Daniel C. Melnick

"A Burnt Offering is about Israel and Iran, and it is the 2020 updated, expanded, and revised version of Daniel Melnick's "Acts of Terror and Contrition - A Nuclear Fable." A political novella about Israel, it presents the unrecorded acts of terror and contrition which arise when a nuclear war threatens between Israel and Iran. The work is partly a political thriller propelling us through terror-filled close-calls and suspenseful choices. Above all, it is a portrait of three generations of an Israeli family as they cope with the dread and opposition human beings feel toward the danger of nuclear weapons.

"The Ash Tree" - a 2015 novel by Daniel Melnick - tells a timeless story of the romance and marriage between a young American woman and an immigrant who survived the 1915 Armenian Genocide in Turkey. In the decades after the Genocide, the survivor, the Armenian-American woman, and their three children become vivid, quintessentially American characters, only for tragedy to find them again. This novel of survival, new life, and heartbreak is part history and part fictionalized memoir. Its cover painting is by the author’s wife, Jeanette Arax Melnick. See www.theashtree.net.

Daniel Melnick is also the author of the novel "Hungry Generations" about expatriate musicians living in Los Angeles during World War II and raising their children in the ensuing decades; in 1972, a young composer arrives in L.A. to work in a Hollywood studio, and to his peril he is initiated into the turbulent family of a great expatriate pianist living in Beverly Hills. "More than combustible [it imagines] a collision of cultures and worlds" - The Plain Dealer. The “thoughtful and engaging novel about three musicians…gives a vivid picture of Los Angeles. Against this background, Daniel Melnick depicts a tragic conflict between an old man and his son…For those who know serious music, it will be supremely satisfying.” – Times Literary Supplement

Another book by Daniel Melnick is a critical study of Proust, Mann, and Joyce and music - "Fullness of Dissonance: Modern Fiction and the Aesthetics of Music." He is also the author of a series of stories and critical essays on modern literature; some of these are posted on www.danielmelnick.com.

The now completed novel "Pathological States" tells the haunting and heartbreaking story of a physician's family in L.A. in the sixties. Also in progress is a study of Beethoven. He lives in Cleveland, Ohio, with his wife, the artist Jeanette Arax Melnick.