- Paperback: 240 pages
- Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks; Original edition (Feb 10 2009)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0812978978
- ISBN-13: 978-0812978971
- Product Dimensions: 13.1 x 1.6 x 20.1 cm
- Shipping Weight: 181 g
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #655,921 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Details |
Product Description
Review
“Echoes of Isaac Bashevis Singer, Sholom Aleichem and S.Y. Agnon sound throughout this high-concept collection’s engaging stories….Unusual and charming stories that successfully revive a nearly forgotten form of storytelling. One hopes we will hear more of these Lamedh-Vov and their all-too-human struggles and triumphs.” — Kirkus Reviews
“These charming stories, told with authority–yet oddly delicate and wholly delightful–are enchanting. To read them is to become transfixed with that long-forgotten childhood wonder. One feels in the hands of a masterful and magical storyteller.”
–Elizabeth Strout, author of Olive Kitteridge
“In his fantastic and fantastical collection, Jonathon Keats creates an original and captivating world of surprise where scoundrels are saints and dreams descend on villages like rain. There’s mystery and magic on every page, and a deeply inspiring humanity at the heart of every fable. Finally, a writer who understands that adults need fairy tales as much, if not more, than children.”—Bret Anthony Johnston, author of Corpus Christi: Stories, and director of the creative writing program at Harvard University
“The Book of the Unknown is based on ancient Jewish lore and set in pre-modern Eastern Europe. Add Jonathon Keats’ 21st-century American sensibility, and the result is a delightful and provocative brew–one of a kind.” —Janet Hadda, author of Isaac Bashevis Singer: A Life, and Professor of Yiddish Emerita at UCLA
"The Book of the Unknown earns Jonathon Keats a place in line with Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav and Isaac Bashevis Singer. In language at once phantasmagorical, seductive, and reverent, Keats imagines the preposterous misadventures of people who are so holy they are unknown even to themselves. And, in so doing, he reopens the Jewish folk imagination–and our own." —Lawrence Kushner, author of Kabbalah: A Love Story, and The Emanu-El Scholar at Congregation Emanu-El of San Francisco
“Keats’ world is a fun one. His allegorical world resembles some hybrid of Robin Hood’s Sherwood Forest and Shrek’s moss-covered environs.”--Booklist
“Keats seizes upon the idea of the 36 righteous ones who preserve the world from destruction by their goodness [and] brilliantly turns the concept on its head …Highly recommended.” –Library Journal, starred review
“These charming stories, told with authority–yet oddly delicate and wholly delightful–are enchanting. To read them is to become transfixed with that long-forgotten childhood wonder. One feels in the hands of a masterful and magical storyteller.”
–Elizabeth Strout, author of Olive Kitteridge
“In his fantastic and fantastical collection, Jonathon Keats creates an original and captivating world of surprise where scoundrels are saints and dreams descend on villages like rain. There’s mystery and magic on every page, and a deeply inspiring humanity at the heart of every fable. Finally, a writer who understands that adults need fairy tales as much, if not more, than children.”—Bret Anthony Johnston, author of Corpus Christi: Stories, and director of the creative writing program at Harvard University
“The Book of the Unknown is based on ancient Jewish lore and set in pre-modern Eastern Europe. Add Jonathon Keats’ 21st-century American sensibility, and the result is a delightful and provocative brew–one of a kind.” —Janet Hadda, author of Isaac Bashevis Singer: A Life, and Professor of Yiddish Emerita at UCLA
"The Book of the Unknown earns Jonathon Keats a place in line with Rabbi Nahman of Bratslav and Isaac Bashevis Singer. In language at once phantasmagorical, seductive, and reverent, Keats imagines the preposterous misadventures of people who are so holy they are unknown even to themselves. And, in so doing, he reopens the Jewish folk imagination–and our own." —Lawrence Kushner, author of Kabbalah: A Love Story, and The Emanu-El Scholar at Congregation Emanu-El of San Francisco
“Keats’ world is a fun one. His allegorical world resembles some hybrid of Robin Hood’s Sherwood Forest and Shrek’s moss-covered environs.”--Booklist
“Keats seizes upon the idea of the 36 righteous ones who preserve the world from destruction by their goodness [and] brilliantly turns the concept on its head …Highly recommended.” –Library Journal, starred review
Product Description
Marvelous and mystical stories of the thirty-six anonymous saints whose decency sustains the world–reimagined from Jewish folklore.
