Alexandrian Summer (eBook)

Yitzhak Gormezano Goren (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2015
200 Seiten
New Vessel Press (Verlag)
978-1-939931-22-1 (ISBN)

Infos

Love, lust, and the convulsions of history surge through this dazzling novel about the vanished cosmopolitan world of Alexandria.

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';A powerful novel of tensionssexual, familial, religious, and political... Alexandriasensual and enchantingshimmers in these pages' (Dalia Sofer, national-bestselling author of The Septembers of Shiraz). Alexandrian Summer is the story of two Jewish families living their frenzied last days in the doomed cosmopolitan social whirl of Alexandria just before fleeing Egypt for Israel in 1951. The conventions of the Egyptian upper-middle class are laid bare in this dazzling novel, which exposes startling sexual hypocrisies and portrays a now vanished polyglot world of horse-racing, seaside promenades, and elegant nightclubs. Hamdi-Ali senior is an old-time patriarch with more than a dash of strong Turkish blood. His handsome elder son, a promising horse jockey, can't afford sexual frustration, as it leads him to overeat and imperil his career, but the woman he lusts after won't let him get beyond undoing a few buttons. Victor, the younger son, takes his pleasure with other boys. But the true heroine of the storyrichly evoked in a pungent upstairs/downstairs mixis the raucous, seductive city of Alexandria itself. ';Helps show why postwar Alexandria inspires nostalgia and avidity in seemingly everyone who knew it... The result is what summer reading should be: fast, carefree, visceral, and incipiently lubricious.' The New Yorker ';Luminous... One of the great triumphs of Alexandrian Summer is the richness of the evocation of this city and the multiple cultures pressed within it... A sultry eroticism pervades.' The Forward ';Gormezano Goren's characters are vividly depicted as they grow up or grow older in a city of conflicting loyalties, riven by resentment, ready to revolt. Readers will be transported.' Publishers Weekly ';A profound literary experience.' Ahshav

Autor

lt;div>Yitzhak Gormezano Goren was born in Alexandria, Egypt, in 1941 and immigrated to Israel as a child. He is a playwright and novelist. Gormezano Goren studied English and French literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv University and has an MFA in theater directing from Brooklyn College. He cofounded the Kedem Stage Theater in Tel Aviv in 1982 and directed it for 30 years. Gormezano Goren received the Israeli Prime Minister's Prize for Literature in 2001.

Yardenne Greenspan (translator) is a fiction writer and translator, born in Tel Aviv to a bilingual family. Her translation projects include works by Israeli authors Shemi Zarhin, Rana Werbin, Yaakov Shabtai and Gon Ben Ari.

André Aciman (introduction) is the author of Out of Egypt, Call Me by Your Name and Harvard Square.