Weinstock Among the Dying

by Michael Blumenthal

Overview

Fiction. Jewish Studies. This Michael Blumenthal novel was chosen by Elie Wiesel, Thomas Kenneally, and Merrill Joan Gerber as winner of Hadassah Magazine's prestigious Ribelow Prize as Best Jewish Novel of the Year in 1994. In its all-too-short lifespan, it received rave reviews from Kirkus and Publisher's Weekly and glowing tributes from such writers as Lorrie Moore, Tim O'Brien, Jhumpa Lahiri, Robert Coles, and Leslie Epstein. Unfortunately, just three months after the novel's publication, its publisher, Zoland Books, was forced to close for economic reasons, and this brilliant novel by one of America's finest poets hardly even saw the light of day. It is now available for the first time in paperback allowing it a second—really a first—life. Once you read it, I am sure you will agree that it more than deserves the kind of critical and popular attention which—due to the unfortunate circumstances that befell its original publisher—it never received.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781929355433
Publisher:	Pleasure Boat Studio: A Literary Press
Publication date:	03/01/2008
Pages:	306
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.73(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Michael Blumenthal holds the Darden Distinguished Endowed Chair in Creative Writing at Old Dominion University. He is author of Dusty Angel (BOA, 1999), which won the Isabella Gardner Poetry Award, as well as four other poetry books, one novel, one memoir, an essay collection, and translations of poems by Peter Kantor. Publications include The New Yorker, and Paris Review.

Editorial Reviews

The satire of academia in Weinstock Among the Dying succeeds in the hilarious footsteps of Nabokov's Pnin. In the end, however, wit and cynicism join hands with grief and growth, and enable Weinstock to bury his despair. His journey toward emotional fulfillment was a pleasure to follow for this reader. In turns humorous and sad, but consistently engaging, Blumenthal has written an eloquent, compelling, richly textured first novel.
—Jhumpa Lahiri

Harvard Review

Michael Blumenthal's Weinstock Among the Dying, is a glorious home run, gratifying on several levels. It's a funny, satirical story of a young guy grappling with the Harvard mystique - a writer smart enough to get into Harvard and teach but seemingly not smart enough to get out. . . . Weinstock has already been compared to the work of Philip Roth, but Blumenthal's playful, witty, effortless prose has none of the heavy, Nixonlike smugness of Roth. WATD ranks in the A-category of sophisticated first novels.
—Steve Kykes

Boston Herald

The best of Weinstock is a devastating, idiosyncratic satire of Harvard, where Blumenthal formerly served as director of creative writing, the very post occupied by Weinstock. Mercilessly he bangs away at the pretensions of academe. . . . Blumenthal's Harvard is "the only place in America where you have to study for dinner," a temple of "Best-0in-the-World" elitism that Jewish faculty - even if their Jewishness is considered "an ugly blemish on the smooth, homogenizing hide of intellectual achievement - would never dream of leaving, for it is their "one chance in life to become the thing every Jew, deep in his heart of hearts most wants to be . . . The Great Goldberg. . . . Blumenthal insists that Harvard is no more nor less than "a dusty archival tomb, in which the collected letters, papers, manuscripts and miseries of the dead were far more significant than the real, passionate, life-giving triumphs and tribulations of the living.
—Stuart Schoffman

The Jerusalem Report

The book sports some of the broadest satire I've ever read of academic existence - Blumenthal would never stoop to calling it "life" - and is as fizzy with one-liners as a George Carlin HBO special.
—Mark Shechner

The Bookpress