A Horse Walks Into a Bar: A novel

by David Grossman, Jessica Cohen (Translator)

Overview

WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE • From the bestselling author of To the End of the Land comes a searing story of loss and survival.

In a dive bar in a small Israeli city, Dov Greenstein, a comedian a bit past his prime, takes the stage for his final show. Over the course of a single evening, Dov’s patter becomes a kind of memoir, taking us back into the terrors of his childhood. And in the dance between comic and audience, a deeper story begins to take shape as Dov confronts the decision that has shaped the course of his life—a story that will alter the lives of several of those in attendance.

A Horse Walks Into a Bar is a poignant exploration of how people confront life’s capricious battering.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781101973493
Publisher:	Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Publication date:	01/16/2018
Series:	Vintage International
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	208
Sales rank:	404,941
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

David Grossman was born in Jerusalem. He is the author of numerous works of fiction, nonfiction, and children’s literature. His writing has appeared in The New Yorker and has been translated into more than forty languages. He is the recipient of many prizes, including the French Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, the Buxtehuder Bulle in Germany, Rome’s Premio per la Pace e l’Azione Umanitaria, the Premio Ischia international award for journalism, Israel’s Emet Prize, and the Albatross Prize given by the Günter Grass Foundation.
 
Jessica Cohen was born in England, raised in Israel, and now lives in the United States. She has translated contemporary Israeli fiction, nonfiction, and other creative works, including David Grossman’s To the End of the Land and Falling Out of Time.

Read an Excerpt

Good evening! good evening! Good evening to the majestic city of Ceasariyaaaaaah!”
(Continues…)

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Excerpted from "A Horse Walks Into a Bar"
by .
Copyright © 2018 David Grossman.
Excerpted by permission of Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Editorial Reviews

WINNER OF THE 2017 MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE 
A New York Times and Washington Post Notable Book

“Astounding. . . . [A] magnificently comic and sucker-punch-tragic excursion into brilliance.” —Gary Shteyngart, The New York Times Book Review

“Unsettling and mesmerizing. . . . As beautiful as it is unusual, and it’s nearly impossible to put down.” —NPR
 
“Bewitching. . . . Brilliant, blistering.” —The Washington Post

“[Grossman] has transcended genre; or rather, he has descended deep into the vaults beneath. . . . This isn’t just a book about Israel: it’s about people and societies horribly malfunctioning.” —The Guardian
 
“As cunning and compelling as the stand-up guy at its center. In this funnyman’s sad, grotesque performance, Grossman reaffirms his power to entertain and unnerve.” —The Boston Globe

“Arresting. . . . Grossman seems to be channeling Philip Roth, circa Portnoy’s Complaint, with a colloquial voice that badgers, bullies, berates and beseeches.” —San Francisco Chronicle
 
“A short, shocking masterpiece . . . in which absurdity and humour are used to probe the darkest corners of the human condition.” —The Sunday Times (London)
 
“[A] pitch-black comedy. . . . It takes an author of Mr Grossman’s stature to channel not a failed stand-up but a shockingly effective one, and to give him salty, scabrous gags that—in Jessica Cohen’s savoury translation—raise a guilty laugh.” —The Economist
 
“Grossman has once more proved himself as one of Israel’s finest literary alchemists. . . . An unsettling, cathartic, confessional stream-of-consciousness soliloquy.” —Haaretz
 
“[A] raw and fiercely emotional book.” —The Spectator
 
“In little more than 200 pages, Grossman brings us to the nerve center of his psyche.” —The Jerusalem Post
 
“Few writers hold a more unflinching mirror up to Israeli society than Grossman . . . But [his work] is also suffused with compassion, acutely attuned to the complexity of individual lives and the solutions people find to the challenge of that complexity.” —Financial Times
 
“A devastating work. . . . A lamentation and a plea for compassion and empathy. . . . A Horse Walks into a Bar is unlike anything Grossman has yet done.” —The Irish Times

