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The Puttermesser Papers

A Novel

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Finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award

With dashing originality and in prose that sings like an entire choir of sirens, Cynthia Ozick relates the life and times of her most compelling fictional creation. Ruth Puttermesser lives in New York City. Her learning is monumental. Her love life is minimal (she prefers pouring through Plato to romping with married Morris Rappoport). Her fantasies have a disconcerting tendency to come true - with disastrous consequences for what we laughably call "reality."

Puttermesser yearns for a daughter and promptly creates one, unassisted, in the form of the first recorded female golem. Laboring in the dusty crevices of the civil service, she dreams of reforming the city and manages to get herself elected mayor. Puttermesser contemplates the afterlife and is hurtled into it headlong, only to discover that paradise found is also paradise lost. Overflowing with ideas, lambent with wit, The Puttermesser Papers is a tour de force by one of our most visionary novelists.

"The finest achievement of Ozick's career... It has all the buoyant integrity of a Chagall painting." —San Francisco Chronicle

"Fanciful, poignant... so intelligent, so finely expressed that, like its main character, it remains endearing, edifying, a spark of light in the gloom." —The New York Times
  • FINALIST | 1999
    IMPAC Dublin Literary Award
© Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times/Redux
CYNTHIA OZICK, a recipient of a Lannan Literary Award for fiction and a National Book Critics Circle winner for essays, is the author of Trust, The Messiah of Stockholm, The Shawl, and The Puttermesser Papers, and many others. She lives in New York. View titles by Cynthia Ozick

About

Finalist for the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award

With dashing originality and in prose that sings like an entire choir of sirens, Cynthia Ozick relates the life and times of her most compelling fictional creation. Ruth Puttermesser lives in New York City. Her learning is monumental. Her love life is minimal (she prefers pouring through Plato to romping with married Morris Rappoport). Her fantasies have a disconcerting tendency to come true - with disastrous consequences for what we laughably call "reality."

Puttermesser yearns for a daughter and promptly creates one, unassisted, in the form of the first recorded female golem. Laboring in the dusty crevices of the civil service, she dreams of reforming the city and manages to get herself elected mayor. Puttermesser contemplates the afterlife and is hurtled into it headlong, only to discover that paradise found is also paradise lost. Overflowing with ideas, lambent with wit, The Puttermesser Papers is a tour de force by one of our most visionary novelists.

"The finest achievement of Ozick's career... It has all the buoyant integrity of a Chagall painting." —San Francisco Chronicle

"Fanciful, poignant... so intelligent, so finely expressed that, like its main character, it remains endearing, edifying, a spark of light in the gloom." —The New York Times

Awards

  • FINALIST | 1999
    IMPAC Dublin Literary Award

Author

© Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times/Redux
CYNTHIA OZICK, a recipient of a Lannan Literary Award for fiction and a National Book Critics Circle winner for essays, is the author of Trust, The Messiah of Stockholm, The Shawl, and The Puttermesser Papers, and many others. She lives in New York. View titles by Cynthia Ozick

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