Writing in the Dark: Essays on Literature and Politics » (First Edition)

DAVID GROSSMAN is the author of seven novels, two works of journalism, and a previous volume of collected commentary. He lives in Jerusalem.

Throughout his career, David Grossman has been a voice for peace and reconciliation between Israel and its Arab citizens and neighbors. In these six essays on politics and culture in Israel, he addresses the conscience of a country that has lost faith in its leaders and its ideals. The collection includes an already famous speech concerning the disastrous Second Lebanon War of 2006, the war that took the life of Grossman's twenty-one-year-old son, Uri.

Moving, human, clear-sighted, and courageous, touching on literature and artistic creation as well as politics and philosophy, these writings are a cri de coeur from "a writer who has been, for nearly two decades, one of the most original and talented not only in his own country, but anywhere" (The New York Times Book Review).

Publishers Weekly

Peace activist and vocal advocate for "relinquishing the Territories and ending the Occupation," Israeli novelist Grossman is unafraid of controversy; these six essays, however, address these concerns more obliquely, through the lens of literature. "Books That Have Read Me" merges the young reader's discovery that "books are the place in the world where both the thing and the loss of it can be contained" with the older writer's urge "to describe contemporary political reality in a language that is not the public, general, nationalized idiom." Grossman's passions are two-an Israel at peace with its neighbors and a citizenry restored to dignity through the individual language of literature, which "can bring us together with the fate of those who are distant and foreign." Grossman lays claim to an "acquired naïveté" in his hopefulness; how welcome and enlightening it is. (Oct.)

Books That Have Read Me 3

The Desire to Be Gisella 29

Writing in the Dark 59

Individual Language and Mass Language 69

Contemplations on Peace 87

Yitzhak Rabin Memorial Rally 121