Alex Epstein (1) (1971–)
Author of Blue Has No South
For other authors named Alex Epstein, see the disambiguation page.
About the Author
Image credit: by Jorge Camarotti
Works by Alex Epstein
Associated Works
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Birthdate
- 1971
- Gender
- male
- Awards and honors
- "Israel Prime Minister's Prize for Literature (2003)"
- Short biography
- Alex Epstein was born in Leningrad (St. Petersburg) in 1971 and moved to Israel when he was eight years old. He is the author of four collections of short stories and three novels; his work has been translated into English, French, Spanish, Russian, Greek, Dutch, Croatian, and Italian. In 2003 he was awarded Israel’s Prime Minister’s Prize for Literature. In 2007 he participated in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa. In 2010 he was writer in residence at the University of Denver. He teaches creative writing in Tel Aviv.
- Nationality
- Israel (passport)
Russia (birth) - Birthplace
- St. Petersburg, Russia
- Places of residence
- Tel Aviv, Israel
- Map Location
- Israel
Members
Reviews
Translated from Hebrew by Becka Mara McKay
I can't decide if these are short stories, lyric essays, or poems. In any case, Epstein has compiled little moments of mystery and romance, history and humor, into this slim volume from Clockroot Books. There are no dramatic flares, and no heartbreaking losses. Instead, the situations and events he describes in these short pieces are simple, personal, and honest. There is emotion, but the quiet kind endured by quiet people, an emotion that reads far show more more realistic than some authors can describe effectively.
In "Memory Card":
"In the winter they buy a digital camera as a surprise for the grandchildren, but they don't know how to connect it to the computer they bought the year before....the old couple takes pictures of each other. In March the woman dies in her sleep. Her husband finds the instruction manual that came with the camera and reads about pixels, about digital zoom, and jpeg and avi files, and other strange, miraculous concepts. In May he finishes the instruction manual, and removes from the camera the 1-gigabyte memory card. He places it in his deceased wife's jewelry box and closes the lid." The picture he has created in so few words reveals the enthusiasm of this couple to share with their grandchildren, the shock of death, and the quiet picture of a man diligently trying to figure out how to save her face. That he doesn't wish to share this "memory card" illuminates how deep his feelings are. I could easily picture him in a chair, trying to decipher the jargon and afraid of messing something up and losing the photos forever. Epstein puts all that into a deceptively simple little paragraph.
In "Another Way Out", he tells another picturesque story.
"A king once imprisoned a poet in a cellar and demanded he find the most beautiful word in the world. This legend has infinite endings. In one, the poet dreamed he carved the word on the cellar's ceiling. When he awoke, he didn't remember it-only that it was written in the font now called FrankRuehl.* In another, the poet doesn't discover (even in a dream) a hint of the word. All he manages, completely by accident, is to invent the game of chess." It has a fairy tale quality, dungeon and all, but the revelation of finding the most complicated game, the game of kings, in a search for beauty, is somehow exactly right.
Alex Epstein breathes life into a variety of topics in this collection: cosmonauts, lost cell phones, dreams, and an escaped elephant heading to another zoo in search of lost love. They are quirky and youthful but lack the sarcasm and edginess that sometimes settles into modern verse. show less
I can't decide if these are short stories, lyric essays, or poems. In any case, Epstein has compiled little moments of mystery and romance, history and humor, into this slim volume from Clockroot Books. There are no dramatic flares, and no heartbreaking losses. Instead, the situations and events he describes in these short pieces are simple, personal, and honest. There is emotion, but the quiet kind endured by quiet people, an emotion that reads far show more more realistic than some authors can describe effectively.
In "Memory Card":
"In the winter they buy a digital camera as a surprise for the grandchildren, but they don't know how to connect it to the computer they bought the year before....the old couple takes pictures of each other. In March the woman dies in her sleep. Her husband finds the instruction manual that came with the camera and reads about pixels, about digital zoom, and jpeg and avi files, and other strange, miraculous concepts. In May he finishes the instruction manual, and removes from the camera the 1-gigabyte memory card. He places it in his deceased wife's jewelry box and closes the lid." The picture he has created in so few words reveals the enthusiasm of this couple to share with their grandchildren, the shock of death, and the quiet picture of a man diligently trying to figure out how to save her face. That he doesn't wish to share this "memory card" illuminates how deep his feelings are. I could easily picture him in a chair, trying to decipher the jargon and afraid of messing something up and losing the photos forever. Epstein puts all that into a deceptively simple little paragraph.
In "Another Way Out", he tells another picturesque story.
