"In the 25 years since [Stern] published his first book, younger Jewish writers have run with a similar shtick . . . But Stern was there first." —The Toronto Globe and MailT**he Book of Mischief triumphantly showcases twenty-five years of outstanding work by one of our true masters of the short story. Steve Stern's stories take us from the unlikely old Jewish quarter of the Pinch in Memphis to a turn-of-thecentury immigrant commun...

In the ruins of postwar Europe, the world's leading expert on the Kabbalah and Jewish mysticism goes on a hair-raising journey to recover sacred books stolen by the Nazis . . .At the end of the Second World War Gershom Scholem, the magisterial scholar of Jewish mysticism, is commissioned by the Hebrew University in what was then British-ruled Palestine to retrieve a lost world. He is sent to sift through the rubble of Europe in search of precious Jewish books stole...

Foxy Ladies is the story of Zoe Heller, a talented graphic designer who works her way up the ranks in the advertising department of a major Los Angeles department store in the 1970s. Foxy Ladies is the chronicle of a country emerging from the upheaval of the 1960s, with women, gays, and African-Americans creating a new American paradigm.

Here in a place dedicated to the manufacture of fear—a place that one ghoul of a Rebbe declared was located to the North of God, where his jurisdicition no longer held sway—Velvl found himself developing a certain resistance.Through numerous books and stories, Steve Stern has become known for his fantastical (and often wildly comic) stories based on yiddish folklore—Harold Bloom has called him "a throwback to the Yiddish sublime." But with this novella, Stern match...

A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2022"A frothy picaresque that ... vibrates to the “sweet celestial confusion” of Soutine’s painting: delirious and earthy, reverent and irreligious." -- The New York Times Book ReviewA wild, effervescent, absinthe-soaked novel that tells of the life of the extraordinary artist Chaim SoutineSteve Stern’s astonishing new novel The Village Idiot begins on a gl...

Award-winning novelist Steve Stern’s exhilarating epic recounts the story of how a nineteenth-century rabbi from a small Polish town ends up in a basement freezer in a suburban Memphis home at the end of the twentieth century. What happens when an impressionable teenage boy inadvertently thaws out the ancient man and brings him back to life is nothing short of miraculous.

A dazzling, spellbinding novel set in a mythical Jewish community by the acclaimed author of the New York Times Notable Book The Book of MischiefIt's the late 1960s. The Pinch, once a thriving Jewish community centered on North Main Street in Memphis, has been reduced to a single tenant. Lenny Sklarew awaits the draft by peddling drugs and shelving books—until he learns he is a character in a book about the rise and fall of this v...

Harry finds himself transplanted from staid and steady Brooklyn in the 1930s and discovers a world that eclipses anything that the Scarlet Pimpernel or Captain Horatio Hornblower could conjure before his inexperienced eyes. His life of excitement is predominantly lived between his ears.

Bichons Neiman and Marcus are a pair of lucky dogs. Their mom, Debbie, has just bought a fabulous home in Beverly Hills for them all to live in. But that's only the start of the adventure, because Neiman is set upon becoming Hollywood's newest star, with a role in the remake of the classic film,It's a Dog's Life. Will she achieve her dream? Not if the nefarious Madame Legrand and her pesky miniature poodle have anything to do with it.

It's the late 1960s. The Pinch, once a thriving Jewish community centered on North Main Street in Memphis, has been reduced to a single tenant. Lenny Sklarew awaits the draft by peddling drugs and shelving books - until he learns he is a character in a book about the rise and fall of this very Pinch. Muni Pinsker, who authored the book in an enchanted day containing years, arrived in the neighborhood at its height and was smitten by an alluring tightrope walker. Muni's own story is dovetai...

The most common phrase in print is "cover before striking," a warning to those about to innocently strike a match to be careful not to burn their fingers.Uppal's characters in Cover Before Striking are all people pushing their lives to new levels of intensity, danger, or passion as they test their limits and those of the world. The pyromaniac at the heart of the title story — winner of the Gloria Vanderbilt Short Fiction Prize — desperately uses fire to reconnect with lost...

A quartet of audacious fictions that capture the pathos and absurdity of life in the age of the internet*A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice** One of Flavorwire's "50 Books That Define the Past Five Years in Literature"A spectacularly talented young writer has returned from the present with Four New Messages, urgent and visionary dispatches that seek to save art, sex, and even alienation from corporatism a...