“Candid, cunning, brave, and wickedly funny,” these stories “will make you remember the first time you read Philip Roth” (Salvatore Scibona).
Set it the Jewish communities of Georgia -- from the 1920s to the present day -- this Mary McCarthy Prize-winning collection investigates the crossroads of desire and religion in seven “funny, fearless outsiders' tales . . . of sexual coming-of-age and temptation” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).
A gay man attends his high school reunion in Savannah, where he's pursued by the now-married golden-boy football star from his youth. An awkward teenager grapples with notions of God, superstition, and girls at his bar mitzvah. A curator's assistant unearths the groundbreaking mystery of a Renaissance painter, and an even more surprising one in his personal life. A charitable cantor's hopes for a budding romance are matched only by his remorse after acting on impulse. An aging widow, devoted to ancestral Jewish tradition, takes an unexpected stand against her modern-thinking grandson.
In this illuminating collective of friends, family, and lovers dealing with shifting social norms in the South, “Friedman explores the balance between religious morality and personal desires in a style similar to Isaac Bashevis Singer and contemplates memory and loss as masterfully as Nathan Englander” (Southern Humanities Review). Though “Friedman works in that same O'Connor-Welty tradition . . . these stories shouldn't be pigeonholed by regionalism or sexuality. In Friedman's well made, rich, and finely paced stories, characters struggle to wed their desires to their community's expectations and traditions -- traits that resonate regardless of creed, address, race, or sexuality” (Los Angeles Review of Books).
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