Art & War, my first non-fiction book (though it comes with some fiction, too, see below), is a collaboration with my friend, the author Shimon Adaf. It’s out today in paperback and e-book. The US edition is already available for the Kindle but it looks like the paperbacks will be out in a few days, on the 26th.
Art & War is a book-length conversation between Shimon and myself, in which we cover subjects ranging from writing the Israeli novel, poetry, the Holocaust, war (of course), our respective childhoods, and our shared love of science fiction and crime fiction, among many other topics. It was prompted by what began as an interview I was conducting with Shimon back in 2013, The Convergence Between Poetry and the Fantastic, and which Shimon turned into a conversation between us.
In between the interview and the book, we each composed a short story that, taking their cue from the subtitle of “poetry, pulp and politics”, are also in dialogue with each other (and we each appear briefly in the other’s work as characters). These are both political, and works of speculative fiction. My own contribution, “Tutim”, is I think one of my best works in the short form, and Shimon’s own “third_attribute” (translated from the Hebrew by Yaron Regev) is pretty remarkable, I think, like everything he writes.
It felt important to write this book, though what value, if any, it has, will have to be left to any readers to decide. I am not fond of acknowledgement sections in books, but since I have the opportunity here, I’m very grateful to Niall Harrison for commissioning that first conversation linked above, and to Etan Ilfeld and Tariq Goddard at Repeater Books for taking it on.
I hope you get a chance to check it out!
