"In Shimon Adaf's Lost Detective Trilogy, what begins as conventional mystery becomes by degrees a brilliant deconstruction not just of genre but of our own search for meaning. Both profound and compulsively readable, these books demand to be devoured." --Lavie Tidhar, author of By Force Alone In A Detective's Complaint, the sequel to One Mile and Two Days Before Sunset, Elish Ben Zaken has traded working as a private investigator for writing detective novels based on unsolved cases from the past. He appears to live an ordinary writer's life: meeting with his agent, attending literary conferences. But all is not quite right with Elish, who cannot escape his past so easily, especially when his sister's daughter, Tahel, a teenager and an aspiring sleuth herself, calls on him for help. Tahel has uncovered a mystery: a young woman boarded a bus in Beersheva on a Thursday evening and stepped off in Sderot, close to the Gaza border, on Sunday evening. A bus ride that should have lasted an hour instead took three days, and the young woman remembers none of it. To assist Tahel--and, he tells himself, to conduct research for his next novel--Elish moves back to Sderot, where he grew up. His sister, Yaffa, has moved her family from Tel Aviv to a new lakeside development there; the property came cheap, despite the attractive setting, and there are murmurs that the developer fled the country before it was completed. Some of the houses still stand empty, and Tahel keeps waking up at night to find her mother staring out at the lake, convinced she is being watched. Now, in the summer of 2014, Sderot lies near the center of the Gaza-Israel conflict, and sirens and missile strikes are part of the town's daily reality--as are violent clashes between anti-war protestors and those who oppose them. In this pressurized environment, Elish must grapple with the deep wounds of history, both personal and political, and the human need for answers in a world that offers few.

A Detective's Complaint: A Novel (The Lost Detective Trilogy, 2)

Literature & Fiction

Adaf, Shimon

Literary

Picador

About the Author Shimon Adaf was born in Sderot, Israel, and now lives in Jaffa. A poet, novelist, and musician, Adaf worked for several years as a literary editor at Keter Publishing House and has also been a writer-in-residence at the University of Iowa. He leads the creative writing program and lectures on Hebrew literature at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Adaf received the Yehuda Amichai prize for Hebrew poetry (2010) for the collection Aviva-No; the Sapir Prize (2012) for the novel Mox Nox, the English translation of which, by Philip Simpson, won the Jewish Book Council's 2020 Paper Brigade Award for New Israeli Fiction in Honor of Jane Weitzman; and the I. and B. Newman Prize for Hebrew Literature (2017). Product Description "In Shimon Adaf's Lost Detective Trilogy, what begins as conventional mystery becomes by degrees a brilliant deconstruction not just of genre but of our own search for meaning. Both profound and compulsively readable, these books demand to be devoured." ―Lavie TidharAt age thirty, Elish Ben Zaken has found himself in a life he never imagined. As a university student, Elish was an esteemed rock-music critic for local newspapers; now, disenchanted with an increasingly commercialized music scene, he has joined a private investigation agency where he is content to be a “clerk of small human sins”―a finder of stolen cars and wayward husbands. But when a disconcertingly amiable detective asks him to look into the suicide of an infamous philosophy professor―and the police file contains an unexpected allusion to Dalia Shushan, a celebrated young rock singer whose recent murder remains unsolved―Elish’s natural curiosity is piqued. And when violence begins to dog the steps of his investigation, he knows that dangerous secrets are at hand. Haunted by the ghost of Dalia, a true artist with a transformative voice whose dark brilliance Elish was one of the first to recognize, he must face the long-buried trauma of his own past in order to unravel the intertwining threads of two lives, and their ends.In Elish, Shimon Adaf has created an unforgettable protagonist. A former philosophy student with a questing mind, born to Moroccan parents and raised in an outlying town, he is an eternal outsider in cosmopolitan Tel Aviv. Equally, One Mile and Two Days Before Sunset is a detective novel unlike any other: an incisive portrait of a man and a city, and a meditation on disappointment, on striving for beauty and for intensity of experience, and on the futile desire to truly know another person. Review "Shimon Adaf is my literary hero, a fearless explorer with the endless curiosity of a child and the skill of an Old Master, combined to unleash strange and wonderful masterpieces on the world. In his Lost Detective Trilogy, what begins as conventional mystery becomes by degrees a brilliant deconstruction not just of genre but of our own search for meaning. Both profound and compulsively readable, these books demand to be devoured." ―Lavie Tidhar, author of By Force Alone

