Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
The House of Love and Prayer: And Other Stories

The House of Love and Prayer: And Other Stories

Reich, Tova

Paperback

General FictionLiterary Fiction

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 1644214849
ISBN13: 9781644214848
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Published: Sep 23 2025
Pages: 224
Weight: 0.57
Height: 0.60 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.30
Language: English
[Tova Reich's] verbal blade is amazingly, ingeniously, startlingly, all-consumingly, all-encompassingly, deservedly, and brilliantly savage.--Cynthia Ozick

In this extraordinary collection of short fiction, Jewish National Book Award finalist Tova Reich dives deep into the world of Orthodox Jewry--a world that her stories embrace with respect and affection while also poking at the faultlines in its unshakeable traditions.

For the first time in paperback, Reich's eight stories are populated by seekers--of holiness, illumination, liberation, meaning, love. Their journeys unfold in the US, Israel, Poland, China, often in the very heart of the Jewish world, and are rendered with an insider's authority. The narrative voice bringing all this to life has been described as fearlessly satiric and subversive, with a moral but not moralizing edge, equally alive to the sacred and the profane, comically absurd to the point of tragedy.

From the opening story, The Lost Girl (winner of a National Magazine Award in Fiction) to Dead Zone in the closing pages of this collection, we are confronted with souls unable to rest, unable to find release, searching for their place in this life, and beyond. Between these two stories, we encounter a true believer seeking personal redemption in China (Forbidden City) and an aged woman longing at the end of her life to find a way back to her mother (The Plot). Three of the stories, The Page Turner, The Third Generation, and Dedicated to the Dead, are animated by the long-term fallout from the Holocaust--generational trauma, abuse of memory, competitive victimization, and more. In the midst of all this is the story The House of Love and Prayer, which, in its way, encompasses the entire spectrum.

The novelist Howard Norman has said, Few contemporary writers are truly original. Tova Reich is one of them. Read this book and discover her satiric genius.

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