'Moods by Yoel Hoffmann--'Isreal's celebrated avant-garde genius' (The Forward)--supplies the magic missing link between the infinitesimal and the infinite. Part novel and part memoir, Yoel Hoffmann's Moods is flooded with feelings--about his family, losses, loves, the soul's hidden powers, old phone books, and life in the Galilee, with its every scent, breeze, notable dog, and odd neighbor. Carrying these shards is a general tenderness accentuated by a new dimension brought along with 'that great big pill of Prozac.' Literature's so pathetic. We peddle fabric with a sun painted on it and no one even looks up... Beautifully translated by Peter Cole, Moods is fiction for lovers of poetry and poetry for lovers of fiction--a small marvel of a book and, withits pockets of joy, a curiously cheerful book by an author who once called himself 'a praying mantis inclined to melancholy' --

Yoel Hoffmann's Curriculum Vitae is the remarkable summation of the writer's life: his escape from the Holocaust; his arrival in Palestine; time in an orphanage; youth; two marriages; fatherhood; his studies of Japanese Buddhism; his travels; his ever-busy inner life. Curriculum Vitae begins quietly but becomes more and more hypnotic and amazing.

Funny, gorgeous and utterly unique, Curriculum Vitae is Yoel Hoffmann's triumphant look backward and inward: How stupid we are to let the world toss us from one place to another, while we need to speak to dentists and poets like warehouse clerks who keep an account of old equipment (bags here and belts there) and pile it up on the floor. What do we remember? The lake at Biwa and the houses across it. The cherry blossoms and Auschwitz, Treblinka, Maidenak....

'Hoffmann,' as the Chicago Tribune put it, 'is not just a good writer but a great one, with the ability to find, in the moment-to-moment dislocation of daily existence, epiphanies of revelatory force . . . What Hoffmann has achieved is a kind of magic.' Hoffmann has also been hailed as 'miraculous' (A. B. Yehoshua), 'spectacular' (The New Yorker), 'radiant' (World Literature Today), and 'stunning' (The New Leader).

The Christ of Fish is a gorgeous novel conjured out of a mosaic of 233 pieces of Aunt Magda's life in Tel Aviv. Originally from Vienna, Hoffmann's heroine is a widow who still speaks German after decades in Israel: we see many views of Aunt Magdaher childhood, her marriage, her nephew, her best friend Frau Stier, Wildegans' poetry, apple strudel, visions and dreams, two stolen handbags, a favorite cafe, and a gentleman admirer.

Set in today's Haifa and presented in 237 dream-like small chapters, it is a book in which shyness and stumbling tenderness emerge triumphant. Poet Peter Cole has made a beautiful translation, capturing Hoffmann's intense and unfathomably original style. A starred Kirkus Review acclaimed the novel 'Beautiful, humane, priceless.'

Devastated by the loss of his wife, Bernhard disconsolately walks thestreets of Jerusalem, considering Gandhi, analysis, the beauty of hiswife Paula's neck, his Arab neighbors, Kokoschka, the Messiah, and theinner life of his friend Gustav the plumber. As his hero tries to cometo terms with his grief and the disasters of WWII, Hoffmann shows theslow remaking of an inner world.

Due romanzi in uno e due bambini protagonisti. Nel primo si racconta la storia di un sarto ebreo e di suo figlio Giuseppe nella Berlino degli anni Trenta. Nel secondo la Palestina di oggi attraverso gli occhi di un bambino. Due storie parallele in un unico romanzo speculare.

In kaleidoscopic fragments, Hoffmann refracts Jewish popular lore and folk wisdom through a postmodernist prism, brightening his prose with snatches of verse, songs, diary excerpts, letters, ominous dreams, lush erotic passages and Yiddish sayings. 'The Book of Joseph' tells the tragic story of a widowed Jewish tailor and his son in 1930s Berlin. 'Katschen' gives an astounding child's-eye view of a boy orphaned in the new state of Israel. The novellas radiate the original poetry of Hoffmann's atomized hypnotic language, which Rosmarie Waldrop has called 'utterly enchanting—it's like nothing else.'

Il grande maestro zen giapponese Dôgen dichiarò che 'non ci fu un Jôshû prima di Jôshû e non ci fu un Jôshû dopo Jôshû'. Quale fu il suo messaggio? Il suo messaggio era che non c'è alcun messaggio, che il mondo, con tutto ciò che contiene, non è né buono né cattivo, né santo né dannato; che non è nulla al di là di se stesso. Jôshû rifiutava i concetti astratti come 'Via', 'Verità', o 'il Buddha'; quando gli viene chiesto: 'Chi è Jôshû?', lui risponde: 'un rustico'; ed è proprio ciò che è: un contadino cinese. Jôshû afferma ripetutamente di non avere nulla da insegnare; interrogato sulla persona 'purificata' risponde: 'Da me non c'è posto per questo stupido'. E quando gli viene chiesto quale sia il 'Buddha più alto di tutti', indica con la mano il campo e dice: 'L'uomo che guida i suoi buoi, è lui'. Quali che siano gli influssi culturali che hanno modellato le sue idee, il suo insegnamento non può e non deve essere visto come un sistema filosofico o magari anti-filosofico. Ognuno dei 458 episodi riportati in questo libro è un'espressione diretta della sua via. Se qualcuno può sembrare bizzarro, è perché la sua via è così estremamente semplice e così assolutamente chiara che troviamo difficile capirla. Dobbiamo sempre ricordare che Jôshû dice quel che dice senza un 'motivo' particolare. Non c'è un bisogno particolare di 'capire'.