A Horse Walks into a Bar A Horse Walks into a Bar

A Horse Walks into a Bar

A Novel

    • 4.2 • 46 Ratings
    • $12.99
    • $12.99

Publisher Description

**SHORT-LISTED FOR THE 2017 MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE**

The award-winning and internationally acclaimed author of the To the End of the Land now gives us a searing short novel about the life of a stand-up comic, as revealed in the course of one evening’s performance. In the dance between comic and audience, with barbs flying back and forth, a deeper story begins to take shape—one that will alter the lives of many of those in attendance.

In a little dive in a small Israeli city, Dov Greenstein, a comedian a bit past his prime, is doing a night of stand-up. In the audience is a district court justice, Avishai Lazar, whom Dov knew as a boy, along with a few others who remember Dov as an awkward, scrawny kid who walked on his hands to confound the neighborhood bullies. Gradually, as it teeters between hilarity and hysteria, Dov’s patter becomes a kind of memoir, taking us back into the terrors of his childhood: we meet his beautiful flower of a mother, a Holocaust survivor in need of constant monitoring, and his punishing father, a striver who had little understanding of his creative son. Finally, recalling his week at a military camp for youth—where Lazar witnessed what would become the central event of Dov’s childhood—Dov describes the indescribable while Lazar wrestles with his own part in the comedian’s story of loss and survival. Continuing his investigations into how people confront life’s capricious battering, and how art may blossom from it, Grossman delivers a stunning performance in this memorable one-night engagement (jokes in questionable taste included).

GENRE
Fiction & Literature
RELEASED
2017
February 21
LANGUAGE
EN
English
LENGTH
208
Pages
PUBLISHER
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
SELLER
Penguin Random House LLC
SIZE
9.1
MB

Customer Reviews

Deanlute ,

Like a ride on the rapids

This book is fast, frenetic, and quite incredible. Read it only because of the prize and really happy I did.

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