Neurotica: Jewish Writers on Sex - Hardcover

3.3

40 ratings by Goodreads

9780393048087: Neurotica: Jewish Writers on Sex

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 039304808X ISBN 13: 9780393048087

Publisher: W W Norton & Co Inc, 1999

Sex is straight and gay, married and unmarried, satisfied and frustrated, guilty and innocent, carnal and platonic, and pathetic according to the 27 short stories and excerpts from longer works of fiction. Woody Allen, Saul Bellow, Rebecca Goldstein, Erica Jong, Jerzy Kosinski, Bernard Malamud, Henry Roth, and Isaac Bashevis Singer are among those who speak up. Novelist Bukiet thanks his wife for the children he hopes are his. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

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Review:

Neurotica: Jewish Writers on Sex is a first-rate collection of writings about "the people of the book, in bed," as editor Melvin Jules Bukiet observes in the book's terrifically funny introduction. ("Not only is sex unshunned by the Jewish tradition; it's often considered a positive mitzvah to have sex on Sabbath. Besides, if work is prohibited and you can't go to the movies, how else can you spend your holy time?") Neurotica includes short stories and excerpts from novels by big names such as Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, Jerzy Kosinski, and Woody Allen, and by promising newcomers such as Nathan Englander and Michael Lowenthal. Some familiar selections (such as an excerpt from Erica Jong's once-scandalous Fear of Flying) now appear remarkably tame. But the sexual proclivities depicted in many of these selections are quite intense and sometimes disturbing--not fit for summary on a family Web site. So keep this one away from the kids, but curl up with it under the covers. It will give you veddy interesting dreams. --Michael Joseph Gross

From the Inside Flap:

as who claimed that sex was the most fun you can have without laughing hadn't encountered Neurotica--an anthology of Jewish short stories, most of which uncover the hilarity inherent in carnality. It is a stellar collection of twenty-seven tales of sexual longing and consummation and frustration--of straight and gay sex, married, unmarried, and adulterous sex, filthy, platonic, and pathetic sex, great sex, awful sex, and solo sex--by many of the masters and the freshest new voices of the Jewish-American literary tradition. Some of the stories are graphic, some ethereal, some wildly comic, some deeply tragic, but all offer a distinctively Jewish point of view on a universal pastime and preoccupation. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll--well, only you know what you'll do.

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