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Antiquities and Other Stories book cover
Antiquities and Other Stories
2022
First Published
3.42
Average Rating
266
Number of Pages

From one of our most preeminent writers, a tale that captures the shifting meanings of the past and how our experience colors those meanings, now alongside four previously uncollected stories In Antiquities, Lloyd Wilkinson Petrie, one of the seven elderly trustees of the now-defunct (for thirty-four years) Temple Academy for Boys, is preparing a memoir of his days at the school, intertwined with the troubling distractions of present events. As he navigates, with faltering recall, between the subtle anti-Semitism that pervaded the school's ethos and his fascination with his own family's heritage—in particular, his illustrious cousin, the renowned archaeologist Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie—he reconstructs the passions of a childhood encounter with the oddly named Ben-Zion Elefantin, a mystifying older pupil who claims descent from Egypt's Elephantine Island. Included alongside this wondrous tale, touched by unsettling irony and with the elusive flavor of a Kafka parable, are four additional stories in Cynthia Ozick's brilliant, distinctive voice, weaving myth and mania, history and The Coast of New Zealand, The Bloodline of the Alkanas, Sin, and A Hebrew Sibyl .

Avg Rating
3.42
Number of Ratings
43
5 STARS
16%
4 STARS
37%
3 STARS
26%
2 STARS
14%
1 STARS
7%
goodreads

Author

Cynthia Ozick
Cynthia Ozick
Author · 25 books

Recipient of the first Rea Award for the Short Story (in 1976; other winners Rea honorees include Lorrie Moore, John Updike, Alice Munro), an American Academy of Arts and Letters Mildred and Harold Strauss Living Award, and the PEN/Malamud award in 2008. Upon publication of her 1983 The Shawl, Edmund White wrote in the New York Times, "Miss Ozick strikes me as the best American writer to have emerged in recent years...Judaism has given to her what Catholicism gave to Flannery O'Connor."

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