Aside from his blatant lack of piety -- and the fact that he's Jewish -- Father Edmond Music could have been a model priest. Now, entrenched at an English estate with a vast library, he would rather pursue a decades-old liaison with his housekeeper than crack down on his assistant's dial-a-confession phone ministry, or, more important, investigate the whereabouts of a rare Shakespeare text gone missing on his watch.  Then, out of nowhere, penance comes due. His car is found totaled (possibly by Vatican hit men), his annoying archrival of the cloth is looking to nail him as a thief, and the once-passionate housekeeper is lapsing into religious fervor. With his forty-year idyll falling apart, Edmond can no longer ignore the danger of the present, or the echoes of his buried past.  National Jewish Book Award-winning author Alan Isler delivers a hilarious and touching literary homily, confirming his unique gift for mingling comedy and tragedy in this deeply moving exploration of faith, love, and identity.

Clerical Errors

Literature & Fiction

ISLER, Alan

Contemporary

Vintage

The Bacon Fancier. Four Tales

Vintage, London

The Prince of West End Avenue: A Novel

Comedy and tragedy are combined in The Prince of West End Avenue as Otto Korner, the narrator, directs his quirky, libidinous fellow residents of a retirement home in a production of Hamlet, all the while recalling his life's adventures spanning the 20th century in Europe and then America. Korner is a Holocaust survivor, and the arrival of a luscious new employee who bears a shocking resemblance to a woman he had loved in his youth throws him back into the past. The narrator weaves together past and present, with events cresting at the performance of Hamlet. Though the machinations of the Emma Lazarus retirement home's Dickensian residents are always in the novel's foreground, the character and history of the narrator, Hamlet-like himself, are gradually revealed as the story's integral backdrop. His flashbacks include his precocious beginnings as a would-be poet, his bungled encounters with the incipient Dada movement and with Lenin in World War I Zurich, his first marriage and his life in Weimar Germany during the rise of Hitler, his experience of the Holocaust, and his immigration to the United States and second marriage. Little by little, and with increasing urgency, he is forced to confront truths about himself that he had thought safely buried. These unwelcome memories are interspersed (and overlap) with the current doings at the retirement home, the hilarious rivalries, factions, jockeying for position, and passionate love affairs of the residents. The novel ends on the night of the first public performance of the Emma Lazarus Old Vic's production of Hamlet, shortly after the last of Otto Korner's secrets is wrung from him. His is a story of life's chaos, complexity, richness -and moral dilemmas. It is a story of how our human qualities - pride, envy, timidity - can sometimes lead us to unintentionally hurt or even destroy those we love.

Penguin??Books

Englishman Nicholas Kraven journeys to America to search for intellectual and sexual stimulation amid the colorful, urbane world of New York academe

Kraven Images

Literary

In this unique volume, four distinct stories spanning four centuries are woven together by a common theme, the Jewish experience in a Gentile world, as the human protagonists fight the evil of anti-Semitism with unexpected results. Reprint.

The Bacon Fancier: Four Tales

JONATHAN CAPE.

A collection of four novellas, each with the theme of the Jew in the non-Jewish world. They move in time through the last four centuries and in space from east to west, sharing a blend of comedy and tragedy.

Op. Non. Cit.

J. Cape

Presents four stories set in successive centuries and linked by the common theme of Jewish experiences in the Gentile world

United States

Viking Adult

Errant priest Father Edmond Music, a Jew who had converted to Catholicism, becomes caught up in a conspiracy involving a stolen Shakespeare folio, a love affair with his housekeeper, a vengeful American priest, and an eighteenth-century Jewish mystic.

Clerical Errors: A Novel

Humor & Satire

Scribner

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by ISLER, Alan. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by ISLER, Alan

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by ISLER, Alan. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Clerical Errors

The Bacon Fancier. Four Tales

The Prince of West End Avenue: A Novel

Kraven Images

The Bacon Fancier: Four Tales

Kraven Images

Op. Non. Cit.

Clerical Errors

The Bacon Fancier: Four Tales

Clerical Errors: A Novel