“There is often a bleakness that permeates Hebrew fiction, and certainly a much darker sense of humor, a lot of sarcasm and irony, as well as self-deprecation. These are less prevalent in most English writing…”

“Isherwood’s prose blends genre and crosses time to revisit key moments in his development as a writer, a gay man, and a global citizen in Berlin.”

"Friendship affords certitude above all, and that is what distinguishes it from love."

I am very interested in writing about those moments when people judge each other, exploring how people’s judgments of others reflect on their own character and understanding.

I began reading Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn, as Told by a Friend (1947), in mid-2016, casually. I’d bought the book by mistake several years prior, thinking it was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s version—that is, the seminal German Faust. I am not the first to have confused the two authors.

Some of the best novelists in the Americas and Europe have written about chess—yet one of the best chess novels, Chess Story (published in German as Schachnovelle; also known as The Royal Game) by Stefan Zweig, was written by an otherwise less than superlative author.