Shira (The Toby Press S. Y. Agnon Library)

Shira is Nobel laureate S.Y. Agnon's final, epic novel. Unfinished at the time of his death in 1970, the Hebrew original was published a year later. With this newly revised English translation by Zeva Shapiro, including archival material never before published in English, The Toby Press launches its S.Y. Agnon Library the fullest collection of Agnon's works in new and revised translations. Also includes newly illustrated Afterword by Robert Alter. Shira is S. Y. Agnon's culminating effort to articulate through the comprehensive form of the novel his vision of the role of art in human reality...Enacted against the background of Jerusalem life in the gathering shadows of a historical cataclysm of inconceivable proportions, Shira is so brilliantly rendered that, even without an ending, it deserves a place among the major modern novels.