Melville House Books

Donald Macintyre‘s profile of A. B. Yehoshua, “widely regarded in Israel as the country’s greatest, as well as its most versatile, novelist,” appears in a recent edition of The Independent. Yehoshua’s newest novel, not yet translated into English, is The Mission of the Human-Resource Man, a book that tells the story of a woman who dies in a suicide bombing. The story, however, is told from the perspective of an HR worker—assigned by the woman’s company to represent its sympathies. Yehoshua explains: “What I wanted to do is take the most anonymous death . . . from the very bureaucratic point of view of a manager of human resources in a big factory. He has to bring her body back to her home and during this voyage he is almost falling in love with her in a certain way.” Yehoshua, who is the recipient of the Bialik Prize and the Israel Prize for Literature, is also the author of The Liberated Bride and Journey to the End of the Millennium, among other novels. He is among those on the shortlist for the first Man Booker International Prize.

Dennis Johnson is the founder of MobyLives, and the co-founder and co-publisher of Melville House.