Shylock Is My Name by Howard Jacobson

Shylock Is My Name by Howard Jacobson

Man Booker Prize-winner Howard Jacobson brings his singular brilliance to this modern re-imagining of one of Shakespeare's most unforgettable characters: Shylock

Winter, a cemetery, Shylock. In this provocative and profound interpretation of The Merchant of Venice, Shylock is juxtaposed against his present-day counterpart in the character of art dealer and conflicted father Simon Strulovitch. With characteristic irony, Jacobson presents Shylock as a man of incisive wit and passion, concerned still with questions of identity, parenthood, anti-Semitism and revenge.

While Strulovich struggles to reconcile himself to his daughter Beatrice's betrayal of her family and heritage - as she is carried away by the excitement of Manchester high society, and into the arms of a footballer notorious for giving a Nazi salute on the field - Shylock alternates grief for his beloved wife with rage against his own daughter's rejection of her Jewish upbringing. Culminating in a shocking twist on Shylock's demand for the infamous pound of flesh, Jacobson's insightful retelling examines contemporary, acutely relevant questions of Jewish identity while maintaining a poignant sympathy for its characters and a genuine spiritual kinship with its antecedent--a drama which Jacobson himself considers to be the most troubling of Shakespeare's plays for anyone, but, for an English novelist who happens to be Jewish, also the most challenging.

Jacobson, Howard: - Howard Jacobson was born on August 25, 1942 in Manchester, England. He is a Man Booker Prize-winning British author and journalist. He studied English at Downing College, Cambridge under F. R. Leavis. He lectured for three years at the University of Sydney before returning to England to teach at Selwyn College, Cambridge. His later teaching posts included a period at Wolverhampton Polytechnic from 1974 to 1980. His time at Wolverhampton was to form the basis of his first novel, Coming from Behind, a campus comedy about a failing polytechnic that plans to merge facilities with a local football club. He also wrote a travel book in 1987, titled In the Land of Oz, which was researched during his time as a visiting academic in Sydney. His fiction, particularly in the six novels he has published since 1998, is characterized chiefly by a discursive and humorous style. His 1999 novel The Mighty Walzer, about a teenage table tennis champion, won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for comic writing. In October 2010 Jacobson won the Man Booker Prize for his novel The Finkler Question, which was the first comic novel to win the prize since Kingsley Amis's The Old Devils in 1986. In 2013 he made The New York Times Best Seller List with his title Whole Rethinking the Science of Nutrition which he co-authored with T. Colin Campbell.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9780804141321
ISBN 10	0804141320
Title	Shylock Is My Name
Author	Howard Jacobson
Series	Hogarth Shakespeare
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Hogarth Press
Year published	2016-02-09
Number of pages	288
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.
Note	Unavailable