Shylock Is My Name: William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice Retold: A Novel

Shylock Is My Name: William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice Retold: A Novel
ISBN-10
0804141339
ISBN-13
9780804141338
Category
Fiction
Pages
288
Language
English
Published
2016-02-09
Publisher
Hogarth
Author
Howard Jacobson

Description

Man Booker Prize-winner Howard Jacobson brings his singular brilliance to this modern re-imagining of one of Shakespeare’s most unforgettable characters: Shylock Winter, a cemetery, Shylock. In this provocative and profound interpretation of The Merchant of Venice, Shylock is juxtaposed against his present-day counterpart in the character of art dealer and conflicted father Simon Strulovitch. With characteristic irony, Jacobson presents Shylock as a man of incisive wit and passion, concerned still with questions of identity, parenthood, anti-Semitism and revenge. While Strulovich struggles to reconcile himself to his daughter Beatrice's “betrayal” of her family and heritage—as she is carried away by the excitement of Manchester high society, and into the arms of a footballer notorious for giving a Nazi salute on the field—Shylock alternates grief for his beloved wife with rage against his own daughter's rejection of her Jewish upbringing. Culminating in a shocking twist on Shylock’s demand for the infamous pound of flesh, Jacobson’s insightful retelling examines contemporary, acutely relevant questions of Jewish identity while maintaining a poignant sympathy for its characters and a genuine spiritual kinship with its antecedent—a drama which Jacobson himself considers to be “the most troubling of Shakespeare’s plays for anyone, but, for an English novelist who happens to be Jewish, also the most challenging.”

Other editions

Similar books

  • Operation Shylock: A Confession
    By Philip Roth

    Roth decides to stop him, even if that means impersonating the impersonator. Operation Shylock is at once spy story, political thriller, meditation on identity and unfathomable journey through a volatile, frightening middle-east.

  • New Boy: Othello Retold
    By Tracy Chevalier

    The tragedy of Othello is transposed to a 1970s suburban Washington schoolyard in Tracy Chevalier's powerful drama of friends torn apart.

  • Shylock Is Shakespeare
    By Kenneth Gross

    Shylock, the Jewish moneylender in The Merchant of Venice who famously demands a pound of flesh as security for a loan to his antisemitic tormentors, is one of Shakespeare's most complex and idiosyncratic characters.

  • Live a Little
    By Howard Jacobson

    'A . . . tender love story . . . This book is alive. It pulses with warmth and intelligence' The Times A wickedly observed novel about falling in love at the end of your life, by the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Finkler Question.

  • Prince Of Cats
    By Ronald Wimberly

    Itês the story of the minor players with Tybalt at the center. The definitive printing of RONALD WIMBERLY's critically-acclaimed first work, presented as intended for the first time.

  • Shylock is My Name: A Novel : William Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice Retold
    By Howard Jacobson

    Culminating in a shocking twist on Shylock's demand for the infamous pound of flesh, Jacobson's insightful retelling examines contemporary, acutely relevant questions of Jewish identity while maintaining a poignant sympathy for its ...

  • Dunbar: William Shakespeare's King Lear Retold: A Novel
    By Edward St. Aubyn

    Edward St Aubyn is renowned for his masterwork, the five Melrose novels, which dissect with savage and beautiful precision the agonies of family life.

  • Shakespeare and the Jews
    By James Shapiro

    Reproduced by kind permission of the Huntington Library. o: 3. o 3. ; §§ 6. “A Woman Jew of Andrinople” in Nicolas de Nicolay, The Navigations Into Turkie, trans. T. Washington (London, 1585), p.147. Reproduced by kind permission of the ...

  • Kalooki Nights: A Novel
    By Howard Jacobson

    Having grown up in the 1950s in the wake of the Holocaust, Jewish cartoonist Max Glickman recalls a shocking crime committed against his family and faith by a neighbor, an act involving a long-hidden motive that reveals startling truths ...

  • The Finkler Question: A Novel
    By Howard Jacobson

    The Finkler Question is a scorching story of exclusion and belonging, justice and love, ageing, wisdom and humanity. Funny, furious, unflinching, this extraordinary novel shows one of our finest writers at his brilliant best.