Emily Barton is the author Brookland and The Testament of Yves Gundron, which were both selected as New York Times Notable Books of the Year. She has received grants from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Sustainable Arts Foundation. Her essays, short stories, and reviews have appeared in Story, Conjunctions, The Massachusetts Review, Tablet, The Los Angeles Times, and The New York Times Book Review, among many other publications. She lives in the Hudson Valley with her husband and sons.
“An imaginative, engrossing, and entertaining storytelling
tapestry. . . . As addicting as a Jewish Game of
Thrones.” —The New York Times Book Review
“Richly imagined. . . . A classic quest tale. . . . A kind of
steampunk fantasia. . . . Barton’s book is Jewishly very
knowledgeable, drawing on a broad range of history, mythology, and
liturgy to create an internally coherent alternative universe.”
—Adam Kirsch, Tablet
“A surreal meld of counterfactual history and Jewish lore. . . .
Raises complex questions about alternate history and mythology.”
—The New Yorker
“Barton’s audacious tale of an otherworldly uprising against the
Nazis is a wild pageant of tumult and valor, magic and
inventiveness, which, for all its humor, sensuality, steampunk
brio, and full-tilt military action, is profoundly inquisitive. . .
. With intimations of Cynthia Ozick and Michael Chabon, Barton is
spellbinding and provocative in this refulgent, topsy-turvy,
questing fantasy.” —Booklist
“In this thrillingly inventive novel, Emily Barton has created a
whole world worth losing yourself in. She sneaks up on you with a
story so original you’ll wonder how she found it, and so vital that
it seems amazing no one has ever told it before.” —Mary-Louise
Parker
“A bold reimagining of some of the darkest history of World War II.
Barton’s Esther is like a Jewish Joan of Arc, except the
calling she feels is entirely her own—and to honor it, she has to
turn the ways of the world upside down.” —Alexander
Chee
"A big, thrilling revisionist history and an audacious, wholly
realized feat of imagination." —Hanya Yanagihara
"It would be tempting to set The Book of Esther alongside other
contemporary Jewish counterfactual fiction, like Michael Chabon’s
Yiddish Policemen’s Union and Philip Roth’s The Plot Against
America. All three focus on the time between the rise of the Nazis
and the establishment of the State of Israel, and, in different
ways, they scramble the founding myths of postwar American Judaism.
But Barton is hunting bigger, more philosophical game than Chabon
or Roth, both of whom imagine undoing Zionism or American
democracy’s acceptance of Jews; Barton, however, is braiding a rope
of alternative tradition, strong and supple enough to hold
modernity without breaking.” —The Forward
“The Book of Esther stands out on the originality and success of
its imagined world.” —The Kansas City Star
“A glorious mash-up of alternate history, spiritual inquiry, and
galloping adventure story, spiced with fantastic technology and a
dash of Mulan, The Book of Esther is breathtaking in
its ambition and scope.” —Chronogram
“Barton’s novel is an inventive and detailed tale about a nation on
the brink of war that will keep the reader interested through the
last scene.” —The Jewish Standard
"Super badass. . . . an interesting and often feminist book
with superb writing." —Filthy Casket
“Emily Barton has formerly reimagined the history of New York, and
now she's reconceived historic Europe as an entirely different
place, replete with Jewish woman warriors on mechanical steeds and
multiplying golems. Exhilarating in its freedom and exacting in its
thought—a fine book.” —John Crowley
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