Amos Oz - Novels, Short Stories & Essays (7 books)

AMOS OZ (b. 1939) is an Israeli novelist, journalist and public intellectual. He is widely considered to be Israel's most famous living writer and is frequently considered to be a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Oz's work has been published in more than forty languages, including Arabic, and he has received many honours and awards, among them the Legion of Honour of France, the Goethe Prize, the Prince of Asturias Award in Literature, the Heinrich Heine Prize and the Israel Prize. Since 1967, he has been a prominent advocate and major cultural voice of a two-state solution to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and regularly publishes essays on the subjects of politics, literature, and peace.

His first book, WHERE THE JACKALS HOWL (1965), is a disturbing and moving collection of short stories about kibbutz life. In BETWEEN FRIENDS (2013), Oz returns to the kibbutz of the late 1950s, the time and place where his writing began. These eight interconnected stories, set in the fictitious Kibbutz Yekhat, draw masterly profiles of idealistic men and women enduring personal hardships in the shadow of one of the greatest collective dreams of the twentieth century.

MY MICHAEL (1968) is a haunting love story and a rich, reflective portrait of Jerusalem in the 1950s. FIMA (1994), also set in Jerusalem, portrays a man, and a generation, dreaming noble dreams but doing nothing. SCENES FROM VILLAGE LIFE (2011) is a memorable novel-in-stories that offers a brilliant, unsettling glimpse of what goes on beneath the surface of everyday life.

Finally, there are two nonfiction works in this collection. The essays in UNDER THIS BLAZING LIGHT (1995) include an examination of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict as a dispute between "Right and Right"; a look at the meaning of socialism in the Israeli context; reflections on the concept of "Homeland" and on the nature of the kibbutz; and reflections on the character of Zionism. A TALE OF LOVE AND DARKNESS (2004) is Oz's acclaimed memoir of coming of age in the midst of Israel's turbulent birth pangs, his mother's tragic suicide, and his decision to change his name and join a kibbutz.


The following books are in ePUB format unless otherwise noted:

* BETWEEN FRIENDS (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013). Translated by Sondra Silverston.

* FIMA (Harcourt, 1994). Translated by Nicholas de Lange.

* MY MICHAEL (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2005). Translated by Nicholas de Lange.

* SCENES FROM VILLAGE LIFE (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2011). Translated by Nicholas de Lange.

* A TALE OF LOVE AND DARKNESS: A Memoir (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2004). Translated by Nicholas De Lange.

* UNDER THIS BLAZING LIGHT: Essays (Cambridge University Press, 1995). Translated by Nicholas de Lange. -- PDF

* WHERE THE JACKELS HOWL & OTHER STORIES (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012). Translated from the Hebrew by Nicholas De Lange and Philip Simpson.