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Published Sep 2012
384 pages
Genre: Short Stories
Publication Information
The Book of Mischief triumphantly showcases twenty-five years of outstanding work by one of our true masters of the short story. Steve Stern’s stories take us from the unlikely old Jewish quarter of the Pinch in Memphis to a turn-of-the-century immigrant community in New York; from the market towns of Eastern Europe to a down-at-the-heels Catskills resort. Along the way we meet a motley assortment of characters: Mendy Dreyfus, whose bungee jump goes uncannily awry; Elijah the prophet turned voyeur; and the misfit Zelik Rifkin, who discovers the tree of dreams. Perhaps it's no surprise that Kafka's cockroach also makes an appearance in these pages, animated as they are by instances of bewildering transformation. The earthbound take flight, the meek turn incendiary, the powerless find unwonted fame.
Weaving his particular brand of mischief from the wondrous and the macabre, Stern transforms us all through the power of his brilliant imagination.
"Starred Review. Stern weaves an intricate and clever web of stories steeped in both sacred and mundane Jewish culture." - Kirkus
"Where other writers can take you, Stern can spirit you, and you don’t even have to wake up to return from where you are at, because you didn’t get there in a dream. You got there at Stern’s hand." - The Literary Outpost
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Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Photo: Sabrina Jones
Steve J. Stern (born 1947) is an author from Memphis, Tennessee. His fiction, with its deep grounding in Yiddish folklore, has prompted critics such as Cynthia Ozick to hail him as the successor to Isaac Bashevis Singer. He has won two Pushcart Prizes, an O'Henry Award, a Pushcart Writers' Choice Award and a National Jewish Book Award. For thirty years, Stern taught at Skidmore College, the majority of those years as Writer-in-Residence. He has also been a Fulbright lecturer at Bar Elan University in Tel Aviv, the Moss Chair of Creative Writing at the University of Memphis, and Lecturer in Jewish Studies for the Prague Summer Seminars. Stern splits his time between Brooklyn and Ballston Spa, New York.
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