Writing in the Dark: Essays on Literature and Politics - Softcover

"Grossman is more than just another talented writer: Like Václav Havel, he is a moralist, a man with a conscience whose words cry out for absolute truth and fariness." --Newsday

"One of contemporary literature's most versatile and absorbing writers." --San Francisco Chronicle

"No other Israeli writer so far has approached the touchy subject [os Israeli Arabs]] with such compassion, or looked at it with, so to speak, bifocal eyes, Israeli and Palestenian." --The New York Review of Books

"An extended rumination on the struggle and the thrill of shaping words in to stories and reclaiming their meaning and beauty." --The Nation

"The Israeli Orwell . . . [Grossman] is a writer for the world stage, and the world has much need of him." --The Buffalo News

"[Grossman] asks the most difficult and searching questions. . . . His words have a tremendous, forceful eloquence about them, from first to last. . . . A delight to read . . . powerfully humanistic." --The Independent (UK)

Throughout his career, David Grossman has been a voice for peace and reconciliation between Israel and its Arab citizens and neighbors. In these six essays on politics and culture in Israel, he addresses the conscience of a country that has lost faith in its leaders and its ideals. This collection, Writing in the Dark, includes an already famous speech concerning the disastrous Second Lebanon War of 2006, the war that took the life of Grossman's twenty-one-year-old son, Uri.

Moving, human, clear-sighted, and courageous, touching on literature and artistic creation as well as politics and philosophy, these writings are a cri de coeur from "a writer who has been, for nearly two decades, one of the most original and talented not only in his own country, but anywhere" (The New York Times Book Review).