Collected stories: Gimpel the fool to The letter writer: Gimpel the fool & other stories, The Spinoza of Market Street, Short Friday & other stories, The séance & other stories

Presents A Collection Of Short Stories, Including Brother Beetle And The Jew From Babylon Along With Ten Previously Unpublished Stories. Old Love (1979): -- 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 (1982): -- A Night In The Poorhouse -- Escape From Civilization -- Vanvild Kava -- The Reencounter -- Moon And Madness -- The Image And Other Stories (1985): -- Advice -- One Day Of Happiness -- The Bond -- The Interview -- The Divorce -- Strong As Death Is Love -- Why Heisherik 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 (1985): -- The Trap -- The Smuggler -- Gifts -- From The Death Of Methuselah And Other Stories (1988): -- 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 Building Project -- The Painting -- Morris And Timna -- Two -- Eulogy To A Shoelace. Isaac Bashevis Singer. Ilan Stavans Is The Editor Of This Volume--page After T.p. Verso. Includes Bibliographical References.

To mark the centenary of the birth of Isaac Bashevis Singer, the sole Yiddish writer to be awarded the Nobel Prize and one of the most influential and beloved Jewish-American authors, The Library of America presents Collected Stories: Gimpel the Fool to The Letter Writer, one of three volumes celebrating Singer's achievement as a master storyteller. Among the 54 works gathered in this collection, which brings together the first four English-language volumes of Singer's stories, is his enduring parable of probity and goodness, "Gimpel the Fool," as well as the disturbing supernatural tales that explore irrational undercurrents of human personality and collective life. Also included are several stories later adapted for the stage and screen, such as "Yentl the Yeshiva Boy," "Taibele and Her Demon," and "The Mirror." "Singer casts a spell," writes Joyce Carol Oates. "Open one of his books anywhere, the words leap out with a power that would seem to us demonic if it were not, at the very same time, so utterly plausible."

The New York Times - William Deresiewicz

The sheer abundance of [Singer's] production, along with that famous interest in sex, suggests a Jewish Boccaccio, and Singer is indeed Boccaccian in his exuberance, facility and invention. Rejecting modernism with its deliberate difficulties and programmatic experimentation, he remained faithful to the older pleasures of character and plot. Singer can get a story going in no time flat, conjure characters so vivid you feel as if they're sitting next to you, pour forth an endless supply of situations and surprises. Some of his stories are mere trifles (the third volume in particular contains a fair number of throwaways), but many more are enigmatic or mordant or sly, hauntingly strange or piercingly sad.

To mark the centennial of the birth of Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Library of America presents Collected Stories, a major celebration of Singer's achievement. Beginning with Gimpel the Fool, whose title story brought Singer to sudden prominence in America when translated 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, revising as he worked. In addition, Collected Stories includes previously uncollected or unpublished stories from his manuscripts in the Ransom Center collections, providing a rare glimpse into the workshop of a literary genius. Here are nearly 200 stories--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 a traditional culture that perished at the hands of the Nazis during the Second World War, and his haunting stories testify to the richness of that vanished world. Singer's Old World tales reveal a wild, mischievous, often disturbing supernaturalism evocative of local storytelling traditions. After his immigration to America, Singer's stories increasingly explore the daily lived reality and imaginative boundaries of Jewish culture as it was transplanted to the United States, revealing him to be the emblematic immigrant American writer, a writer whose vision and insights enlarged our idea of what it is to be an American.

Isaac Bashevis Singer once claimed that he preferred writing stories to novels because the short-story form brought perfection within reach. The 65 stories gathered here show Singer striving for and often achieving such perfection, crafting tales that fuse crystalline storytelling with an unnerving exploration of erotic passion and irrational desire, family life and religious piety, and fundamental emotions such as shame, lust, anger, pride, and tenderness. Also on display in stories such as A Friend of Kafka and The Adventure is Singer's shrewd gift as a comic writer, evoking the Jewish milieu in New York and in Warsaw between the wars with a blend of affection and satire. His driven, mercurial processions of predicaments and transmogrifications are limitless, Cynthia Ozick writes, a cornucopia of invention.

The New York Times - William Deresiewicz

The sheer abundance of [Singer's] production, along with that famous interest in sex, suggests a Jewish Boccaccio, and Singer is indeed Boccaccian in his exuberance, facility and invention. Rejecting modernism with its deliberate difficulties and programmatic experimentation, he remained faithful to the older pleasures of character and plot. Singer can get a story going in no time flat, conjure characters so vivid you feel as if they're sitting next to you, pour forth an endless supply of situations and surprises. Some of his stories are mere trifles (the third volume in particular contains a fair number of throwaways), but many more are enigmatic or mordant or sly, hauntingly strange or piercingly sad.

In the wake of his receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1978, Isaac Bashevis Singer published several volumes of short stories in collections that mingled recent work with previously untranslated stories written in Yiddish decades earlier. Stretching back to The Jew from Babylon, a story first published in Yiddish in 1932, and gathering tales such as Brother Beetle and There Are No Coincidences from the 1960s, the works in Collected Stories: One Night in Brazil to The Death of Methuselah serve as a retrospective view of Singers achievement as a storyteller. Collected Stories: One Night in Brazil to The Death of Methuselah also contains ten stories published in English translation for the first time, selected from the extensive collection of Singers papers at the University of Texas. Ranging from Between Shadows, an evocative, naturalistic sketch set in Warsaw, to the bittersweet melodrama Morris and Timna, to the beguiling fable Hershele and Hanele, or The Power of a Dream, these stories enrich our understanding of Singer as a writer. The volume also includes The Bird, My Adventures as an Idealist, and Exes, stories published in magazines that were not included in any of Singers collections. Complementing the 78 stories gathered here is the introduction to Gifts (1985), a version of a lecture Singer had delivered since the early 1960s sometimes called Why I Write as I Do, which illuminates his biography, philosophical outlook, and literary aims. A friend of Kafka and other stories (1970). -- 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 (1973). -- 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 (1975). 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. Isaac Bashevis Singer loved to give interviews. He was famous for encouraging interruptions of the solitary task of writing. These twenty-four welcomed interruptions are representative of the many he allowed over a twenty-five-year period. Included here are his conversations with such interviewers as Irving Howe, Laurie Colwin, Richard Burgin, and Herbert R. Lottman. In these talks Singer discusses the nature of his writing, its ethnic roots, his demonology, the importance of free will, and the place of storytelling in human life. The interviews with Singer reveal both his impish sense of humor and a determination that sustained him through many years of limited acclaim and comparative neglect by critics. Yiddishists often faulted him for refusing to use his talent as a force for change in the world, Jewish readers often deplored his use of pre-Enlightenment folk material, and academics could not take too seriously a writer who insisted on telling stories that emphasized plot and character. Yet he was not deterred from his astonishing and beloved work, for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize. Presents a collection of fifty-four short stories, including "Gimpel the Fool," "Yentl the Yeshiva Boy," and "The Mirror."