Agnon: 13 books

The Bridal Canopy, Nobel laureate S.Y. Agnon’s mock epic novel, is an elaborate frame story encompassing dozens of Hassidic tales. Set in early nineteenth-century Galicia, the plot is part quest, part comedy of errors,   progressively departing from its opening tone of realism. It is the...

S.Y. Agnon was the greatest Hebrew writer of the twentieth century, and the only Hebrew writer to receive the Nobel Prize for literature. He devoted the last years of his life to writing a massive cycle of stories about Buczacz, the Galician town (now in Ukraine) in which he grew up. Yet when these...

This collection of S.Y. Agnon’s short stories, published in commemoration of the 50th anniversary of his Nobel Prize in Literature, surveys the major theme in his writing: the epic transformations in the life of the Jewish people – both in Europe and in the Land of Israel. In new and revised translations,...

Shira is Nobel laureate S.Y. Agnon’s final, epic novel. Unfinished at the time of his death in 1970, the Hebrew original was published a year later. With this newly revised English translation by Zeva Shapiro, including archival material never before published in English, The Toby Press launches...

In time for the 50th anniversary of the awarding of the Nobel Prize to S.Y. Agnon the first and only such award to a Hebrew author The Toby Press presents this first-time edition of his posthumous magnum opus A City in Its Fullness. This English edition contains 27 short stories and novellas, a literary...

A new English language edition of a very popular Hebrew book – the first time Hebrew literature’s only Nobel laureate has had his stories rendered in graphic form. These three tales (which retain Agnon’s original prose) rendered in “comics” form, are among the most beloved by Israeli children...

S.Y. Agnon’s first book-length, breakthrough work, originally published in Hebrew in 1912 and now available in English for the first time in a fully annotated edition—this novella depicts an impossible moral dilemma faced by the tragic hero Menasheh Chaim, in mid-19th century Buczacz (in today’s...

1. A first-time translation of “Young and Old Together” (originally published in 1920), his longest satire, and his first substantial literary treatment of his Galician youth. The object of the satire is something Agnon knew very well first-hand: the young Zionists of his native hometown. In the...

A Guest for the Night (first published in 1939 as Germany invaded Poland) is Agnon’s depiction of how all modern movements aside from Zionism – secularism, Haskalah, socialism, communism – failed to provide a viable alternative to traditional life. But, he is clear, even traditional life was...

To a large degree, In Mr. Lublin’s Store sums up Agnon’s thematic and formal development. This novel is also a prime example of an objective correlative for a world that is out of joint—a world where a plot is no longer possible because impersonal forces deriving from the setting where it takes...

Szybusz, a small town in Jewish Galicia, is the scene of a bitter¬sweet romance at the beginning of the twentieth century. Few of Agnon’s stories are told as effortlessly as A Simple Story, yet this engaging tale reveals the profound psychological and social insights of the Nobel Laureate’s finest fiction.

When Israeli Nobel Laureate S. Y. Agnon published the novel Only Yesterday in 1945, it quickly became recognized as a major work of world literature, not only for its vivid historical reconstruction of Israel's founding society. The book tells a seemingly simple tale about a man who immigrates to...

In Betrothed, Jacob Rechnitz, a marine biologist arrives in pre-World War I Jaffa on the Mediterranean coast of the Land of Israel. His scholarly pursuits and gentle dalliance with six girls is interrupted by the arrival of his benefactor Ehrlich and his daughter Shoshanah, who is destined to rouse Jacob from his waking slumber through the power of their childhood betrothal oath.