clockroot books
The short texts of Alex Epstein virtuously echo the great
tradition of world literature in a truly original manner...
—Etgar Keret
Lunar Savings Time
Stories
by Alex Epstein
translated from the Hebrew by Becka Mara McKay
The stories in Lunar Savings Time slip through time and between dreams and waking, between native tongue and elusive translation, long-dead writers and just-opened books. Alex Epstein has created a masterwork in the finest strokes—stories in which humor, stubborn memory, and strange beauty meet and part ways in less than a page. Through these pages journey a woman who travels back in time to visit a psychoanalyst; Kafka, had he lived and emigrated to Israel after the Holocaust; the wandering Cain; the siege of Leningrad; Zen masters, beggars, writers, ghosts. In Epstein’s lyrical philosophy, every imaginative proposition must answer to the burden of history—or perhaps, for every moon, there’s rain; for every love story, the fact of time. “He can be placed next to Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Kafka, Borges,” Haaretz has said of Epstein. Lunar Savings Time is his most radical and finest collection yet, a wondrous achievement.ISBN 9781566568524 • paperback • $15
Ten Short Pieces at Words without Borders