One Mile and Two Days Before Sunset: A Novel (The Lost Detective Trilogy, 1)

"In Shimon Adaf's Lost Detective Trilogy, what begins as conventional mystery becomes by degrees a brilliant deconstruction not just of genre but of our own search for meaning. Both profound and compulsively readable, these books demand to be devoured." --Lavie Tidhar, author of By Force Alone In the summer of 2014, at the height of the Gaza-Israel conflict, Elish Ben-Zaken met the poet and librarian Nahum Farkash in the border town of Sderot. They spoke only briefly, but in that brief encounter, Elish might have missed the key to unraveling the case of a Sderot woman who disappeared for two days, only to reappear with no memory of her time away. In Take Up and Read, Shimon Adaf returns to Farkash's story. Attempting to defend the legacy of the singer Dalia Shoshan--whose murder Elish investigated several years before--Farkash tries to impede the production of a new documentary about her life. Meanwhile, he reminisces about his past, reflecting on his experiences as a young religious boy growing up in Sderot. Fourteen years later, in a militant Israel that has been distorted by catastrophic war, Elish's niece and nephew are haunted by their uncle's death and the failure of his 2014 investigation. As Tahel and Oshri conduct experiments in search of the truth, they draw near to the heart of a great conspiracy. In this masterful conclusion to the Lost Detective Trilogy, Shimon Adaf brings together futuristic biotechnology, parallel universes, and Jewish mysticism. Take Up and Read addresses a central concern of the trilogy, interrogating humankind's tenuous grasp on the boundaries of our selves, and the arbitrary connections between the body, consciousness, and perception.

Take Up and Read: A Novel (The Lost Detective Trilogy, 3)

Israel is a literary giant in so many ways, as writers from Israel continue to leave their footprints across the world literature . Kaleidoscope brings together three exceptional and significant Israeli poets into one volume, representing three generations in the evolution and development of the nation's poetry. A selection of works by three unique poets: Ory Bernstein, Rachel Chalfi and Shimon Adaf, this anthology reveals how each poet has their own voice while also reflecting three movements in Israeli poetry.

Kaleidoscope: Three Poets from Israel

Chalfi, Racquel

Bernstein, Ory

Poetry

Mosaic Press

Shimon Adaf and Lavie Tidhar are two of Israel’s most subversive and politically outspoken writers.  Growing up on opposite sides of the Israeli  spectrum – Tidhar in the north of Israel in the Zion-ist, socialist Kibbutz; Adaf from a family of religious Mizrahi Jews living in Sderot – the two nevertheless shared a love of books, and were especially drawn to the strange visions and outrageous sensibilities of the science fiction that was available in Hebrew. In Art and War, they engage in a dialogue that covers their approach to writing the fantastic, as they question how to write about Israel and Palestine, about Judaism, about the Holocaust, about childhoods and their end.Extending the conversation even into their fiction, the book contains two brand new short stories – Tutim by Tidhar, and Third Attribute by Adaf – in which each appears as a character in the other’s tale; simultaneously political and fantastical, they burn with an angry, despairing intensity.

Art and War: Poetry, Pulp and Politics in Israeli Fiction

Essays & Correspondence

Repeater Books

In the original text alongside the English translation, Adaf blends contemporary colloquial Hebrew, Arabic, and old Aramaic with biblical, Talmudic, and Rabbinic intertextualities. The collection is a powerful lamentation for Adaf’s sister, Aviva, who died at 43. Written from a witness of Israeli society, the daily violence taking place makes the grief reverberating through the poems both personal and palpable.

Aviva-no

History & Criticism

Alice James Books

The Wandering Veil provides a comprehensive survey of the work of the New York–based Israeli artist Izhar Patkin (born 1955). Published for an exhibition which traveled from the Tel Aviv Museum of Art and The Open Museum, Tefen to MASS MoCA, it focuses on works of the past decade, including Patkin’s series of mural-size "veil" paintings on tulle, inspired by the work of the late Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali and its themes of memory, loss and exile. Arranged thematically, this book contains 125 color plates and includes examples of key works from the 1980s and 1990s. It also features interviews with the artist by David Ross and the late critic Herbert Muschamp, plus texts by authors from a range of disciplines, including curators, poets, art and architecture critics, a literary scholar, a psychoanalyst and a theologian.

Izhar Patkin: The Wandering Veil

Arts & Photography

Tel Aviv Museum of Art/The Open Museum, Tefen/MASS MoCA

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