MOSES ALONE

From Chinese migrant to Hasidic Jew, from Hispanic trucker to lauded Biennale sculptor, the ceaselessly roving Tel moves in person and imagination into curious lives and fresh terrains.

Five adventures take the reader of this collection on journeys from Venice, Italy, to Venice, California, to a cheap apartment in Brooklyn, to Manhattan, to New Mexico, and to Jerusalem.

Jonathan Tel is an award-winning novelist and short story writer whose books include Scratching the Head of Chairman Mao, Arafat's Elephant, Freud's Alphabet, and The Beijing of Possibilities. His writing has appeared in the New Yorker and Granta. His stories have won the Sunday Times EFG Story Prize, the Commonwealth Short Story Prize, and the V.S. Pritchett Short Story Prize. Tel teaches history at Stanford University in Berlin, travels widely, and has lived in Beijing, Tokyo, New York, Jerusalem, and many other cities of the imagination. He currently resides in London.

In “The Book of Moses,” a successful sculptor finds himself shut out of his own life, unrecognized by those closest to him. In “Bola de la Fortuna,” a Hispanic truck driver accused of murder discovers his fate in a crystal ball. In “The Shabbos Goy from Kaifeng,” a Chinese immigrant working for Hasidic Jews in New York becomes deeply involved in their life. “The City That Always Sleeps” presents the reader with a mad couple of actors who have a mysterious hold on a visitor in a mirrored Manhattan apartment. “Put Not Thy Trust in Chariots” involves a bank teller in Jerusalem who loans out his car to an Arab woman.

These novellas are part meticulous documentation of the worlds we live in, part fabulous feats of imagination. On every page, Tel's mastery as a storyteller is on full display.