Hi,
I'll be reading in Brooklyn, at the Park Slope Barnes &
Noble Wednesday night. Please do come if you are about, and
please do pass this on.
See you, and thank you,
Oz
Brooklyn - Wed. 2 July, 7:30 pm
Barnes & Noble Park Slope
267 7th Avenue
for more information, phone: 718-832-9066
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New From City Lights Publishers
PICNIC GROUNDS
A Novel in Fragments
by Oz Shelach
Publication date: April 15, 2003
ISBN: 0-87286-419-7
Trade paperback original $11.95 112pp
for more information:
http://oznik.com/book/
book@oznik.com
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What people say of PICNIC GROUNDS:
SF Bay Guardian:
"Shelach's first novel, is rooted in Jewish and Arab
history, despite its nonlinear structure. The metaphor of
Jerusalem as picnic ground or campground firmly if subtly
underpins this indictment of Israel's historical myopia. As
a Jewish journalist born in West Jerusalem and now living in
New York City, Shelach is the ideal candidate for creating
such a bizarre and spooky montage of the Israel-Palestine
conflict. The deadpan grimness of his reportorial detachment
invites favorable comparison to writers like Viktor Pelevin
and Franz Kafka."
Counterpunch:
"Haunted by History... an enticing little book, that is both
luring and unsettling, but most of all helps one understand
some of the major undercurrents informing modern day Israeli
society and culture. It is a fascinating read"
Kirkus Reviews, March 2003:
"A school of minnow-sized tours de force, just morsels,
really, at times airy and light, at others leaving behind
the aftertaste of broken hearts."
full review (courtesy of Barnes & Noble):
St. Petersburg Times:
"Picnic Grounds is a forceful debut whose fragmentary form
lends it the feel of a scrapbook - Kodak moments from a
society with its guard down and its righteousness
momentarily disabled."
Haaretz:
"Shelach is a wonderful writer. There is no doubt that, from
his very first book, he has a great future ahead him. This
book should be read slowly in small sips, not gulped down,
like a very bitter drink (not an intoxicating one)... a
whole and complete world and without a personal, confident
voice, brilliant in the way that a definite artist is a
genius..."
Part reportage, part parable, part excavation of history,
this jigsaw puzzle of compelling tales constitutes an
exile's nostalgic tour into Israel's culture of denial.
Captivating in its beguiling, seeming simplicity, Picnic
Grounds is a novel built from the layers of overlapping
lives and stories, much like the villages and cities of
modern-day Israel are constructed from a culture
superimposed over the palimpsests of history. Landscape,
language, and the manufacture of knowledge are deconstructed
by a unique new voice, writing in a language that is not
quite English, from a life that is anything but
post-colonial.
Oz Shelach was born in West Jerusalem in 1968 and has been a
journalist and editor for Israeli radio and magazines. He
currently lives in New York.
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"Oz Shelach has managed, by pinpointing minutes, to evoke
hours, days, years, a whole history. The very pauses in his
extraordinary novel are filled with more width of
understanding, more depth of compassion than would be
possible in a book many times its length" -- David Plante
"Taking responsibility for the destruction of Palestine is a
pill still far too bitter for most Israelis to swallow.
Stepping outside of home and Hebrew, Oz Shelach takes us on
an eerie journey through the archaeology of complicity and
denial. Deeply personal, Pcnic Grounds is also a profoundly
political document that forces us to confront, as James
Baldwin put it, 'the price of the ticket,' the heavy debt a
state can exact from its people." -- Ammiel Alcalay
"There's something so captivating about these 'fragments,'
about their beguiling simplicity, about the things they so
eloquently withhold, something so pure and unpretentiously
fresh. Oz Shelach, in the first person plural, is probably
the most relentlessly restrained cartographer of the current
Israeli scene, and this novel is the most intricately subtle
commentary on that unsettled scene that I've read in years.
A stunning literary achievement." -- Anton Shammas
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