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  • Published: 2 February 2015
  • ISBN: 9780099285472
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 208
  • RRP: $24.99

Satan in Goray



A dark and mesmerising story, at once lyrical and terrifying

The pogrom that swept through Poland was interpreted as a sign of the Coming of the Lord. In the little town of Goray, laid waste by murder and famine, grief becomes joy as good news arrives of the second coming of the Messiah. Once the town’s pious rabbi is usurped, the townspeople are free to look forward to the End of Days, when they will wear golden jackets and dine on marzipan candy. But such perilously high hopes pave the way to hysteria, and a panic which could threaten the very existence of Goray.

  • Published: 2 February 2015
  • ISBN: 9780099285472
  • Imprint: Vintage Classics
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 208
  • RRP: $24.99

About the author

Isaac Bashevis Singer

Issac Bashevis Singer was born in Poland in 1904, and emigrated to the United States in 1935, shortly after his first novel, Satan in Goray, had been published in instalments. In 1943 he became a US citizen, but he continued to write almost exclusively in Yiddish, personally supervising the translation of his works into English. In 1978 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Issac Bashevis Singer died in Florida in 1991.

Isaac Bashevis Singer (1904-1991) was the author of many novels, stories, children's books, and a memoir. He won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978.

 

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Praise for Satan in Goray

Whatever religion his writing inhabits, it is blazing with life and actuality

Ted Hughes, New York Review of Books

His storytelling powers are so immense, so natural. He has more creative confidence than any living writer

Financial Times

A gripping parable of reason versus revelation, hysteria in the face of apocalypse

Guardian

A remarkably confident debut... Singer was a great writer who managed to make that small world take on universal significance

Guardian

Singer set scenes with such vividness that there is almost a smell to his books, the smell of poverty and guttering candles and decaying lives and decaying souls

Observer

The richness of Singer's evocation and the ambiguity of his art set the novel apart from pure political satire

New Yorker