Books with author Isaac Bashevis Singer

Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer introduces readers to the village of Chelm in this Newbery Honor Book. Chelm is a village of fools. The most famous fools—the oldest and the greatest—are the seven Elders. But there are lesser fools too: a silly irresponsible bridegroom; four sisters who mix up their feed in bed one night; a young man who imagines himself dead. Here are seven magical folktales spun by a master storyteller, that speak of fools, devils, schlemiels, and even heroes—like Zlateh the goat.The New York Times called Zlateh the Goat and Other Stories, "beautiful stories for children, written by a master." The New York Book Review said, "This book is a triumph. If you have no older children on your list, buy it for yourself." Singer's extraordinary book of folklore is illustrated by Maurice Sendak, who won a Caldecott Medal for Where the Wild Things Are. Supports the Common Core State Standards

"A piercing work of fiction with a strong claim to being Singer's masterpiece" (Richard Bernstein, The New York Times), Shadows on the Hudson traces the intertwined lives of a group of Jewish refugees in New York City in the late 1940s. At its center is Boris Makaver, a pious, wealthy businessman whose greatest trial is his unstable daughter, Anna. A chain of events disrupts the lives of the close-knit community as each refugee struggles to reconcile the horrific past with the difficult present, as Singer explores both the nature of faith and the nature of love in the aftermath of the Holocaust.

Beginning with “Gimpel the Fool,” the story that brought Isaac Bashevis Singer to prominence in America in the 1950s, this Library of America volume is the first of three gathering most of Singer’s short fiction. These stories were published in English in the versions he called his “second originals,” translations that he supervised and on which he himself often collaborated, revising his Yiddish texts as he worked.Born in 1904 into a family of rabbis, Singer grew up in a devout household in Warsaw’s Jewish quarter, but he also spent time in the villages and market towns of eastern Poland, most notably Bilgoray, where he took refuge with his mother and brother during World War I. He had firsthand exposure to forms of Jewish folk culture that were destroyed by the Nazis, and many of his works testify to the richness of that annihilated world. In his stories set in Poland, Singer drew upon vernacular traditions for tales imbued with a wild, sometimes mischievous, often disturbing supernaturalism that was an outgrowth of local storytelling but containing dark undercurrents born of his own concerns and obsessions. At the same time, his skeptical but never dismissive engagement with religion and spirituality—and the opposing forces of secularism—enabled him to take part in the creative ferment of Jewish modernism but also distance himself from its politics and literary methods.In addition to “Gimpel the Fool,” this volume—drawn from Singer’s first four English-language collections of stories originally published in the 1950s and 1960s—contains some of Singer’s most beloved tales: “The Spinoza of Market Street,” “The Gentleman from Cracow,” “Taibele and Her Demon,” and “Yentl the Yeshiva Boy,” the basis of a hit Broadway play and the film Yentl.LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.