From the Publisher

…[a] magnificently comic and sucker-punch-tragic excursion into brilliance…This is material Grossman has explored previously; indeed, some of it mirrors his own biography. But never has he presented it in one sustained performative howl, combining the comic dexterity of a Louis C.K. with a Portnoyish level of detail…I marveled at Grossman's novel To the End of the Land…After I read the last page, I felt happy for Grossman. I felt that he had accomplished his life mission as a writer, which very few get to do. And yet, from a practitioner's standpoint, I think A Horse Walks Into a Bar is even better. Its technical proficiency is astounding. At 194 pages, there is nothing extraneous, not one comma, not one word, not one drop of a comic's sweat…Grossman's portrayal of Israeli society is rich and complete, filled with sociopolitical detail but rendered with a stand-up's shrug of the shoulders…And, oh, yes, Grossman is funny…Grossman has taken it to a new level. He has left a trail of blood and sweat on the page that only a true master—a Lenny Bruce, a Franz Kafka—could dream of replicating.

The New York Times Book Review - Gary Shteyngart

02/27/2017
Grossman (To the End of the Land) masterfully balances the neuroses and hard-earned insight of veteran stand-up comedian Dov Greenstein with a defining memory that’s 40 years in the shaping. The story of Dov’s life—his worship of a mentally ill mother who survived the Holocaust, his contentious relationship with his father, his awkward adolescence, and a brief stay at a military camp in Gadna—unspools over one evening in a basement club in the small city of Netanya, Israel, related through the observations of Avishai Lazar, a boyhood friend of Dov’s and, later, a respected judge. As Dov immerses himself in his act, the audience—many of whom eventually walk out in bewilderment or anger at Dov’s deeply personal (and often decidedly grim) revelations—come to understand that, amid the self-deprecating humor and good-natured banter, the comedian is, for the first time, recounting the formative event of his life. “For an instant, when he looks up, the spotlight creates an optical illusion,” Avishai muses as he watches Dov discover what has lain hidden for decades, “and a fifty-seven-year-old boy is reflected out of a fourteen-year-old man.” Grossman wrestles with questions of faith and friendship, fate and family, with empathy, wisdom, and acerbic wit. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

11/01/2017
Winner of the 2017 Man Booker International Prize, this harrowing story takes place in the span of only two hours and unfolds during the final show of stand-up comedian Dovaleh Gee. (LJ 9/15/16)SEE ALSO: Grossman's Falling Out of Time (2014), To the End of the Land (2010), Lion's Honey (2006), Her Body Knows (2005), Someone To Run With (2004)

Library Journal

2016-11-07
Take my life. Take my life, please….Dov Greenstein is on stage in Caesarea—Hello, is this microphone working?—or somewhere, at any rate, any of a hundred dusty Israeli towns, marking time before the spotlights in a tiny bar. "Looks like my agent fucked me again," he says, and the audience laughs appreciatively. He throws out a few insults, a few jibes, and asks them, "Why are you dumbasses laughing? That joke was about you!" But he's no Don Rickles, not Dovelah. He's on the stage, it seems, to work out some personal issues and not a little bit of existential angst. To that end, he's invited an old friend, Avishai Lazar, a former judge, to attend. Avishai, the narrator, has known Dov since childhood and summer camp, and he's amazed at the amount of hurt the comedian has stowed away, the better to make jokes out of, perhaps, but enough to keep an army of psychiatrists busy. Besides, there's some payback in the offing for some long-ago slight: "The sweetness of the revenge I am about to be subjected to," Avishai thinks. Along the way, Grossman (To the End of the Land, 2010, etc.) unveils scenes from Israeli history and society: through Dov, he jokes that one woman's hairdo was designed by the same engineer who built the nuclear plant at Dimona, and it's not long before the Holocaust is dusted off and worked into the bit. The comic patter becomes ever more fraught, ever less funny; as one audience member protests, "People come here to have a good time, it's the weekend, you wanna clear your head, and this guy gives us Yom Kippur." Yes, and not a little Freud, too. The book is an assault on the reader, a provocation and a challenge; Grossman takes great risks, but in the end there is reward in a kind of redemption— and in any event, thank the heavens, the bad jokes stop.Another thoughtful, if odd and caustic, story from one of Israel's greatest contemporary writers.

Kirkus Reviews