Hope: a Tragedy: A Novel
(OverDrive MP3 Audiobook, OverDrive Listen)

Shalom Auslander. (2012). Hope: a Tragedy: A Novel. Unabridged Books on Tape.

Shalom Auslander. 2012. Hope: A Tragedy: A Novel. Books on Tape.

Shalom Auslander, Hope: A Tragedy: A Novel. Books on Tape, 2012.

Shalom Auslander. Hope: A Tragedy: A Novel. Unabridged Books on Tape, 2012.

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   • fileAs: Auslander, Shalom
   • bioText: Shalom Auslander was raised in Monsey, New York. Nominated for the Koret Award for writers under 35, he has published articles in Esquire, the New York Times Magazine, Tablet, The New Yorker, and has had stories aired on NPR's This American Life. Auslander is the author of the novel Hope: A Tragedy, the short story collection Beware of God, and the memoir Foreskin's Lament. He lives in New York. To learn more about Shalom Auslander, please visit shalomauslander.com.
   • name: Shalom Auslander
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   • bioText: Shalom Auslander was raised in Monsey, New York. Nominated for the Koret Award for writers under 35, he has published articles in Esquire, the New York Times Magazine, Tablet, The New Yorker, and has had stories aired on NPR's This American Life. Auslander is the author of the novel Hope: A Tragedy, the short story collection Beware of God, and the memoir Foreskin's Lament. He lives in New York. To learn more about Shalom Auslander, please visit shalomauslander.com.
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Hope: a Tragedy

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FROM THE CREATOR OF SHOWTIME'S "HAPPYISH"
The bestselling debut novel from Shalom Auslander, the darkly comic author of Foreskin’s Lament and Beware of God.
 
Hope: A Tragedy is a hilarious and haunting examination of the burdens and abuse of history, propelled with unstoppable rhythm and filled with existential musings and mordant wit. It is a comic and compelling story of the hopeless longing to be free of those pasts that haunt our every present.
 
The rural town of Stockton, New York, is famous for nothing: no one was born there, no one died there, nothing of any historical import at all has ever happened there, which is why Solomon Kugel, like other urbanites fleeing their pasts and histories, decided to move his wife and young son there.
To begin again. To start anew. But it isn’t quite working out that way for Kugel…
His ailing mother stubbornly holds on to life, and won’t stop reminiscing about the Nazi concentration camps she never actually suffered through. To complicate matters further, some lunatic is burning down farmhouses just like the one Kugel bought, and when, one night, he discovers history—a living, breathing, thought-to-be-dead specimen of history—hiding upstairs in his attic, bad quickly becomes worse.

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1. • premium: False
   • source: "A virtuoso humorist, and a brave one: beware Shalom Auslander; he will make you laugh until your heart breaks." – New York Times Book Review
     
     "A caustic comic tour de force." – NPR
     
     "Poisonously funny.... Like...
   • content: "A virtuoso humorist, and a brave one: beware Shalom Auslander; he will make you laugh until your heart breaks." – New York Times Book Review
     
     "A caustic comic tour de force." – NPR
     
     "Poisonously funny.... Like an unintentional bark of laughter at a funeral." – Entertainment Weekly
     
     "Staggeringly nervy... Other fiction writers have gotten this fresh with Anne Frank. But they don't get much funnier... [Auslander] is an absurdist with a deep sense of gravitas... It's a tall order for Mr. Auslander to raise an essentially comic novel to this level of moral contemplation. Yet Hope: A Tragedy succeeds shockingly well." – New York Times
     
     "Shalom Auslander writes like some contemporary comedic Jeremiah, thundering warnings of disaster and retribution. What makes him so terrifyingly funny is that he isn't joking." — Howard Jacobson, author of The Finkler Question and winner of the Man Booker Prize
     
     "A wonderful, twisted, transgressive, heartbreaking, true, and hugely funny book. It will make very many people very angry. It will also make very many people very happy." — A. L. Kennedy, author of Day
     
     "Can the darkest events of the twentieth century and of all human history be used to show the folly of hope? And can the result be so funny that you burst out laughing again and again? If you doubt this is possible, read Hope: A Tragedy. You won't regret it." — John Gray, author of Straw Dogs: Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

     
     

2. • premium: True
   • source:
   • content:

     Starred review from October 31, 2011
     Cultural anthropologists trying to figure out if there really is a recognizably Jewish voice and sense of humor, and if so, how it mixes and matches its key elements of self-deprecation, mordant compliance, hypochondria, and a total lack of surprise when disaster occurs, should consider Auslander’s debut novel. The author’s memoir, Foreskin’s Lament, was about growing up in and leaving the Orthodox Jewish community; this novel’s hero, Solomon Kugel, isn’t observant, but he’s still locked into a relationship with a God he “could never believe in... but he could never not believe in, either.” And with a mother who insists she’s a Holocaust survivor, major money problems, a farmhouse that’s not only on the hit list of a local arsonist but also features an unwanted occupant in the attic, he’s fully immersed in what Philip Roth (an obvious influence, down to a shared obsession with Anne Frank) once called “the incredible drama of being a Jew.” Things start out hilarious and if the book wanes a bit as life keeps getting worse for Kugel, God’s plaything, that’s okay. As funny as it is, the novel is also a philosophical treatise, a response—ambivalent, irreverent, and almost certainly offensive to some—to the question of whether art and life are possible after the Holocaust, an examination of how to “never forget” without, as Kugel’s infamous attic occupant puts it, “never shutting up about it.”

popularity

18

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FROM THE CREATOR OF SHOWTIME'S "HAPPYISH"
The bestselling debut novel from Shalom Auslander, the darkly comic author of Foreskin’s Lament and Beware of God.
 
Hope: A Tragedy is a hilarious and haunting examination of the burdens and abuse of history, propelled with unstoppable rhythm and filled with existential musings and mordant wit. It is a comic and compelling story of the hopeless longing to be free of those pasts that haunt our every present.
 
The rural town of Stockton, New York, is famous for nothing: no one was born there, no one died there, nothing of any historical import at all has ever happened there, which is why Solomon Kugel, like other urbanites fleeing their pasts and histories, decided to move his wife and young son there.
To begin again. To start anew. But it isn’t quite working out that way for Kugel…
His ailing mother stubbornly holds on to life, and...

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