A Virtual Event in partnership with 70 Faces Media
Every author dreams of winning the Man Booker Prize, one of the most prestigious literary awards on the planet. No Israeli had . . . until David Grossman bowled over the 2017 jury with A Horse Walks into a Bar.
“[E]very sentence counts,” the selection panel chair explained in bestowing the award on Grossman. “[E]very word matters in this supreme example of the writer’s craft.”
That was hardly the first time this Israeli national literary treasure had received such praise. The renowned journalist and peace activist — whose writings have been alternately the cris de coeur of a distraught patriot and his escape from political reality — wasn’t yet 30 years old when he won the Israeli Prime Minister’s Prize for Creativity. Since then, he’s been awarded France’s Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, the Frankfurt Peace Prize, the National Jewish Book Award, the Italian Premio Flaiano and the Israel Prize, the state’s highest honor.
The Streicker Center and 70 Faces Media are honored to welcome you to hear from Grossman upon the publication of his latest novel, More Than I Love My Life, a tender tale of three generations of women bound together by love, blood and secrets.
Author of 12 works of fiction and five of nonfiction, David Grossman lives in Jerusalem.
In conversation with award-winning journalist and author Sandee Brawarsky.
More about the book:
Grossman’s tender and disquieting latest (after A Horse Walks into a Bar) looks at three generations of women whose bonds are fissured by histories of restlessness and war. Gili, an aspiring filmmaker, has never forgiven her mother, Nina, for leaving her and her father when Gili was a toddler. Nina was raised in Yugoslavia and hasn’t recovered from her own sense of abandonment after her mother, Vera, an anti-Nazi partisan, was held in a prison camp for refusing to renounce communism. Vera, who’s both Gili’s biological grandmother and the stepmother of Gili’s father, Rafael, is the family’s center. When Nina visits for Vera’s 90th birthday party, she asks filmmaker Rafael to make a documentary for the family about their relationship; ultimately, Gili, who once worked as Rafael’s assistant, insists on having the final edit both out of a desire for creative fulfillment and to make sure they get the project right. The four talk, film, and revisit the dilapidated island prison, and their relationships shift as they grapple with Vera’s and Nina’s past. Grossman shines a light on the victims of the violent split between Tito and Stalin, as well as on the stories people tell themselves to explain, survive, and forgive. And in Vera, who is nimble and sharp at 90, endlessly self-mythologizing, and possessed of a broken Hebrew that Cohen renders into idiosyncratic broken English, the author has created an unforgettable character. This adds another remarkable achievement to Grossman’s long list. (Source: Publisher Weekly)