Lunar Savings Time

Book excerpt: The stories in Lunar Savings Time slip through time and between dreams and waking, between native tongue and elusive translation, long-dead writers and just-opened books. Alex Epstein has created a masterwork in the finest strokes—stories in which humor, stubborn memory, and strange beauty meet and part ways in less than a page. Through these pages journey a woman who travels back in time to visit a psychoanalyst; Kafka, had he lived and emigrated to Israel after the Holocaust; the wandering Cain; Zen masters, beggars, writers, ghosts. In Epstein’s lyrical philosophy, every imaginative proposition must answer to the burden of history. “He can be placed next to Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Kafka, Borges,” Haaretz has said of Epstein; Lunar Savings Time is his most radical collection yet, a wondrous achievement.