To mark the centennial of the birth of Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Library of America presents a major celebration of Singer's achievement, beginning with "Gimpel the Fool" and concluding with "The Death of Methuselah."
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To mark the centennial of the birth of Isaac Bashevis Singer, The Library of America presents a major celebration of Singer's achievement, beginning with "Gimpel the Fool" and concluding with "The Death of Methuselah."
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Add this copy of Isaac Bashevis Singer: Collected Stories Vol. 2 (Loa to cart. $10.97, good condition, Sold by ThriftBooks-Baltimore rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Halethorpe, MD, UNITED STATES, published 2004 by Library of America.
Add this copy of Isaac Bashevis Singer Collected Stories V. 2: a Friend to cart. $13.42, very good condition, Sold by BooksRun rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Philadelphia, PA, UNITED STATES, published 2004 by Library of America.
Add this copy of Isaac Bashevis Singer Collected Stories V. 2: a Friend to cart. $13.49, very good condition, Sold by HPB Inc. rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Dallas, TX, UNITED STATES, published 2004 by Library of America.
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Add this copy of Isaac Bashevis Singer Collected Stories V. 2: a Friend to cart. $17.00, good condition, Sold by Ed's Editions, LLC rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Columbia, SC, UNITED STATES, published 2004 by Library of America.
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Good in Very Good jacket. 2004 edition. Dust jacket is very good with minimal wear. Green cloth boards and binding are very good. Top page edge has light foxing. A name in pen on front endpaper. Pages are clean and unmarked. LO.
Add this copy of Isaac Bashevis Singer Collected Stories V. 2: a Friend to cart. $17.50, very good condition, Sold by Sequitur Books rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Boonsboro, MD, UNITED STATES, published 2004 by Library of America.
Add this copy of Isaac Bashevis Singer Collected Stories V. 2: a Friend to cart. $18.16, very good condition, Sold by dying earth books rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from torrance, CA, UNITED STATES, published 2004 by Library of America.
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Near Fine in Fine jacket. pp. 800. 1st ed/1st printing. This book is square, solid, and unread; the boards are solid and unblemished, and the dust jacket is sharp and glossy in archival Brodart cover. No price clippings, no remainder marks. You'll be so thrilled with this book upon its arrival you'll hop, skip, and do the pogo with wild abandon upon its arrival! NOTE: Light evidence of handling to the sides of the pages, and I mean nearly invisible.
Add this copy of Isaac Bashevis Singer Collected Stories V. 2: a Friend to cart. $22.00, like new condition, Sold by Shelley and Son Books (IOBA) rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Hendersonville, NC, UNITED STATES, published 2004 by Library of America.
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Like New in Like New jacket. By the time Isaac Bashevis Singer published the three short-story collections gathered in this Library of America volume A Friend of Kafka (1970), A Crown of Feathers (1973), and Passions (1975) he had made his home in America for nearly four decades. Earning his living as a columnist for the Yiddish newspaper Forverts (The Jewish Daily Forward), he had risen from nearly complete anonymity outside of his Yiddish readership to international celebrity as the last of the great Yiddish fiction writers, as Anzia Yzierska once called him. Awarded prizes, fêted in the United States and abroad, eagerly sought for lectures and interviews, he had brought about this remarkable transformation primarily though the translation of his stories. Often collaborating with his translators, Singer intended the English version of his stories to be regarded not as diminished approximations of his Yiddish stories but as works shaped by the author in the language of his adopted homeland. The sixty-five stories in Collected Stories: A Friend of Kafka to Passions the second of three volumes reflect Singer s origins in Poland and his long exile in America. Although he continued to write tales drawing on Jewish folk traditions and supernaturalism, many of his stories from the late 1960s and early 1970s take place in the United States, as Singer explored the psychic devastation wrought by the Nazi genocide on Holocaust survivors ( The Cafeteria ), evoked the fragility of transplanted forms of Jewish life and belief ( The Cabalist of East Broadway ), and reflected on the spiritual hazards of worldly success in America ( Old Love ). Stories such as A Day in Coney Island, A Tutor in the Village, and The Son based on Singer s reunion with his son Israel Zamir after a twenty-year separation show Singer blurring the line between autobiography and fiction, a tendency that marks much of his later writing. Green cloth. 856pp. Bound in ribbon page marker. Decorated end papers. First Printing. Full refund if not satisfied.
Add this copy of Isaac Bashevis Singer Collected Stories V. 2: a Friend to cart. $22.60, very good condition, Sold by BookHouse On-Line rated 5.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Minneapolis, MN, UNITED STATES, published 2004 by Library of America.
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Very Good. First edition, first printing. Very good hardcover in very good slipcase. Binding is tight, sturdy, and square; boards and text also very good. Slipcase has one spot of rubbing. Insert included. Ships from Dinkytown in Minneapolis, Minnesota.
Add this copy of Isaac Bashevis Singer Collected Stories V. 2: a Friend to cart. $23.00, very good condition, Sold by Turn-The-Page Books rated 4.0 out of 5 stars, ships from Skyway, WA, UNITED STATES, published 2004 by Library of America.
