YAIR ASSULIN’S The Drive, an award-winning Israeli novel first published in Hebrew in 2011, has just been released in the United States by New Vessel Press, in a translation by Jessica Cohen. It is a slim book that speaks volumes about the current state of Israel.
The Drive represents a new landmark in Israeli fiction. Israel has always had a strong national literature with many respected novelists, from S. Y. Agnon, who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1966, to such notable names as Amos Oz, A. B. Yehoshua, Batya Gur, Aharon Appelfeld, and David Grossman (whose Man Booker International Prize–winning novel A Horse Walks into a Bar [2014] was also translated into English by Cohen). Most recently, Etgar Keret has gained worldwide acclaim for his absurdist, comic, and fantastic short stories.
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