On Sale: Sep 7, 2010
Page Count: 272 pages
Publisher: Algonquin Books
ISBN-13: 9781616200275

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A magical realist novel about a Jewish man murdered during the Holocaust who returns as a wandering spirit, exploring the horrors of genocide, the resilience of the human spirit, and the enduring power of faith, memory, and hope.

At the center of A Blessing on the Moon is Chaim Skibelski. Death is merely the beginning of Chaim’s troubles. In the opening pages, he is shot along with the other Jews of his small Polish village. But instead of resting peacefully in the World to Come, Chaim, for reasons unclear to him, is left to wander the earth, accompanied by his rabbi, who has taken the form of a talking crow. Chaim’s afterlife journey is filled with extraordinary encounters whose consequences are far greater than he realizes.

Through magical realism, dark humor, and Jewish folklore, Skibell explores the horrors of the Holocaust and the struggle to find meaning amid unimaginable suffering. The novel reflects on memory, faith, survival, and the possibility of hope and spiritual renewal even in the face of profound evil. Not since art Spiegelman’s Maus has a work so powerfully evoked one of the darkest moments of the twentieth century with such daring originality.

Winner of the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts & Letters

Turner Prize for First Fiction from the Texas Institute of Letters

A Book of the Month Club selection

Stephen Crane First Fiction Award shortlist

A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year

A Bookriot “100 Must-Read Books of Jewish Fiction” selection

Genre:

Fiction General

Possessing “a gifted, committed imagination” (New York Times), Joseph Skibell is the author of three novels, A Blessing on the Moon, The English Disease, and A Curable Romantic; the forthcoming collection of nonfiction stories My Father’s Guitar and Other Imaginary Things; and another forthcoming nonfiction work, Six Memos from the Last Millennium: A Novelist Reads the Talmud. He has received numerous awards, including the Rosenthal Foundation Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, the Sami Rohr Award in Jewish Literature, Story magazine’s Short Short-Story Prize, and the Turner Prize for First Fiction.

As director of the Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature from 2008 to 2015, he sang and played guitar onstage with both Margaret Atwood and Paul Simon. A professor at Emory University, Skibell has also taught at the University of Wisconsin and the Michener Center for Writers at the University of Texas. Recently a Senior Fellow at the Bill and Carol Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry, he is the Winship Distinguished Research Professor in the Humanities at Emory University. A native Texan, he lives mostly in his head.

“A compelling tour de force, a surreal but thoroughly accessible page-turner.”

Houston Chronicle
“Brilliant . . . Astonishing.”

The Boston Globe
“As mesmerizing as a folk tale, as rich as gold itself.”

The Denver Post
“As magical as it is macabre.”

The New Yorker
“Startlingly original . . . Recalls the dark, hallucinatory world of Jerzy Kosinski’s The Painted Bird while at the same time surpassing it.”

The Washington Post
“Dignified, elegant, and inventive.”
Time Out New York
“A fine debut, manifestly infused with deep familial and cultural feeling, and a significant contribution to the ongoing literature of the Holocaust.”
Kirkus (starred review)
“Utterly different and surreal, this first novel takes an original approach to the Holocaust and leaves a lasting impression.”
Library Journal (starred review)
“A major talent is revealed in this debut novel . . . A story that beguiles even as it breaks your heart.”
Publishers Weekly (starred review)