books in order

Amos Oz Books In Order

Novels

  1. Elsewhere, Perhaps (1966)
  2. My Michael (1968)
  3. Touch the Water, Touch the Wind (1974)
  4. Soumchi (1980)
  5. A Perfect Peace (1982)
  6. Black Box (1988)
  7. To Know a Woman (1989)
  8. Fima (1991)
  9. Under This Blazing Light (1995)
  10. Don’t Call It Night (1996)
  11. Panther in the Baseme*nt (1997)
  12. The Same Sea (2001)
  13. A Tale of Love and Darkness (2004)
  14. Rhyming Life and Death (2009)
  15. Suddenly In the Depths of the Forest (2010)
  16. Between Friends (2013)
  17. Judas (2016)

Collections

  1. Where the Jackals Howl (1965)
  2. Unto Death (1971)
  3. The Hill of Evil Counsel (1978)
  4. The Amos Oz Reader (2009)
  5. Scenes from Village Life (2011)

Anthologies edited

  1. Until daybreak (1984)

Non fiction

  1. In the Land of Israel (1983)
  2. Israeli Literature (1985)
  3. The Slopes of Lebanon (1989)
  4. The Tanner Lectures On Human Values 1994 (1994)
  5. Israel, Palestine and Peace (1994)
  6. The Story Begins (1996)
  7. The Silence of Heaven (2000)
  8. Help Us to Divorce (2004)
  9. How to Cure a Fanatic (2006)
  10. Jews and Words (2012)
  11. Dear Zealots (2018)

Novels Book Covers

Collections Book Covers

Anthologies edited Book Covers

Non fiction Book Covers

Amos Oz Books Overview

Elsewhere, Perhaps

Oz’s fictional community of Metsudat Ram is a microcosm of the Israeli frontier kibbutz, where, held together by necessity and menace, the kibbutz niks share love and sorrow under the guns of their enemies and the eyes of history. Translated by Nicholas de Lange in collaboration with the Author. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book

My Michael

One of Amos Oz’s earliest and most famous novels, My Michael created a sensation upon its initial publication in 1968 and established Oz as a writer of international acclaim. Like all great books, it has an enduring power to surprise and mesmerize. Set in 1950s Jerusalem, My Michael tells the story of a remote and intense woman named Hannah Gonen and her marriage to a decent but unremarkable man named Michael. As the years pass and Hannah’s tempestuous fantasy life encroaches upon reality, she feels increasingly estranged from him and the marriage gradually disintegrates. Gorgeously written and profoundly moving, this extraordinary novel is at once a haunting love story and a rich, reflective portrait of place.

Touch the Water, Touch the Wind

Oz has crafted an intricate tale of people constantly seeking escape from a hostile world, an escape symbolized on its highest level by the watchmaker Pomeranz, a mathematician and musician. By the power of his music, he causes the arid earth to turn into a moist womb that receives him and his wife not in death but in immortality. Translated by Nicholas de Lange. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book

Soumchi

A young boy in modern day Jerusalem trades away one possession after another, only to find something much more wonderful his first love.

A Perfect Peace

Set in Israel just before the Six Day War, this novel describes life on a kibbutz, where the founders of Israel and their children struggle to come to terms with their land and with each other. Oz’s strangest, riskiest, and richest novel Washington Post Book World. Translated by Hillel Halkin. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book

Black Box

A powerful and tragicomic blend of politics and personal destiny, ‘Black Box‘ records in a series of letters the wrecked marriage of Ilana and Alex. Seven years of silence following their bitter divorce is broken when Ilana writes to Alex for help over their wayward and illiterate son, Boaz, and old emotional scars are reopened.

To Know a Woman

A collection of essays on various topics related to Israel the PLO, Jewish terrorists, Israel’s offensive into Lebanon and ethnic tensions within his nation. The author explores Jewish attitudes towards themselves and non Jews and re examines the Holocaust and Zionism. Amos Oz is a leading figure in the Peace Now Movement. After the Six Day War in 1967, he was one of the first voices in Israel to advocate partitioning the land between Israel and the Palestinian state in the context of peace and security. He is the author of ‘My Michael’, ”Black Box’, ‘Touch the Water’, ‘Touch the Wind’, ‘In the Land of Israel’ and ‘To Know a Woman‘.

