Joseph Skibell

We welcome two authors with fascinating new novels. Mary Helen Stefaniak is a Gardner Fiction Book Award winner and author of three novels, whose latest is The Califfs of Baghdad, Georgia, a wonderfully seductive story that ranges from 1864 Savannah to 1775 Baghdad. Loosely following A Thousand ... (more)and One Nights, it is a spirited romp that connects camels fluent in Arabic with the Ku Klux Klan and babies switched at birth. Joseph Skibell’s novel A Curable Romantic is a ”fat, cheeky, sweeping saga” that begins in 1895 Austria. Critics call it ”intellectual comedy of the highest order.” Skibell’s previous novels include A Blessing on the Moon and The English Disease.

As far as romance goes, Dr. Jakob Sammelsohn is fairly incurable. Twice married, once divorced, once widowed, he flees his small village and his pious father all by the age of twelve. Young Dr. Sammelsohn is a lovelorn Candide wandering optimistically through modern history. Along the way, the amorous ... (more)ghost of his wife—whom he abandoned on their wedding day—pursues and haunts him. A Curable Romantic is a novel of personal and historical exile that is often fantastical yet always grounded in tradition and history. Joseph Skibell is the author of A Blessing on the Moon. He teaches at Emory University and is the director of the Richard Ellmann Lectures in Modern Literature.