxed set)

Edited by Ilan Stavans

“It’s remarkable how naturally Singer fits into the American literary tradition.”— The New Yorker

Overview
Table of Contents

Overview

Influences Musharraf Ali Farooqi: Isaac Bashevis Singer’s world is my own
April 23, 2018

First published ten years ago to mark the centennial of the birth of Isaac Bashevis Singer, one of ten American writers to be awarded the Nobel Prize and perhaps the most influential and beloved Jewish American author, Isaac Bashevis Singer: The Collected Stories is now reissued in a deluxe boxed set. Beginning with “Gimpel the Fool,” whose title story brought Singer to prominence in America when translated from Yiddish by Saul Bellow in 1953, and concluding with The Death of Methuselah, the collection published three years before his death in 1991, this three-volume edition brings together for the first time all the story collections Singer published in English in the versions he called his “second originals”—translations he supervised and collaborated on himself, revising as he worked. In addition, Collected Stories includes thirteen previously uncollected stories from the Ransom Center archives.

Here are nearly 200 stories in all—the full range of Singer’s vision encompassing Old World shtetl and New World exile. Born in Poland in 1904 into a family of rabbis, Singer was raised in the traditional culture that was to be annihilated during World War II, and his haunting stories testify to the richness of that vanished world. Singer’s Old World stories reveal a wild, mischievous, often disturbing supernaturalism evocative of both local storytelling traditions and dark undercurrents born of Singer’s own concerns and obsessions.

As a special feature, the boxed set also includes Isaac Bashevis Singer: An Album, a compact illustrated paperback biography with appreciations of and anecdotes about Singer from some of today’s leading writers, including Cynthia Ozick, Jonathan Safran Foer, Francine Prose, Nicholas Dawidoff, and Joyce Carol Oates, among others.

Ilan Stavans, volume editor, is Lewis-Sebring Professor in Latin American and Latino Culture at Amherst College. He is the author of Spanglish: The Making of a New American Language and the editor of The Poetry of Pablo Neruda and The Oxford Book of Jewish Stories.

Audio: Listen to a 2004 panel discussion, “The Imaginary World of Isaac Bashevis Singer,” featuring Ilan Stavans, editor of LOA’s Singer edition, and Library of America Publisher Max Rudin (1 hr., 9 min.).

Each Library of America series volume is printed on acid-free paper and features Smyth-sewn binding, a full cloth cover, and a ribbon marker.

Project support for Collected Stories: A Friend of Kafka to Passions was provided by Judy and Michael Steinhardt.
Table of Contents

Gimpel the Fool and Other Stories
Gimpel the Fool
The Gentleman from Cracow
The Wife Killer
By the Light of Memorial Candles
The Mirror
The Little Shoemakers
Joy
From the Diary of One Not Born
The Old Man
Fire
The Unseen

The Spinoza of Market Street
The Spinoza of Market Street
The Black Wedding
A Tale of Two Liars
The Shadow of a Crib
Shiddah and Kuziba
Caricature
The Beggar Said So
The Man Who Came Back
A Piece of Advice
In the Poorhouse
The Destruction of Kreshev

Short Friday and Other Stories
Taibele and Her Demon
Big and Little
Blood
Alone
Esther Kreindel the Second
Jachid and Jechidah
Under the Knife
The Fast
The Last Demon
Yentl the Yeshiva Boy
Three Tales
Zeidlus the Pope
A Wedding in Brownsville
I Place My Reliance on No Man
Cunegunde
Short Friday

The Séance and Other Stories
The Séance
The Slaughterer
The Dead Fiddler
The Lecture
Cockadoodledoo
The Plagiarist
Zeitl and Rickel
The Warehouse
Henne Fire
Getzel the Monkey
Yanda
The Needle
Two Corpses Go Dancing
The Parrot
The Brooch
The Letter Writer

A Friend of Kafka and Other Stories
A Friend of Kafka
Guests on a Winter Night
The Key
Dr. Beeber
Stories from Behind the Stove
The Cafeteria
The Mentor
Pigeons
The Chimney Sweep
The Riddle
Altele
The Joke
The Primper
Schloimele
The Colony
The Blasphemer
The Wager
The Son
Fate
Powers
Something Is There

A Crown of Feathers and Other Stories
A Crown of Feathers
A Day in Coney Island
The Captive
The Blizzard
Property
The Lantuch
The Son from America
The Briefcase
The Cabalist of East Broadway
The Bishop’s Robe
A Quotation from Klopstock
The Magazine
Lost
The Prodigy
The Third One
The Recluse
A Dance and a Hop
Her Son
The Egotist
The Beard
The Dance
On a Wagon
Neighbors
Grandfather and Grandson

Passions and Other Stories
Hanka
Old Love
Errors
The Admirer
Sabbath in Portugal
The Yearning Heifer
The Witch
Sam Palka and David Vishkover
A Tutor in the Village
The New Year Party
A Tale of Two Sisters
A Pair
The Fatalist
Two Markets
The Gravedigger
The Sorcerer
Moishele
Three Encounters
The Adventure
Passions

Old Love
One Night in Brazil
Yochna and Shmelke
Two
The Psychic Journey
Elka and Meier
A Party in Miami Beach
Two Weddings and One Divorce
A Cage for Satan
Brother Beetle
The Boy Knows the Truth
There Are No Coincidences
Not for the Sabbath
The Safe Deposit
The Betrayer of Israel
Tanhum
The Manuscript
The Power of Darkness
The Bus

from The Collected Stories
Author’s Note
A Night in the Poorhouse
Escape from Civilization
Vanvild Cava
The Reencounter
Moon and Madness

The Image and Other Stories
Advice
One Day of Happiness
The Bond
The Interview
The Divorce
Strong as Death is Love
Why Heisherick Was Born
The Enemy
Remnants
On the Way to the Poorhouse
Loshikl
The Pocket Remembered
The Secret
A Nest Egg for Paradise
The Conference
Miracles
The Litigants
A Telephone Call on Yom Kippur
Strangers
The Mistake
Confused
The Image

from Gifts
Author’s Introduction
The Trap
The Smuggler
Gifts

from The Death of Methuselah and Other Stories
The Jew from Babylon
The House Friend
Burial at Sea
The Recluse
Disguised
The Accuser and the Accused
A Peephole in the Gate
The Bitter Truth
The Impresario
Logarithms
Runners to Nowhere
The Missing Line
The Hotel
Dazzled
Sabbath in Gehenna
The Last Gaze
The Death of Methuselah

Uncollected Stories
The Bird
My Adventures as an Idealist
Exes
Between Shadows
Hershele and Hanele, or the Power of a Dream
Pity
The Angry Man
The Mathematician
The Painting
The Building Project
Morris and Timna
Two
Eulogy to a Shoelace

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ISBN: 9781598534559 2500 pages

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