Fima

Fima’s life in Jerusalem always manages to become enmeshed in the mundane. With wit and storytelling mastery, Oz portrays a man and a generation that has dreams but does nothing. Named a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Translated by Nicholas de Lange. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book

Under This Blazing Light

‘Perhaps most of the essays in this book are substitutes for stories that I have not managed to write,’ says Amos Oz in the preface to Under This Blazing Light. Published for the first time in English, this collection of essays reveals the personal and political thoughts of Israel’s most celebrated novelist. The essays in this volume put a unique perspective on the author’s own experiences and development, and reveal a complex and deeply human figure of practical political influence as well as of significant literary stature. Oz’s refreshing blend of skepticism and idealism will win for him new readers, while delighting those who will recognize here the qualities evident in his other writings. Relevant in light of recent developments in the Middle East, the topics covered include an examination of the Israeli Palestinian conflict as a dispute between ‘Right and Right’; a look at the meaning of socialism in the Israeli context; reflections on the concept of ‘Homeland’ and on the nature of the Kibbutz; and reflections on the character of Zionism. The essays also include portraits of several Jewish writers and thinkers whose ideas and themes in one way or another have proved influential or determinative for Amos Oz himself. Amos Oz is widely considered to be Israel’s most famous living writer. His fifteen books include My Michael, Touch the Water, Touch the Wind, In the Land of Israel, Black Box, To Know a Woman, and Fima. His work has been translated into twenty nine languages, and he has received several major literary awards. He is currently a Professor of Modern Hebrew Literature at Ben Gurion University.

Don’t Call It Night

In this extraordinary novel from a great and true voice of our time Washington Post, a teenage drug overdose throws a closely knit Negev Desert settlement into turmoil and tests the limits of a precarious love affair. A New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Translated by Nicholas de Lange.

Panther in the Baseme*nt

From a great and true voice of our time Washington Post Book World, comes this story of Proffy, a twelve year old living in Palestine in 1947. When Proffy befriends a member of the occupying British forces who shares his love of language and the Bible, he is accused of treason by his friends and learns the true nature of loyalty and betrayal. Translated by Nicholas de Lange.

The Same Sea

From the internationally acclaimed Israeli author, a unique novel in verse that will take its place among the great books of our time. The Same Sea is Amos Oz’s most adventurous and inventive novel, the book by which he would like to be remembered. This is Oz free of convention literary and otherwise. Prose leads to poetry, poetry to prose. The cast of characters ranges from a prodigal son to a widowed father who has taken in his son’s enticing young girlfriend, who in turn sleeps with her boyfriend’s close friend. The author himself receives phone calls from his characters, criticizing the way he portrays them in his novel. In this human profusion there is chaos and order, love and eroticism, loyalty and betrayal, and ultimately an extraordinary energy. Reminiscent of Under Milk Wood for the range of its voices, its earthy humor, and its poignancy, The Same Sea is heartbreaking and sensuous, filled with classical echoes and Biblical allusions. Oz at his very best.’I wrote this book with everything I have. Language music, structure everything that I have…
. This is the closest book I’ve written. Close to me, close to what I always wanted…
. I went as far as I could. Amos Oz

A Tale of Love and Darkness

Love and darkness are just two of the powerful forces that run through Amos Oz’s extraordinary, moving story. He takes us on a bold, seductive journey through his childhood and adolescence, a quixotic child’s eye view along Jerusalem’s wartorn streets in the 1940s and ’50s, and into the infernal marriage of two kind, well meaning people: his fussy, logical father, and his dreamy, romantic mother. Caught between them is one small boy with the weight of generations on his shoulders. And at the tragic heart of the tale is the suicide of his mother, when Amos was twelve and a half years old. Soon after, still a gawky adolescent, he left home, changed his name and became a tractor driver on a kibbutz. ‘Jews go back to Palestine’ urged the graffiti in 1930s Lithuania, so they went; then later the walls of Europe shouted ‘Jews get out of Palestine’. Oz’s story dives into 120 years of family history and paradox, the saga of a Jewish love hate affair with Europe that sweeps from Vilna and Odessa, via Poland and Prague, to Israel. Those who stayed in Europe were murdered; those who escaped took the past with them. In search of the roots of his family tragedy, he uncovers the secrets and skel