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Very Good in Very Good jacket. Library of America, 2004. 1st printing. A gently used copy, tight and unmarked. Full green cloth binding. 789pp. Ribbon marker bound in. In a very nice dust jacket. First Edition. Hardcover. Very Good/Very Good. 8vo-8"-9" Tall.
My college-bound grandson expressed an interest in Judaica and in Yiddish writing as he prepared to go off to school. I had, in fact, been reading an old copy of this Library of America volume of Singer: "Collected Stories, A Friend of Kafka to Passions" and had it with me during a recent visit. I was surprised to learn of my grandson's interest in a culture of which he knew little. I gave him my old battered copy and acquired a new one for myself as slowly continued through this lengthy volume of 65 stories and 850 pages.
Isaac Bashevis Singer (1903 -- 1991) grew up in Poland, the son of a rabbi and deeply steeped in Orthodox, Hasidic Judaism. He early became a writer in Yiddish and emigrated to the United States in 1935 where he lived for the rest of his life. Continuing to write in Yiddish for various periodicals, Singer's work began to be translated into English in the 1950s and his popularity and exposure to a large audience increased. Singer began to assist in the translation of his works and came to regard English as his "second original language". In 1974, Singer received the National Book Award for his short story collection "A Crown of Feathers" included in this volume, and in 1978 he became the seventh American citizen to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. Singer's popularity has waned somewhat subsequent to his death.
The Library of America published three volumes of Singer's Collected Stories in 2004, to coincide with the centenary of his birth, and reissued the volumes in 2015 in a box set. Ilan Stavans, who also edited the LOA volume "Becoming Americans: Four Centuries of Immigrant Writing", edited the volumes. Singer became the first fiction writer in an original language other than English to be included in the LOA. (An earlier LOA book was devoted to Alexis de Tocqueville who wrote in French.) Singer was a prolific writer who also wrote lengthy novels and children's books, but the stories are probably the most accessible single part of his work.
"What makes a writer an American writer?", the LOA asks on its page introducing Singer. This writer of tales centered on the pre-WW II world of Polish Jews touched on a welter of themes shared by the broad American experience. In the words of the LOA, "his parables seemed, to his newfound American audience, startlingly apposite to the morally ambiguous world ushered in by World War II, even as they evoked, as in a dream, a time and a place the war had brutally obliterated".
Singer's stories are set in his native Poland, both in rural areas and in Warsaw, and, increasingly, in the United States. For me, the stories have broad philosophical themes which center upon religious faith and its difficulty in contemporary life. The stories illustrate the search for meaning and morality in life amid uncertainty and change. They explore the nature of reason and rationality, frequently illustrated by the figure of Spinoza, as juxtaposed with feeling, passion, and mystery. Singer's works are replete with spirits, amulets and supernatural figures from of old.
Another broad theme of Singer's work, criticized by some, is sexuality. The stories explore the pervasive character of sexuality both in modern secular life and in the seemingly closed world of the Orthodox Jewish community in Poland. The stories offer more than a suggestion that sexuality and the religious search are intertwined.
Singer's stories have an immediacy in their telling, and many are strongly autobiographical. They often include a Singer-like narrator who converses a single other individual who shares his, or sometimes her, story. Whether set in Poland, in America, or elsewhere, the stories often take place in a cafeteria, writer's club, or apartment, or other place for conversation and reflection. Stories and issues come to life through the interaction of a small group of individuals and in their telling. The parochialism of the stories is apparent, but the universality of their concerns is as well.
The three books included in this LOA volume each include stories mostly published separately in magazines. As Singer became more widely known, the English translations followed closely upon the original Yiddish. The themes seem to me largely constant among the three volumes with Singer's concerns and preoccupations restated engagingly in many different ways. Singer had a complex relationship to Judaism. He seems to me enmeshed in it always and to come closest to it in his latter works. The two initial books in this volume "A Friend of Kafka" and "A Crown of Feathers" have a more searching, skeptical tone for me than most of the stories in "Passions".
The titles of each book are well-chosen. and I enjoyed the stories on which they are based. In "A Friend of Kafka" (1970), I also particularly liked the stories "The Cafeteria" and "Something is There". In the National Book Award winning, "A Crown of Feathers" (1974), the stories I liked included "A Day in Coney Island" and "The Cabalist of East Broadway". In the aptly named volume "Passions" (1975) which explores both religious and sexual longings, the stories "Old Love", "Sabbath in Portugal", and "The New Year Party" were among those I most enjoyed. The latter two books also include short introductions by Singer which offer insight into what he was about.
The LOA volume includes a chronology of Singer's life, notes on the texts and on the stories, and a brief glossary of Yiddish expressions found in the stories.
I was grateful for the opportunity to explore I.B. Singer again through this LOA volume. Perhaps I will have the opportunity to explore the remaining two volumes in the LOA series. My favorite story by Singer, "The Spinoza of Market Street" is included in the first volume. I was glad to see as well that Singer may be of interest to new young readers, as evidenced by my grandson.
