Novelists Oscar Hijuelos and Katharine Weber babble about Leora Skolkin-Smith’s admission novel, Edges, a adventure set in pre-1967 Israel and Palestine. Narrator Liana Bialik is fourteen years old if her American father’s suicide armament her ancestors to leave their New York suburb and acknowledgment to her mother’s built-in Jerusalem. Although tensions simmer below the apparent of this disconnected land, Liana’s mother longs to accumulate with ancestors and the admired citizenry that her ancestors fought for as allotment of the 1940’s Haganah (the Jewish underground). For Liana, however, the adorableness and agitation of this acreage becomes a abode of animal and affecting self-discovery. With her adolescent lover, she escapes to abide in the Palestinian apple above Jerusalem’s border. There, she grows abroad from her acute accord with her mother into a adulthood formed by the boundary-less spaces of a absent cartography and people.
-- "Edges" takes the clairvoyant to an Israel afore top walls formed a border, when, instead, metal affairs afraid "like hosiery lines" above the land. Liana’s advancing of age brings this agitated arena into amazing ablaze and relief.
A PEN/Faulkner Award Nominee, "Edges" will be
featured at The Virginia Festival of the Book, 2006. "Edges" was aswell best by "The Bloomsbury Review's 25th Anniversary Issue" as a "Favorite Book of the Last 25 Years"
Ms. Skolkin-Smith has accustomed grants from The New York State Council on the Arts, The Department of Cultural affairs, The Millay Colony for the Arts, The Vermont Studio Center, and Art-Without-Walls. She was awarded a Teaching Fellowship for alum plan at Sarah Lawrence College area she holds a BA and MFA in writing.
Reviewers accept written:
"Leora Skolkin-Smith's Edges is "sensual, visual," addendum Carolyn Howard-Johnson, application a agreeable appearance to back the family's "tendency against secrecy," says Duffie Bart.'
-Blake Eskin, Nextbook
"Edges is an alluringly written, absolutely affective atypical that has a lot to say about love, identity, history and the acceptation of nationality. The book is account account abandoned for its superb language, but it is arresting and acclaimed as able-bodied in its adventure cogent and abstraction of abode and emotions. It is a admirable atypical by an columnist with a absolutely able articulation and style, one able-bodied admirable a advanced and acceptant audience. -Oscar Hijuelos, columnist of the Pulitzer-prize acceptable novel, "The Mambo King Sings Songs of Love"
"Edges is an affected and affective novel. Leora Skolkin-Smith has that attenuate allowance of the biographer who can back the affection — the aspect of a abode and its humans — with attention and clarity. A annoying debut."
—Katharine Weber, columnist of "The Little Women" and "The Music Lesson"
"Where, and how and to whom do we absolutely belong? Skolkin's ablaze admission atypical is a anesthetic brainwork on the ever-changing boundaries of adulation and need. A advancing of age adventure of the band amid a adolescent American and her able mother, categorical in a wartime Mideast as alive and alarming and abstruse as the Israeli desert."
—Caroline Leavitt, columnist of "Girls in Trouble" and "Coming Back to Me"
"... The agitation both of the babe and her mother is graphically abundant as they attempt to ascertain themselves in the ablaze of a apparitional accomplished and present. The balladry of the girl’s animal activation ripples through abounding pages, abatement the angry realities of the battle amid Arab and Jew. The pages arm-twist as able-bodied the memories of a aggregate land, and the mother’s adolescence growing up in an old Jerusalem afore the city-limits was afar by concrete barriers, the religious, cultural, bisect amid Arab and Jew easier to bridge. The author’s active faculty of landscape, her allowance for anecdotic with both mother and daughter, Arab and Jew, gives the atypical a different faculty of antithesis and brings the reader, behindhand of political confidence into accord with this account of a vanished Jerusalem. Edges is a able abstraction of absent worlds which it is a joy to aberrate aback into."
--Mark Mirsky, biographer and architect of Fiction Magazine, and Professor of English at City College of New York. Books cover "Diaries: Robert Musil 1899-1942"; "Dante, Eros, and Kabbalah"; "My Search for the Messiah: Studies and Wanderings in Israel and America";" Blue Hill Avenue: A Novel"; "The Red Adam"; and" Absent Shakespeare."
"EDGES: ISRAEL, O PALESTINE"
by Leora Skolkin-Smith, Edited by Grace Paley
Glad Day Books
June, 2005
ISBN 1-930180-14-4
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