Rhyming Life and Death

An ingenious, witty, behind the scenes novel about eight hours in the life of an author.A literary celebrity is in Tel Aviv on a stifling hot night to give a reading from his new book. While the obligatory inane questions ‘Why do you write? What is it like to be famous? Do you write with a pen or on a computer? are being asked and answered, his attention wanders and he begins to invent lives for the strangers he sees around him. Among them are Yakir Bar Orian Zhitomirski, a self styled literary guru; Tsefania Beit Halachmi, a poet whose work provides the novel’s title; and Rochele Reznik, a professional reader, with whom the Author has a brief but steamy sexual skirmish; to say nothing of Ricky the waitress, the real object of his desire. One life story builds on another and the author finds himself unexpectedly involved with his creations. 20090301

Unto Death

Two novellas showing the atmosphere of hatred in which Jews must live, die, and struggle for rationality both historically and in the present. Woodcuts by Jacob Pins. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book

The Hill of Evil Counsel

The Hill of Evil Counsel is a fusion of history and imaginative narrative, re creating the twilight world of Jerusalem during the fading days of the British Mandate. In these three closely linked stories, Oz vividly evokes the stifling atmosphere of impending crisis as real personalities rub shoulders with fictional characters whose hopes and fears are hauntingly portrayed.

The Amos Oz Reader

The Reader draws on Oz’s entire body of work, loosely grouped into four themes: the kibbutz, the city of Jerusalem, the idea of a ‘promised land,’ and his own life story. Included are excerpts from his celebrated novels, among them Where the Jackals Howl, A Perfect Peace, My Michael, Fima, Black Box, and To Know a Woman. Nonfiction is represented by selections from Under This Blazing Light, The Slopes of Lebanon, In the Land of Israel, and Oz s masterpiece, A Tale of Love and Darkness. Robert Alter, a noted Hebrew scholar and translator, has provided an illuminating introduction. 20090315

Scenes from Village Life

A portrait of a fictional village, by one of the world’s most admired writers In the village of Tel Ilan, something is off kilter. An elderly man complains to his daughter that he hears the sound of digging under his house at night. Could it be his tenant, a young Arab? But then the tenant hears the mysterious digging sounds too. The mayor receives a note from his wife: ‘Don t worry about me.’ He looks all over, no sign of her. The veneer of new wealth around the village gourmet restaurants and art galleries, a winery cannot conceal abandoned outbuildings, disused air raid shelters, rusting farm tools, and trucks left wherever they stopped. Amos Oz s novel in stories is a brilliant, unsettling glimpse of what goes on beneath the surface of everyday life. Scenes from Village Life is a parable for Israel, and for all of us.

In the Land of Israel

Oz traveled throughout Israel and the West Bank in the 1980s and spoke with many people about the past, present, and future of his country. What he found is memorably set down here. New Author’s Note and Postscript; map. Translated by Maurie Goldberg Bartura. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book

The Slopes of Lebanon

Amos Oz is a leading figure in the Peace Now movement. After the Six Day War in 1967, he was one of the first voices in Israel to advocate partitioning the land between Israel and the Palestinian state in the context of peace and security. This collection of essays brings together his thoughts on Israel’s offensive into Lebanon, on fanaticism, the PLO, Jewish terrorists, Arafat and the political, religious and ethnic tensions within his nation. He explores Jewish attitudes towards themselves and non Jews and he re examines the Holocaust and Zionism its dreams and its failures.

