"Intellectual comedy of the highest order."
In this brilliant, inventive tour de force, Joseph Skibell presents an unforgettable character, a lovelorn Candide wandering optimistically through modern history. Along the way, the amorous ghost of his wife – whom he abandoned on their wedding day when he was only twelve – pursues and haunts him.
Our young hero, Dr. Jakob Josef Sammelsohn, arrives in Vienna in the 1890s, befriends Sigmund Freud, and is led into the arms of Emma Eckstein, one of Freud's most famous patients. Later, he romances the beautiful and wealthy Loë Bernfeld, who inducts him into the world of Esperanto and the universal language movement. And finally, he finds himself in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1940, where he becomes a pawn in a battle over Heaven.
A Curable Romantic is a novel of personal and historical exile that could spring only from the imagination of a virtuoso. Often fantastical, yet always grounded in tradition, it is a rare literary feat – a truly incomparable tale, people with characters who live on in the memory.
"Skibell's special gift is to be intoxicated by prose and to know how to cast into the magic pools of language for wondrous things, which he pulls out phrase by phrase, sentence by sentence, page by page."
Purchase at these online book stores Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Indie Bound, Borders, Powells
Bibliography for . Reviews are here!
In this brilliant, inventive tour de force, Joseph Skibell presents an unforgettable character, a lovelorn Candide wandering optimistically through modern history. Along the way, the amorous ghost of his wife – whom he abandoned on their wedding day when he was only twelve – pursues and haunts him.
Our young hero, Dr. Jakob Josef Sammelsohn, arrives in Vienna in the 1890s, befriends Sigmund Freud, and is led into the arms of Emma Eckstein, one of Freud's most famous patients. Later, he romances the beautiful and wealthy Loë Bernfeld, who inducts him into the world of Esperanto and the universal language movement. And finally, he finds himself in the Warsaw Ghetto in 1940, where he becomes a pawn in a battle over Heaven.
A Curable Romantic is a novel of personal and historical exile that could spring only from the imagination of a virtuoso. Often fantastical, yet always grounded in tradition, it is a rare literary feat – a truly incomparable tale, people with characters who live on in the memory.
"Skibell's special gift is to be intoxicated by prose and to know how to cast into the magic pools of language for wondrous things, which he pulls out phrase by phrase, sentence by sentence, page by page."
Purchase at these online book stores Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Indie Bound, Borders, Powells
Bibliography for . Reviews are here!
A Blessing On The Moon
"When Chaim Skibelski is shot dead and tossed into a pit along with all the other Jewish citizens of a small town in wartime Poland, his trials are only beginning. Scrambling up from this mass grave, the spectral Chaim wanders the countryside (at times guided by his rabbi, who has turned into a crow), his afterlife a remarkable journey of discovery that leads a long way from a peaceful, nurturing eternity. At first harrowing, Joseph Skibell's debut novel proceeds to startle and challenge as it refuses to exploit the ready pathos of the Holocaust, testing its hero's endurance and the reader's expectations. Chaim's journey illuminates the horror of history through the energy and wisdom of fantasy and myth; scene after scene is rich with emotion, humor and invention. Daring in its haunting, often painful honesty, dense in thoughtful observation and unsparing incident, the novel [is] an unlikely page-turner. An act of commemoration (as many as eighteen members of the author's family perished in the Holocaust), A Blessing on the Moon is also a confirmation that no subject lies beyond the grasp of a gifted, committed imagination."
Purchase at these online book stores Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Indie Bound, Borders, Powells
"When Chaim Skibelski is shot dead and tossed into a pit along with all the other Jewish citizens of a small town in wartime Poland, his trials are only beginning. Scrambling up from this mass grave, the spectral Chaim wanders the countryside (at times guided by his rabbi, who has turned into a crow), his afterlife a remarkable journey of discovery that leads a long way from a peaceful, nurturing eternity. At first harrowing, Joseph Skibell's debut novel proceeds to startle and challenge as it refuses to exploit the ready pathos of the Holocaust, testing its hero's endurance and the reader's expectations. Chaim's journey illuminates the horror of history through the energy and wisdom of fantasy and myth; scene after scene is rich with emotion, humor and invention. Daring in its haunting, often painful honesty, dense in thoughtful observation and unsparing incident, the novel [is] an unlikely page-turner. An act of commemoration (as many as eighteen members of the author's family perished in the Holocaust), A Blessing on the Moon is also a confirmation that no subject lies beyond the grasp of a gifted, committed imagination."
Purchase at these online book stores Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Indie Bound, Borders, Powells
The English Disease
"The English Disease tells the wildly funny and sometimes heartbreaking story of Charles Belski, a neurotic Jewish musicologist trying to balance his sense of self and identity, struggling between intellectual and emotional reactions to a life which feels beyond his control. A chronic sufferer of melancholy – "the English disease" – Belski married to escape the tedium of dating, had a child whilst considering divorce, and is now consumed with a seemingly dissonant guilt at his distance from his faith. He narrates his tale with the wicked humor of a master cynic–a journey that starts with a disastrous camping trip meant to save his marriage, continues on a traumatic voyage to Poland with an egomaniacal yet desperately lonely colleague, and finally finds him back in California confronting his assimilated life and his wife's unexpected religious epiphany. Described as "a wildly funny novel that is equal parts Philip Roth, Groucho Marx, and Woody Allen," THE ENGLISH DISEASE tackles the challenges of relationships and changing cultural landscapes with a gentle touch and boundless wit!"
Purchase at these online book stores Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Indie Bound, Borders, Powells
"The English Disease tells the wildly funny and sometimes heartbreaking story of Charles Belski, a neurotic Jewish musicologist trying to balance his sense of self and identity, struggling between intellectual and emotional reactions to a life which feels beyond his control. A chronic sufferer of melancholy – "the English disease" – Belski married to escape the tedium of dating, had a child whilst considering divorce, and is now consumed with a seemingly dissonant guilt at his distance from his faith. He narrates his tale with the wicked humor of a master cynic–a journey that starts with a disastrous camping trip meant to save his marriage, continues on a traumatic voyage to Poland with an egomaniacal yet desperately lonely colleague, and finally finds him back in California confronting his assimilated life and his wife's unexpected religious epiphany. Described as "a wildly funny novel that is equal parts Philip Roth, Groucho Marx, and Woody Allen," THE ENGLISH DISEASE tackles the challenges of relationships and changing cultural landscapes with a gentle touch and boundless wit!"
Purchase at these online book stores Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Indie Bound, Borders, Powells
