Einstein's Beach House - Softcover

Appel, Jacob M

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0984940588 ISBN 13: 9780984940585

Publisher: Pressgang, 2014

Synopsis

A couple adopt a depressed hedgehog; a mother is seduced by the father of her daughter's imaginary friend; a man kidnap's his ex-wife's pet turtle. In eight tragicomic stories, Einstein's Beach House features ordinary men and women rising to life's extraordinary challenges.

About this title

About the Author

Jacob M. Appel is a physician, attorney and bioethicist based in New York City. He is the author of more than two hundred published short stories and is a past winner of the Boston Review Short Fiction Competition, the William Faulkner-William Wisdom Award for the Short Story, the Dana Award, the Arts & Letters Prize for Fiction, the North American Review's Kurt Vonnegut Prize, the Missouri Review's Editor's Prize, the Sycamore Review's Wabash Prize, the Briar Cliff Review's Short Fiction Prize, the H. E. Francis Prize, the New Millennium Writings Fiction Award on four separate occasions, an Elizabeth George Fellowship and a Sherwood Anderson Foundation Writers Grant. His stories have been short-listed for the O. Henry Award, Best American Short Stories, Best American Nonrequired Reading and the Pushcart Prize anthology on numerous occasions. His nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, New York Post, New York Daily News, Chicago Tribune, San Francisco Chronicle, and numerous other regional newspapers. Jacob holds graduate degrees from Brown University, Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons, Harvard Law School, New York University's MFA program in fiction and Albany Medical College's Alden March Institute of Bioethics. He taught for many years at Brown University and currently teaches at the Gotham Writers' Workshop and the Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

Review

"Jacob Appel captures New York City and its satellites around the turn of the millennium with painful, entertaining accuracy. Lives are coming apart, and coming together, in stories that live with you long after you've read them. Comparisons to Cheever, Trevor, and especially Chekhov can't be helped, but Appel writes with a grace and humor all his own." - Dan O'Brien, author of War Reporter and The Body of an American

"Jacob Appel is licensed to give sightseeing tours, and reading Einstein's Beach House certainly cements his qualifications. A capacious curiosity is at work here: Appel's stories move with thirstful purpose, rarely slowing, filled with wry humor and bon mots as we proceed briskly down his fictional paths, invited to examine modern ethical issues along the way. Take this tour--you'll want to give a tip once you reach the end." - Matthew Pitt, author of Attention Please Now

"A failed professional ventriloquist, a possibly morose hedgehog and a particularly acute array of parents and their children populate Jacob Appel's impossibly keen Einstein's Beach House -- a collection that takes a sharp look at the moments when we, whether child or adult, see who we truly are and the inevitability of who we will become. Appel's achy, skewed, sometimes heart-breaky world is dense with truth and humor -- the stuff of great literature." - Allison Lynn, author of The Exiles and Now You See It

"Sharp, observant, darkly funny and deeply humane." - Kirkus 

About this edition

• Publisher: Pressgang
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 0984940588
• ISBN 13: 9780984940585
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 188