The Parting Gift - A Novel

Zusatztext 107717795 Informationen zum Autor Evan Fallenberg  is the author of three novels and a translator of Hebrew fiction, plays and films. His work has won or been short-listed for numerous awards, including the American Library Association Barbara Gittings Stonewall Award for Literature, the Edmund White Award for Debut Fiction and the PEN Translation Prize. He teaches at Bar-Ilan University and is faculty co-director of the Vermont College of Fine Arts International MFA in Creative Writing & Literary Translation. Fallenberg is the recipient of residency fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell Colony, Banff Centre for the Arts, Fondation Ledig-Rowohlt and Sun Yat-sen University, and is the founder of Arabesque: An Arts and Residency Center in Old Acre. Klappentext "An unabashed tale that does not pull punches and looks at love's underside…This breathless story should only be read in one sitting. It hits hard and never lets up. Terse, brusque, etched on one's inner thigh with an old serrated knife." -André Aciman, author of Call Me by Your Name This erotic tale of jealousy, obsession, and revenge is suffused with the rich flavors and intoxicating scents of Israel's Mediterranean coast. An unnamed narrator writes a letter to an old college friend, Adam, at whose place he has been crashing since his abrupt return to the States from Israel. Now that the narrator is moving on to a new location, he finally reveals the events that led him to Adam's door, set in motion by a chance encounter with Uzi, an older man with whom the narrator has just had an intense sexual relationship. From his first meeting with Uzi, the narrator is overwhelmed by an animal attraction that will lead him to derail his life, withdraw from friends and extend his stay in a small town north of Tel Aviv. As he becomes increasingly entangled in Uzi's life-and by extension the lives of Uzi's ex-wife and children-his passion turns sinister, ultimately threatening all around him. Written in a circuitous style reminiscent of Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley novels, The Parting Gift is a page-turner and a shrewd exploration of the roles men assume, or are forced to assume. Leseprobe Dear Adam, We are sitting, as I write this, as we often do: me on the sofa and you at your desk, your back to me, hunched over your computer. Your hair needs cutting, this time preferably by someone—anyone—other than Beth. You will never see, as I can, the line, or lack of one, that runs from below your left ear to below your right, how jagged it is, how unendearing. Your nape—what a lovely, raw word, don’t you think? So Saxon and blunt—is impossibly white, sickly white, and the mole that is nearly equidistant between your scraggly hairline, such as it is, and the collar of your stretch-necked T-shirt, stands out like a nipple on a pale breast. A nipple on a pale breast: a beautiful metaphor, wouldn’t you agree? It retains the bodily imagery but swivels it around from front to back. I hope you don’t feel it emasculates you, though. Beth wouldn’t approve, she’s a fierce defender of your masculinity. Such as it is. The lady doth protest a little too much. Your nape, still bent to your work, still deathly white with a dark eruption that contains who knows what disease or tumor one day to awaken and poison you, invites kissing or strangling. I could do either, in fact. Now, though, I’m too distracted for either. I’m occupied, gainfully, with this letter, which is, or will be, my parting gift to you. In it I shall recount how it is that I washed up on your doorstep nearly four months ago, and what events brought me here. You have never asked me and I find that exceedingly nice of you— nice being a word that could have been coined specially for you had it not already been abused for centuries in describing the bland or the sweet or the cuddly or the mild—and at the s...

Product details

• Authors: Evan Fallenberg
• Publisher: Other press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 30.06.2020
• EAN: 9781635420029
• ISBN: 978-1-63542-002-9
• No. of pages: 256
• Dimensions: 126 mm x 190 mm x 19 mm
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature; Guides > Health