"A king once imprisoned a poet in a cellar and demanded he find the most beautiful word in the world. This legend has infinite endings. In one, the poet dreamed he carved the word on the cellar's ceiling. When he awoke, he didn't remember it-only that it was written in the font now called FrankRuehl.* In another, the poet doesn't discover (even in a dream) a hint of the word. All he manages, completely by accident, is to invent the game of chess." It has a fairy tale quality, dungeon and all, but the revelation of finding the most complicated game, the game of kings, in a search for beauty, is somehow exactly right.
Alex Epstein breathes life into a variety of topics in this collection: cosmonauts, lost cell phones, dreams, and an escaped elephant heading to another zoo in search of lost love. They are quirky and youthful but lack the sarcasm and edginess that sometimes settles into modern verse. show less
Massive temporal distance between the writing of this review and the moment I closed the last page. In short: masters studies and two jobs makes for a very busy Yair with little to no time for that oh so silly 'reading for fun' thing (I kid of course, it kind of keeps me alive sometimes).
But in all seriousness, I picked up this book from the CSUN student store (from another class' required reading list, hope the person who missed buying it didn't flunk...) and read it in sporadic bursts when show more time (and my mind) allowed. After finishing I began the writing of this review three different times. But for different reasons I was never able to finish or publish the review. Well, here we are and here I am again. At the moment of this writing I'm searching my mind for the visual metaphor I wanted to use for describing this novel/collection of short story-esque vignettes (more Etgar Keret than Raymond Carver, definitely) and the best I could come up with was a borrowed one from a post war American lit class and its instructor back in my BA days.
Said metaphor is simple: a moebius strip. Essentially, a somewhat un-even symbol mistaken by some for 'infinity'. The context (back in the class) was used to describe Barth's "Lost in the Funhouse" (I recall the author even included a cut out strip in his book, neat, right?) It represented less endlessness and eternity and more consistent renewal or, more accurately, consistent cycling back to the beginning after wider and more elaborate journeys outward. Not the best, probably, but the best I can come up with to conceptualize this book.
It's not a mind shattering work. In fact, the book is actually simple, refreshingly so. Epstein is a master of brevity (duh) but is conversely very capable of saying a lot using very little (would be Saul Bellows take note, do more of this technique, please!) And the repeated motifs running through the stories are similarly postmodern but without the American and maybe Continental angst/baggage of Western postmodernism. Time travel, Zen, and many other things coalesce with ease and there's a soft eye one could liken to an eventual sage that heightens the simplicity of the mode of storytelling to near (at times) parable status. I can only imagine what it all reads like in the original Hebrew (I'll find out some day...)
Overall, a fascinating postmodern detour from a writer whose future work I'm already beginning to prepare myself for mentally by, hopefully, deepening the breadth and depth of my perceptions. A definite should read.
(As a side note, one galling piece of this work was Epstein's 'take' on Franz Kafka had he migrated to Israel in the early years of the state....ehhhhhh, no. Sorry, but that story did not ring true at all. What is it with Israeli writers trying to sentimentalize and 'rescue' Kafka? I'm looking at you AB Yehoshua you pseudo pugnacious little twerp.) show less
But in all seriousness, I picked up this book from the CSUN student store (from another class' required reading list, hope the person who missed buying it didn't flunk...) and read it in sporadic bursts when show more time (and my mind) allowed. After finishing I began the writing of this review three different times. But for different reasons I was never able to finish or publish the review. Well, here we are and here I am again. At the moment of this writing I'm searching my mind for the visual metaphor I wanted to use for describing this novel/collection of short story-esque vignettes (more Etgar Keret than Raymond Carver, definitely) and the best I could come up with was a borrowed one from a post war American lit class and its instructor back in my BA days.
Said metaphor is simple: a moebius strip. Essentially, a somewhat un-even symbol mistaken by some for 'infinity'. The context (back in the class) was used to describe Barth's "Lost in the Funhouse" (I recall the author even included a cut out strip in his book, neat, right?) It represented less endlessness and eternity and more consistent renewal or, more accurately, consistent cycling back to the beginning after wider and more elaborate journeys outward. Not the best, probably, but the best I can come up with to conceptualize this book.
It's not a mind shattering work. In fact, the book is actually simple, refreshingly so. Epstein is a master of brevity (duh) but is conversely very capable of saying a lot using very little (would be Saul Bellows take note, do more of this technique, please!) And the repeated motifs running through the stories are similarly postmodern but without the American and maybe Continental angst/baggage of Western postmodernism. Time travel, Zen, and many other things coalesce with ease and there's a soft eye one could liken to an eventual sage that heightens the simplicity of the mode of storytelling to near (at times) parable status. I can only imagine what it all reads like in the original Hebrew (I'll find out some day...)
