Böcker av Yoel Hoffmann

The Christ of Fish is a gorgeous novel conjured out of a mosaic of 233 pieces of Aunt Magda's life in Tel Aviv. Originally from Vienna, Hoffmann's heroine is a widow who still speaks German after decades in Israel: we see many views of Aunt Magdaher childhood, her marriage, her nephew, her best friend Frau Stier, Wildegans' poetry, apple strudel, visions and dreams, two stolen handbags, a favorite cafe, and a gentleman admirer.

Set in today's Haifa and presented in 237 dream-like small chapters, it is a book in which shyness and stumbling tenderness emerge triumphant. Poet Peter Cole has made a beautiful translation, capturing Hoffmann's intense and unfathomably original style. A starred Kirkus Review acclaimed the novel "Beautiful, humane, priceless."

Part novel and part memoir, Yoel Hoffmann's Moods is flooded with feelings, evoked by his family, losses, loves, the soul's hidden powers, old phone books, and life in the Galilee-with its every scent, breeze, notable dog, and odd neighbor. Carrying these shards is a general tenderness, accentuated by a new dimension brought along by "that great big pill of Prozac."Beautifully translated by Peter Cole, Moods is fiction for lovers of poetry and poetry for lovers of fiction-a small marvel of a book, and with its pockets of joy, a curiously cheerful book by an author who once compared himself to "a praying mantis inclined to melancholy."

In kaleidoscopic fragments, Hoffmann refracts Jewish popular lore and folk wisdom through a postmodernist prism, brightening his prose with snatches of verse, songs, diary excerpts, letters, ominous dreams, lush erotic passages and Yiddish sayings. "The Book of Joseph" tells the tragic story of a widowed Jewish tailor and his son in 1930s Berlin. "Katschen" gives an astounding child's-eye view of a boy orphaned in the new state of Israel. The novellas radiate the original poetry of Hoffmann's atomized hypnotic language, which Rosmarie Waldrop has called "utterly enchanting-it's like nothing else."