Moods (New Directions Paperbook) - Softcover

Hoffmann, Yoel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0811223825 ISBN 13: 9780811223829

Publisher: New Directions, 2015

Synopsis

Yoel Hoffmann―“Israel’s celebrated avant-garde genius” (The Forward)―supplies the magic missing link between the infinitesimal and the infinite

Part novel and part memoir, Yoel Hoffmann’s Moods is flooded with feelings, evoked by his family, losses, loves, the soul’s hidden powers, old phone books, and life in the Galilee―with its every scent, breeze, notable dog, and odd neighbor. Carrying these shards is a general tenderness, accentuated by a new dimension brought along by “that great big pill of Prozac.”

Beautifully translated by Peter Cole, Moods is fiction for lovers of poetry and poetry for lovers of fiction―a small marvel of a book, and with its pockets of joy, a curiously cheerful book by an author who once compared himself to “a praying mantis inclined to melancholy.”

About this title

About the Author:

Yoel Hoffmann was born in Brasow, Romania in 1937. He is presently a citizen of Israel, and is Professor of Eastern Philosophy at the U. of Haifa. He has had a lifelong scholarly engagement with Hebrew literature, Western philosophy, and Japanese Buddhism. His is the winner of the first Koret Jewish Book Award. His books include The Heart is Katmandu, Bernhardt, The Christ of Fish, and Katschen & The Book of Joseph.

Peter Cole’s previous books of poems include Things on Which I’ve Stumbled (New Directions). Among his volumes of translation are The Poetry of Kabbalah: Mystical Verse from the Jewish Tradition and The Dream of the Poem: Hebrew Poetry from Muslim and Christian Spain, 950-1492. Cole, who divides his time between Jerusalem and New Haven, was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2007.

Review:

“Spectacular.”
- The New Yorker

“Hoffmann is not just a good writer but a great one, with the ability to find, in the moment-to-moment dislocation of daily existence, epiphanies of revelatory force. What Hoffmann has achieved is a kind of magic.”
- David Ulin, Chicago Tribune

“Hoffmann’s subject is the miracle of this most ordinary thing, and his prose is its revelation and praise.”
- Jenny Hendrix, Forward

“Hoffmann’s meandering is intensely personal, yet his hope that the cataloguing of thoughts and feelings will lead to some kind of larger understanding beyond the self is entirely universal.”
- Publishers Weekly

“Hoffmann writes in a language of miracles.”
- American Book Review

“Hoffmann's is an exile literature in exile from itself: self-consciously historicized, yet with none of its homage presented obviously. It's a miracle of Peter Cole's sinuous, sensitive English translation of Moods that Hoffmann seems even more 'himself': a magus, a sphinx, the Kohen of the koan, the Grand Rabbi of Kyoto–a genius.”
- Joshua Cohen

“Reading Moods is not unlike the experience of reading the fictions of Jorge Luis Borges, as it compels an immediate reassessment upon conclusion, and rewards an immediate rereading.”
- Full Stop

About this edition

• Publisher: New Directions
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0811223825
• ISBN 13: 9780811223829
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 160