PRAISE FOR RHODA LERMAN

GOD’S EAR

“Rhoda Lerman’s brilliant fifth novel, God’s Ear, is by turns playful and prayerful, ironic and deadly serious. Although her idioms and inflections are hauntingly and soothingly familiar … Lerman speaks in her own vatic voice … wildly funny, achingly spiritual, profoundly Jewish and feminist at the same time. When Rhoda Lerman’s wise words enter God’s willing ear, the holy connection crackles.”

—Brett Singer, The New York Times Book Review

“You have company coming, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, and E. L. Doctorow. Her name is Rhoda Lerman and God’s Ear is her fifth book. She knows her Jews, she knows her Southwest, and she spins one terrific yarn out of the two strands.”

—Charles Fenyvesi, The Washington Times

“Lerman has a sharp, lyrical, and almost uncanny ear for the Jewish absurd.”

—Susan Shapiro, Newsday

“Lerman effortlessly works an immense amount of Jewish learning and Hasidic lore into a novel that’s moving, wise, and very, very funny. Irresistible storytelling.”

—Kirkus

“Like a Chagall painting translated to print … The very opposite of a minimalist, Lerman proves herself mistress not only of side-splitting one-liners but also of pregnant perception about faith and virtue.”

—Publishers Weekly

“Seldom have wisecracks and authenticity been so wedded in a Jewish-American novel. God’s Ear laughs its way to religious epiphany that is rare indeed in the contemporary Jewish American novel.”

—Sanford Pinsker, The Philadelphia Inquirer

CALL ME ISHTAR

“The writing is splendid and the imagination is boundless.”

—Ishmael Reed

“A brilliant and original triumph of the imagination.”

—Marge Piercy

“Lerman equals Philip Roth at his own good game—the Jewish absurd. Her eye for the giveaway detail, her ear for the mad halfphrase, her ability to sustain the cadences of a comic scene, all have that peculiar mix of energy, lucidity and hysteria at which Roth excels … Call Me Ishtar announces a writer of genuine talent. Rhoda Lerman is a find … go out and find her.”

—Harriet Rosenstein, The New York Times Book Review

“A virtuoso performance; biblical rhetoric juxtaposed with Americanese and supernatural events with the dull routines of suburbia … a weird, often hilarious mix of the exotic and the mundane.”

—Lore Dickstein, Ms. Magazine

THE BOOK OF THE NIGHT

“Lerman creates in The Book of The Night a fantastic narrative voyage that is as unpredictable as an acid trip in which one’s imagination is the primary determinant of reality; it is replete with luscious detail and intriguing wordplay.”

—Valerie Miner, The New York Times Book Review

“A metamorphosis as provocative as any of Kafka’s is at the heart of this bizarre, sometimes prolix and portentous novel … a book filled with strange, rich effects unlike those in any other contemporary novel … it has stayed in my mind, and stimulated and bothered me, more than any other fiction I have read this year.”

—Bruce Allen, Chicago Tribune Book World

“Lerman’s characters grapple with philosophy like lovers, and the result is a gothic novel of ideas with a plentitude of life to sustain its armature of scholarship. The language is gnomic and very fine, fiery, and mysterious and attractive to those who remember Yeats and Blake.”

—The Philadelphia Inquirer

“Rhoda Lerman has demonstrated—with much fun along the way— that it is still possible to write a clever, serious, and technically innovative novel … because of the novelist’s never-flagging sense of irony and fun, her wonderfully provocative story is also a delight to read. With The Book of The Night, she takes her place beside Robert Graves.”

—Colin Walters, The Washington Times

THE GIRL THAT HE MARRIES

“A perfectly nice female person succumbs to the atavistic urge to transform herself into the All-Time Classic Wife. With Rhoda Lerman’s outrageous talent this becomes the feminist Jekyll-and-Hyde of our time—and we recognize the monster in ourselves while we’re laughing.”

—Gloria Steinem

“Read it and weep. With unrelenting manic ferocity, this savage, sexist, hilarious romance à la Kafka demonstrates the truth of H. L. Mencken’s assertion that ‘to be in love is merely to be in a state of perceptual anesthesia—to mistake an ordinary young man for a Greek god.’ Pursuers of ordinary men (is there some other kind?) can hardly afford to miss this cautionary tale.”

—Julie Lerman, The New York Times Book Review

“Devastating. For every woman or man who has married (or is in danger of marrying) in order to shore up an inadequate self.”

—Betty Friedan

“A wickedly funny comedy of erotic manners.”

—The Atlantic Monthly

“A devastating satire of the games people play in courtship and supposed love. While it is a superb parody, it also holds enough of the truth to make you want to cry.”

—Lucy Freeman

“Antically funny … Like her characters, Lerman’s language plays games. [She] is funny because she hears us so right … Spinning us on a swift whirligig through the sexual nastiness of our culture, she set us down laughing.”

—Erica Abee, The Village Voice

“A gem of a novel … Striking.”

—Carol Felsenthal, Chicago Daily News

ELEANOR

“A haunting portrait … blessed with sensitivity and depth and honesty.”

—The Los Angeles Times Book Review

“A beautiful novel, elegantly written, true as anything could be. Like her heroine, Rhoda Lerman has taken great risks in writing it; after reading it, I am sure that Eleanor Roosevelt would approve.”

—The Washington Post Book World

“An imaginative success … Lerman brings what has always been a stick figure in history to glowing, aching life.”

—Doris Grumbach, The Chronicle Review

“Lerman risks everything as a novelist by casting the entire narrative in Eleanor’s voice and creates a plausible, deep-running, vulnerable, complex, moving character.”

—Saul Maloff, The New York Times Book Review

“Truer to the great lady’s heart than any other account.”

—Jean Stapleton

“A poignant, plausibly imagined novel … the author’s attempt to write in [Mrs. Roosevelt’s] voice succeeds both as a novel and as a sensitive portrait of a woman who at 33 knows who she is but has yet to imagine who she’ll become.”

—Clarence Petersen, Chicago Tribune

“A reality truer and more haunting than the most scrupulous notes of the biographer-distinguished historical fiction.”

—Frances Taliaferro, Harper’s Magazine

“From the first the narrative is powerful, every word of it readable and compelling, the period details skillfully rendered, the tension beautifully managed and sustained … a tour de force.”

—Publishers Weekly