The truth of the matter is that the iPad did not save the short story, and in any case this was not the reason that one man, fed up with his life, jumped from the window of his apartment on a high enough floor. And then, in the middle of the journey to the sidewalk, he suddenly discovered he could actually fly. He began to hover above the city streets, and flew up and down and forgot that he had just jumped from the window to die, and even cautiously approached the utility lines (without which the world is demilitarized from sadness). After a few minutes, when he turned in the general direction of his window, he could no longer fly. He started to fall, managed only to think he should ascend one last time, but it was no use, he spun through the air, plummeting and crashing on the road just a few minutes’ walk from his home. What a brief and bizarre kind of grace this was. But grace nonetheless.

From Lunar Savings Time, Clockroot Books. From the Hebrew: Becka Mara McKay.

Max Brod once dreamed of an angel who had only a right wing. The angel knocked on Brod’s door and asked where Kafka lived. Brod gave the angel directions, and thought in his dream that he had never in his life seen anything as terrifying as this one-winged angel. The next day Brod met Kafka. Kafka told him that on the previous night he had dreamed of an angel with no wings, who asked for Max Brod’s address.

From Blue Has No South, Clockroot Books.

• Publishers Weekly
• The Millions (A Year in Reading: Kevin Brockmeier)
• National Post
• Three Percent
• Review of Contemporary Fiction
• The Arts Fuse
• The Complete Review
• Jewish Book Council
• Broken Pencil
  

About my new “Facebook book” and social literature, at The Outlet, the blog of the wonderful Electric Literature magazine >>>

The full book in Hebrew >>>

Samples in English, via Electric Literature, translated by Jessica Cohen >>>

Once upon a time there was a writer who published a memoir of his childhood in Buchenwald. This was the first time that he’d written about the Holocaust. All his life he wrote love stories (and in all of his love stories it rained endlessly, on almost every page, so that it was possible to close the book and still smell the odor of damp earth from within the leather binding, but this is another matter). Only after a few years, on his deathbed, he admitted that the whole story was nothing more than a fabrication. In those days he was not in Buchenwald, but in Auschwitz. And only for a year.

From Lunar Savings Time, Clockroot Books. From the Hebrew: Becka Mara McKay.

My great-grandmother once shut a book by Tolstoy so hard that a spark came from its pages, and the spark climbed up the curtains, and ignited a fire, and our summer house went up in flames. I did not inherit this talent of my great-grandmother’s, but once I did try to write a story in which everything took place in reverse: the summer house goes up in flames, the curtain burns, a spark catches in the pages of Anna Karenina, and so on: my great-grandmother shut the book so hard that the fire was extinguished.

From Lunar Savings Time, Clockroot Books. From the Hebrew: Becka Mara McKay. Art: Lior Reizel. Mixed technique on canvas (detail).

After midnight, in a hotel in a foreign country, they turned on the radio on the nightstand (they didn’t find any stations with songs that they knew). But from the balcony they could see, on the sea’s surface, the wandering paintbrush of the old lighthouse, which was still in operation. If all we have is the present, then time travel is music.

From Lunar Savings Time, Clockroot Books. From the Hebrew: Becka Mara McKay.

All of the creases in the maps were flattened long ago. On this journey not ten years passed, but a whole life. Even the old man resting on the bench damp from rain cannot recognize his son from a picture in a wallet.

From Lunar Savings Time, Clockroot Books. From the Hebrew: Becka Mara McKay

To leave something for the family, the man who decided to commit suicide hired himself out as a one-time hit man. (He found guidance in his son’s schoolbooks: a sniffling Superman and a bird with a burning tail fly toward each other at such-and-such speed: when will they meet, etc.) Day and night he made calculations to time exactly his fall from the roof with the victim’s exit from the building. The only thing left to add is that certainly stories more miraculous and sad than this happen in the world. At the moment of truth he moved his watch from his right wrist to his left wrist and then dove.

From Lunar Savings Time, Clockroot Books. From the Hebrew: Becka Mara McKay

Hebrew only >>>