The Prince of West End Avenue

The Prince of West End Avenue

by Alan Isler (Author)

Synopsis

In the Emma Lazarus retirement home in uptown Manhattan, the Jewish inmates embark on a chaotic, bitchy production of Hamlet. Comedy and tragedy combine as our hero, Otto Korner, directs his quirky, libidinous fellow residents in the play and looks back over his adventures in Germany, Zurich, (where he met Lenin and inadvertently invented Dada), Auschwitz and America. Winner of the National Jewish Book Award and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 256
Edition: Publishers Proof Copy
Publisher: Vintage
Published: 04 Apr 1996

ISBN 10: 0099701510
ISBN 13: 9780099701514
Book Overview: A bittersweet comedy set in a Jewish Old People's home in New York, this is a stunningly mature first novel.

Media Reviews
A masterpiece -- Hugo Barnacle * Independent *
Alan Isler's novel has been compared with the works of Isaac Bashevis Singer and Saul Bellow... Can it possibly live up to such praise? It can, it does -- Anita Brookner * Spectator *
Masterly, imaginative and provocatively disturbing in its effortless transitions between the comic and the tragic -- Geoffrey Elborn * Guardian *
Hilariously funny...a wonderful acheivement. Not since the heyday of Bellow and Heller has language been used to such good effect, at once hilarious and profoundly humane. Not since Malamud have comedy and tragedy and pathos and romance come together so effortlessly -- Gabriel Josipovici * Jewish Quarterly *
Poignant, comic and delightfully clever * Observer *
Author Bio
Alan Isler was born in London in 1834. His first novel, The Prince of West End Avenue, was acclaimed on both sides of the Atlantic. In America it won the National Jewish Book Award and was one of the five fiction nominees for the 1994 National Book Critics Circle Award. In Britain it won the Jewish Quarterly Fiction Award. He is also the author of the novels, Kraven Images and Clerical Errors, and a collection of novellas, The Bacon Fancier.