"In these playful and perceptive commentaries, Oz shares his rich and rewarding experience as novelist, critic, and teacher. As he analyzes the opening sections of novels and short stories by such writers as Gogol, Kafka, Chekhov, Garcia Marquez, Raymond Carver, and with passing reference to other classics of world literature, Oz instructs, challenges, guides, and he entertains. Who hasn't been through the experience of sitting in front of a blank...

Shmuel, a young, idealistic student is drawn to a mysterious handwritten note on a campus noticeboard. This takes him to a strange house, where an elderly invalid man requires a paid companion, to argue with and read to him. But there is someone else in the house, too ...

"Amos Oz takes us on a 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 story is the suicide of his mother, when Amos was twelve-and-a-half...

Strange things are happening in Tel Ilan, a century-old pioneer village. A disgruntled retired politician complains to his daughter that he hears the sound of digging at night. Could it be their tenant, that young Arab? But then the young Arab hears the diggings sounds, too. And where has the mayor's wife gone, vanished without trace, her note saying "Don't worry about me"?

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...