A liar, a cheat, a degenerate, and a whore. These are the last people one might expect to be virtuous. But a legendary Kabbalist has discovered the truth: they are just some of the thirty-six hidden ones, the righteous individuals who ultimately make the world a better place. In these captivating stories, we meet twelve of the secret benefactors, including a timekeeper’s son who shows a sleepless village the beauty of dreams; a gambler who teaches a king ruled by the tyranny of the past to roll the dice; a thief who realizes that his job is to keep his fellow townsfolk honest; and a golem–a woman made of mud–who teaches kings and peasants the real nature of humanity.
With boundless imagination and a delightful sense of humor, acclaimed writer and artist Jonathon Keats has turned the traditional folktale on its head, creating heroes from the unlikeliest of characters, and enchanting readers with these stunningly original fables.
A liar, a cheat, a degenerate, and a whore. These are the last people one might expect to be virtuous. But a legendary Kabbalist has discovered the truth: they are just some of the thirty-six hidden ones, the righteous individuals who ultimately make the world a better place. In these captivating stories, we meet twelve of the secret benefactors, including a timekeeper’s son who shows a sleepless village the beauty of dreams; a gambler who teaches a king ruled by the tyranny of the past to roll the dice; a thief who realizes that his job is to keep his fellow townsfolk honest; and a golem–a woman made of mud–who teaches kings and peasants the real nature of humanity.
With boundless imagination and a delightful sense of humor, acclaimed writer and artist Jonathon Keats has turned the traditional folktale on its head, creating heroes from the unlikeliest of characters, and enchanting readers with these stunningly original fables.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
4.4 out of 5 stars (49 customer reviews)
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A great book, Jan 23 2009
By Matthew Smith "Roger Mexico" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: The Book of the Unknown: Tales of the Thirty-six (Paperback)
Pre-release customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program
I would suggest making sure that when you start reading this book that you make sure you have plenty of time for it, because it is extremely hard to put this book down. This is the best work of fiction that I have read in a long time. I started the book yesterday and read straight through. It is really that good and that entertaining.
For such short stories the author has an amazing ability to pull the reader into the characters, and really makes the reader invest something in the story right from the beginning. This is what makes the stories so compelling, but it is the author's imagination and story telling that keeps you hooked and reading on.
Each story has the feel of a parable which was the author's intent, but the stories are not preachy. What I most enjoyed was how the author was able to employ such clever twists in the stories. At the beginning of each new story I would find myself wondering how the author is going to turn this character into a lesson. Just how was each story going to work to its unique conclusion was something I wondered with each new story.
This is just a wonderfully written book. I enjoyed every page of it, and I feel very comfortable highly recommending this excellent little book to everyone.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
luminous, Jan 21 2009
By Seven Kitties "7kitties" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: The Book of the Unknown: Tales of the Thirty-six (Paperback)
Pre-release customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program
These stories are like a rich chocolate dessert--you can't read the book fast. Every story deserves a full stop, a break, to enjoy. The stories themselves are lovely, floating in a fairy tale world of odd logics (a town that refuses to sleep, a city that Death didn't visit, etc) that serve as backdrops for the themes of each story.
Like fairy-tales, also, morality doesn't often figure into the equation, and characters are types used to illustrate the larger theme; but thankfully, in these stories there *is* a larger theme to each story (what it *is* is your job to puzzle out while you digest each story). This means that if you want mystery, action, thrills, etcetera, this book may not be to your taste.
I do wonder about the necessity of the fictional scholarly apparatus that bookend the stories: I'm most familiar with that mysterious-disappearance-but-left-text device from Lovecraftian horror tales, so it reads to this reader, at least, as a bit cheezy. Not sure what his purpose is--perhaps to create some sort of DaVinci code mystique? It does seek to elevate the tales from just a story-collection, but I'm honestly not sure that they need that kind of help.
Beautiful, haunting, lyrical. A must-read.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
12 Excellent Stories Drawn from Jewish Folklore, Jan 21 2009
By TammyJo Eckhart "TammyJo Eckhart" - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: The Book of the Unknown: Tales of the Thirty-six (Paperback)
Pre-release customer review from the Amazon Vine™ Program
Don't let the title mislead you, there are only 12 short stories here but these twelve are so well written, so engaging, and so enlightening that I devoured it in less than 24 hours. From the first page we are dropped into a fictional world where a Jewish scholar shares his latest find with us in the form of "real accounts" of the lives of the Lamedh-Vov who justify the existence of humanity in the mind of God. We meet 6 men and 6 women whose lives are both tragedy and victory as they merely live best they can, battered and bolstered by the world around them. Set in an unspecified but likely early modern Europe, we see them and feel for them as embody what might be called cultural icons. Love them or hate them, their tales touched me and made me keep reading and reading.
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