Israel, Palestine and Peace

An important testimony as well as a moving portrait of a divided land is revealed in this collection of provocative essays and speeches on the Israeli Palestinian conflict variously composed before and after the peace initiatives. Preface by the Author. Translated by Nicholas de Lange. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book

The Story Begins

In this collection of ten essays, Amos Oz shares his rich and rewarding experience as both writer and teacher. As he analyzes the opening sections of novels and short stories by such writers as Agnon, Gogol, Kafka, Chekhov, Garc a M rquez, and Raymond Carver, Oz instructs, challenges, and guides. He writes about the notion of ‘beginnings,’ what the beginning of a novel or short story might ‘mean’ to the author and how important it is. And best of all he entertains. He highlights opening paragraphs in which authors make promises they may or may not deliver later in the work, or deliver in unexpected ways, or they may deliver more than they have promised. It is a game that miraculously and playfully engages both writer and reader. The Story Begins is a resourceful, accessible, and friendly companion for all students of literature and writing and for all book lovers.

The Silence of Heaven

In The Silence of Heaven, the world renowned Israeli novelist Amos Oz introduces us to an extraordinary masterpiece of Hebrew literature that is just now appearing in English, S. Y. Agnon’s Only Yesterday. For Oz, Agnon is a treasure trove of a world no longer available to today’s writers, yet deeply meaningful for his wonderment about God, the submerged eroticism of his writing, and his juggling of multiple texts from the historical Hebrew religious library. This collection of Oz’s reflections on Agnon, which includes an essay on the essence of his ideology and poetics, is a rich interpretive work that shows how one great writer views another. Oz admires Agnon especially for his ability to invoke and visualize the religious world of the simple folk in Eastern European Jewry, looking back from the territorial context of the Zionist revival in Palestine. The tragedy of Agnon’s visions, Oz maintains, lies in his perspicacity. Long before the Holocaust, Agnon saw the degeneration, ruin, and end of Jewish culture in Eastern Europe. He knew, too, that the Zionist project was far from being a secure conquest and its champions far from being happy idealists. Oz explores these viewpoints in a series of thick readings that consider the tensions between faith and the shock of doubt, yearnings and revulsion, love and hate, and intimacy and disgust. Although Oz himself is interested in particular ideological questions, he has the subtle sensibility of a master of fiction and can detect every technical device in Agnon’s arsenal. With the verve of an excited reader, Oz dissects Agnon’s texts and subtexts in a passionate argument about the major themes of Hebrew literature. This book also tells much about Oz. It represents the other side of Oz’s book of reportage, In the Land of Israel, this time exploring the ideologies of Jewish identity not on the land but in texts of the modern classical heritage. The Silence of Heaven hence takes us on a remarkable journey into the minds of two major literary figures.

How to Cure a Fanatic

Internationally acclaimed novelist Amos Oz grew up in war torn Jerusalem, where as a boy he witnessed firsthand the poisonous consequences of fanaticism. In two concise, powerful essays, the award winning author offers unique insight into the true nature of fanaticism and proposes a reasoned and respectful approach to resolving the Israeli Palestinian conflict. As an added feature, he comments on contemporary issues the Gaza pullout, Yasser Arafat’s death, and the war in Iraq in an extended interview at the end of the book. Oz argues that the Israeli Palestinian conflict is not a war of religion or cultures or traditions, but rather a real estate dispute one that will be resolved not by greater understanding, but by painful compromise. As he writes, ‘The seeds of fanaticism always lie in uncompromising righteousness, the plague of many centuries.’ The brilliant clarity of these essays, coupled with Oz’s ironic sense of humor in illuminating the serious, breathes new life into this centuries old debate. Oz argues that the Israeli Palestinian conflict is not a war of religion or cultures or traditions, but rather a real estate dispute one that will be resolved not by greater understanding, but by painful compromise. He emphasizes the importance of imagination in learning to define and respect other’s space, and analyzes the twisted historical roots that have led to Middle East violence. In his interview, Oz sends a message to Americans. Why not, he proposes, advocate for a twenty first century equivalent of the Marshall Plan aimed at preventing poverty and despair in the region? ‘What is necessary is to work on the ground, for example, building homes for hundreds of thousands of Palestinian refugees who have been rotting in camps for almost sixty years now.’ Fresh, insightful, and inspiring, How to Cure a Fanatic brings a new voice of sanity to the cacophony on Israeli Palestinian relations a voice no one can afford to ignore.

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