A Letter to Mama and Other Uncollected Stories (Isaac Bashevis Singer

In this most recent offering from Nobel laureate Isaac Bashevis Singer, A Letter to Mama and Other Uncollected Stories brings together nineteen stories that were translated in Singer's lifetime but left uncollected or unpublished. The stories were translated either by Singer himself or under his personal supervision, and appeared in The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, Paris Review, Tablet, Narrative, Jewish Review of Books, and American Scholar. Singer was recognized as a master storyteller. His mastery came not only from inborn talent, but also from edits and revisions. He was an artist of variations, and these stories communicate their uniqueness not only by their apparent words, but also by how they are different from similar narratives Singer had composed. Readers less familiar with Singer’s writing can enjoy the narratives for their storytelling mastery. Readers more familiar with Singer’s writing have the privilege of seeing how he winds the threads of his narrative in different directions even when the circumstances seem similar to stories he has written before—combining the pleasure of the familiar with the power of nuance and originality. About the author: Isaac Bashevis Singer (1903-1991) was a Polish-born Jewish-American author of short stories, novels, essays, cultural criticism, memoirs, and stories for children. His career spanned nearly seven decades of literary production, at the center of which was the translation of his work from Yiddish into English, which he undertook with various collaborators and editors. Singer published widely during his lifetime, with nearly sixty stories appearing in The New Yorker, and received numerous awards and prizes, including two Newberry Honor Book Awards (1968 & 1969), two National Book Awards (1970 & 1974) and the Nobel Prize for Literature (1978). Known for fiction that portrayed 19th-century Polish Jewry as well as supernatural tales that combined Jewish mysticism with demonology, Singer was a master storyteller whose sights were set squarely on the tension between human nature and the human spirit.