Adam Tehar-Zahav is known as The Short Story Master. He is still a famous writer, but his readers are fewer, his love life is stuck, and worst of all - short stories are no longer in fashion. The new novel by Maya Arad is an intricate and engulfing work of fiction, as well as a brilliant play of a book whithin a book. Arad weaves some of Adam Tehar-Zahav's works into his comedy, works which allude to his attempts to find love and start a family. While doing so, the reader gets an ironic and sharp view of today's Hebrew literature, and of its true and false heroes and achievements.
Maya Arad was born in Israel (1971) and grew up in Kibbutz Nahal-Oz. She graduated in Classics and Linguistics at the Tel Aviv University and has a Ph.D. in Linguistics from London University. She taught at Stanford University.
Her first book Another Place, a Foreign City, a novel in rhymes, also published by Xargol, won the Ministry of Education and Culture award and in 2005 was Shortlisted for the Sapir prize (the Israeli Booker). In 2006 it was performed as a play at the Cameri Theater.
After having examined the funnier and less glamorous aspects of academic life in the critically acclaimed best seller Seven Moral Failings (2006), she published in 2008 a collection of three novellas, Family Pictures, examining family life.
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