Deep and delightful. Sad lonely characters searching for meaning. He combines the everyday of mainly Old World Jewry with speculation, myth and a touch of politics. The collection bridges the thriving and the destruction of the Ashkenazy world. Classic Singer, in fact. ( )

I was expecting some really corny pro-vegan crap when I started reading this, but surprise surprise! Although the pro-vegan is in here… you don’t get that feeling one gets when talking with a vegan… you know like they try to force feed you their ideals and crap… not all! Instead you get his awesome stories that make you wonder how the fuck did this shit never made it to my to-read shelve before!? This is some serious deep shit! But not the kind of deep shit that don’t come from a pompous bastard… you know… like you reading something and you realize pretty quick that whoever wrote it is a smart mother fucker… but not the kind of smart mother fucker who likes to make you feel stupid… arg!!! Now I’m having problems explaining this shit! Look! What I think I’m trying to say is that these are all great short stories… I really like this book! I learned a lot of my people’s culture from it (for those of you who don’t know this I’m a Protestant Jew) like the fact that I can negotiate the marriage contract with my bride’s parents! This is fucking awesome! If I were to become rich one day… I could get picky and shit with what I want to go down in my marriage! By contract! And if I’m on demand (and we all know I am!) I can come up with crazy shit like what kind of food I want in the wedding, and what should my bride wear on the wedding day!!! Yay!!! Also there is some bestiality going down… and if all of this wasn’t enough! THERE ARE FUCKING ZOMBIES!!!! I love it!!! Great book!!! Highly recommended! Thank you K.I.
( )

I only read a few of the stories, didn't really "get" them, and decided I'm not smart enough to appreciate this collection.

The stories are:
The Seance
The Slaughterer, originally published in The New Yorker
The Dead Fiddler, written in 1968, originally published in The New Yorker
The Lecture, originally published in Playboy
Cockadoodledoo
The Plagiarist
Zeitl and Rickel, originally published in The Hudson Review
The Warehouse
Henne Fire, originally published in Playboy
Getzel the Monkey
Yanda
The Needle
Two Corpses Go Dancing - published in Yiddish in 1943
The Parrot
The Brooch
The Letter Writer, originally published in The New Yorker

What a nice collection.

I had no idea what to expect – I had never heard of Isaac Bashevis Singer. But contained in this book are a collection of stories that draw you in slowly, not knowing you’ve just been trapped. For lack of a better term, they seem to be a type of Jewish mysticism. The stories are deeply steeped in this “Jewishness”, permeated with the culture and religious underpinnings of the devout. But they are also wrapped up in the same type of mindset that brought us the Golem. No Golems here, but we do see the dead getting married, angels handing out bodies, a man who by too perfectly mimicking another becomes the other, a woman who is a demon – a lot of strange stuff. And even when the mystical is not specifically included, the tradition of the Jewish culture permeates the atmosphere of these stories so strongly, it still feels mystical.

I happened to be reading this book at the same time I was completing two others. The strongest recommendation I can give to this book is that I kept wanting to come back to this one over the others. Those books weren’t bad, this was just better. ( )