Katschen & The Book of Joseph

Reviews

"Magnificent. Dreamlike and powerful. These are both astonishingly fine works." — Cooper Renner, elimae

"[N]ew beginnings awaken Hoffmann's characters to foreign, often spectacular landscapes, and the author's prose ... insures the reader an equally enlightening experience." — The New Yorker

"Israel's celebrated avant-garde genius-in English at last." — Forward

"Like other Israeli novelists of his era, Hoffmann faces the challenge of voicing the unspeakable. He has a Mozartean sense of the emotional interplay of light and shadow, and in his close stitchery of everyday life and mythical experience, his many-colored Joseph's dreamcoat is seamless." — Boston Globe

"Reading Hoffmann's subtle prose is like viewing the same universe, alternately and with the most skillful modulations, through a telescope and a microscope, only to find out, in awe, that the astral view and the infinitesimal view are actually one and the same." — Amos Oz

"The stunning American debut of Romanian-born Israeli author Yoel Hoffmann." — The New Leader

"These two novellas, Yoel Hoffman's English-language debut, deliver a cache of themes particular to post modern Israeli literature, all the while paying homage to Yiddish folklore and Jewish mysticism." — Atlanta Jewish Times

"Unadulterated, cerebral and exquisitely phrased (most remarkably in this English translation), Hoffmann's writing pretends to nothing but what it achieves: a meditative journey through the mind, heart and history, the scope of which is so gratifying, so stimulating, so difficult to describe." — Bomb

"Yoel Hoffmann's prose has a poetic quality, full of imagery and symbolism.... Hoffmann skillfully views life through the eyes of a confused and innocent young boy who possesses a vivid imagination and never loses hope regardless of his misfortunes." — World Literature Today