A new collection from an acknowledged master of flash-fiction

“The short texts of Alex Epstein virtuously echo the great tradition of world literature in a truly original manner, as the tension between the classical and the intuitively improvised creates in the reader’s mind the literary equivalent of a cross between Mozart and Miles Davis.”
—Etgar Keret

“Israel’s new Borges... a master of flash-fiction who distills stories to their aphoristic essence.”
—Jewish Daily Forward

The stories in Lunar Savings Time slip through time and between dreams and waking, between native tongue and elusive translation, long-dead writers and just-opened books. Alex Epstein has created a masterwork in the finest strokes—stories in which humor, stubborn memory, and strange beauty meet and part ways in less than a page. Through these pages journey a woman who travels back in time to visit a psychoanalyst; Kafka, had he lived and emigrated to Israel after the Holocaust; the wandering Cain; the siege of Leningrad; Zen masters, beggars, writers, ghosts. In Epstein’s lyrical philosophy, every imaginative proposition must answer to the burden of history—or perhaps, for every moon, there’s rain; for every love story, the fact of time. “He can be placed next to Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Kafka, Borges,” Haaretz has said of Epstein; Lunar Savings Time is his most radical collection yet, a wondrous achievement.

Alex Epstein is the author of seven works of fiction in Hebrew, and in 2003 received the Israeli prime minister’s prize for literature. He has been a fellow at the University of Denver and currently teaches in Tel Aviv. His collection Blue Has No South is also published by Clockroot Books, and his stories have appeared in the Kenyon Review, the Iowa Review, and elsewhere.

Becka Mara McKay is the author of the poetry collection A Meteorologist in the Promised Land and the translator of Alex Epstein’s Blue Has No South.

for more information:

http://www.clockrootbooks.com/clockrootbooks/lunarsavingstime.html

http://www.montrealgazette.com/entertainment/books/Alex+Epstein+Minimal+length+maximum+impact/4663361/story.html

http://www.guernicamag.com/fiction/2662/epstein_5_15_11/