Overall, a fascinating postmodern detour from a writer whose future work I'm already beginning to prepare myself for mentally by, hopefully, deepening the breadth and depth of my perceptions. A definite should read.
(As a side note, one galling piece of this work was Epstein's 'take' on Franz Kafka had he migrated to Israel in the early years of the state....ehhhhhh, no. Sorry, but that story did not ring true at all. What is it with Israeli writers trying to sentimentalize and 'rescue' Kafka? I'm looking at you AB Yehoshua you pseudo pugnacious little twerp.) show less
A collection of poetic flash fiction stories and musings that sometimes hit home and sometimes seem too quirky to know what they are supposed to be. I'm not a huge reader of poetry, so most of the "stories" that were poems in prose format didn't really work for me, but the more straight-forward flash fiction, especially the more surreal pieces, was very engaging. The span of Epstein's stories is vast, covering biblical mythology, Homerian legend, Kafkaesque nightmares, the Israeli situation, show more bookstores, angels, lovers, and many other topics. The imagination is there, for sure, but I may have been spoiled by "that other" Israeli flash fiction writer (yes, I mean Keret) and so can't help but find Epstein's work, technically great though it is, a little too literary to truly touch the soul. show less
Alex Epstein is an Israeli who emigrated from Russia as a child, and who writes in Hebrew. He is known as a master of the miniature story and was the 2003 recipient of Israel’s Prime Minister’s Prize for Literature. blue has no south is a slim volume of 131 short-short stories, ranging in length from a few sentences to a few pages, with most just a paragraph or two.
Some of Epstein’s miniature creations are stories with glimpses of protagonists and plot. Others seem more accurately show more described as prose poems, being simply moments or thoughts, captured in a photograph of words. Epstein’s pieces address a diversity of subjects, with common themes including the myths of Odysseus, Penelope, Theseus and Sisyphus converted to modern settings, Kafka and Jung, time machines and time travel, chess, suicide and earth-bound angels with broken wings.
I picked this volume off the shelves at the library out of curiosity regarding the short-short story genre and ended up basically enjoying this quirky little book. Epstein clearly has a talent for creating a mental image that tells a story in just a few lines. Where his effort fell somewhat short for me, however, was in the failure of many of the stories to elicit an emotional connection, although several, such as “The Chase”, did leave me feeling disturbed. The following are a few examples from Epstein’s shorter pieces.
Some of Epstein’s miniature creations are stories with glimpses of protagonists and plot. Others seem more accurately show more described as prose poems, being simply moments or thoughts, captured in a photograph of words. Epstein’s pieces address a diversity of subjects, with common themes including the myths of Odysseus, Penelope, Theseus and Sisyphus converted to modern settings, Kafka and Jung, time machines and time travel, chess, suicide and earth-bound angels with broken wings.
I picked this volume off the shelves at the library out of curiosity regarding the short-short story genre and ended up basically enjoying this quirky little book. Epstein clearly has a talent for creating a mental image that tells a story in just a few lines. Where his effort fell somewhat short for me, however, was in the failure of many of the stories to elicit an emotional connection, although several, such as “The Chase”, did leave me feeling disturbed. The following are a few examples from Epstein’s shorter pieces.
“A Wayward Text Message”show less
From time to time, even though all the batteries were supposed to be sent to another warehouse, a short tune bursts from one of the phones in the used cell phone warehouse. The sleepy guard locates the defiant device and erases another love message that will go unclaimed.
“The Crippled Angel”
The crippled angel sat in a wheelchair especially designed for winged creatures of his kind and chain-smoked. From his usual spot in the plaza in front of the museum he observed with concern those coming in. He tried to guess which of them intended to hang himself in one of the exhibition halls.
“Gloss”
Their love story ended many years ago. He still writes her name as a solution to crossword puzzle clues of suitable length. Two words: four letters and five letters. Once, at a bus stop, he thinks he recognizes her waiting for a bus across the street. His hand trembles when he takes his new book of crossword puzzles from his bag. He opens it to the first one and quickly finds a suitable clue. Even afterward, on the bus, the trembling in his hand does not stop. The tip of the pencil breaks against the bright paper.
“The Chase”
On one of the previous mornings, soaked to the bone, we saw a tall, stooping angel dragging his wings in the mud. From time to time he stopped, wiping the sweat from his forehead with the back of his hand and spitting to the side. We fired on him but he didn’t fall. Not one of us remembers exactly when this chase began (in the newspapers piling up in the roadhouses, it is written that this was already the tenth year). And also today, according to the clouds bursting with gray in the heavens, it’s about to rain. The tracker stops suddenly, pointing at the footprints on the ground. “Now,” he remarks in amazement, “now we are chasing after a blind man with a stick.” We pick up the pace.
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