The Jewish Messiah: A Novel

Description

The new novel by the internationally acclaimed author- "a farce of nuclear proportions"(Vanity Fair) Arnon Grunberg is one of the most subtly outrageous provocateurs in world literature. The Jewish Messiah, which chronicles the evolution of one Xavier Radek from malcontent grandson of a former SS officer, to Jewish convert, to co- translator of Hitler's Mein Kampf into Yiddish, to Israeli politician and Israel's most unlikely prime minister, is his most outrageous work yet. Taking on the most well-guarded pieties and taboos of our age, The Jewish Messiah is both a great love story and a grotesque farce that forces a profound reckoning with the limits of human guilt, cruelty, and suffering. It is without question Arnon Grunberg's masterpiece.

Arnon Grunberg is the author ofBlue Mondays, an international bestseller that won the Anton Wachter Prize for a debut novel. He is also the author ofPhantom Pain, whichwon the AKO Prize (the Dutch equivalent of the Booker). He currently lives in New York City. Sam Garrett has won prizes and appeared on short lists for some of the world's most prestigious literary awards for his translations of some 30 novels and works of non-fiction.Garrett is the only translator to have twice won the British Society of Authors' Vondel Prize for Dutch-English translation (in 2003 and again in 2009). In 2012, his translation ofThe Dinnerby Herman Koch spent two months on the New York Times bestseller list and became the most popular Dutch novel ever translated into English. Garrett's translation of Tim Krabbe'sThe Rideris considered a cycling cult classic.Other works of his have been short-listed for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award (2005 and 2013), the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Award (2010), the PEN Translation Prize (2014), and the Best Translated Book Award (2014). He divides his time between Amsterdam and the French Pyrenees.

"Grunberg rejects self-serving existentialism, confronts real-world torture, genocide, terrorism, and personal crimes of the heart, and he infuses his visceral, wily satire with biblical fury." -Los Angeles Times "Arnon Grunberg is known for writing incendiary novels, but...The Jewish Messiah pushes his bleak sense of humor into new realms....Much more than an impolite screed; Grunberg wants to incite dialogue, not controversy." - Time Out New York