The World to Come, Dara Horn
The World to Come, Dara Horn
List: $21.99 | Sale: $15.39
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The World to Come

Author: Dara Horn

Narrator: William Dufris

Unabridged: 15 hr 18 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 03/08/2006


Synopsis

An intoxicating combination of mystery, spirituality, redemption, piety, and passion, The World To Come is Dara Horn's follow-up to her breakout, critically acclaimed debut novel In the Image. Using a real-life art heist as her starting point, Horn traces the life and times of several characters, including Russian-born artist Marc Chagall and the New Jersey—based Ziskind family.

Benjamin Ziskind, a former child prodigy, now spends his days writing questions for a television trivia show. After Ben's twin sister, Sara, forces him to attend a singles cocktail party at a Jewish museum, Ben spots Over Vitebsk, a Chagall sketch that once hung in the twins' childhood home. Convinced the painting was stolen from his family, Ben steals the work of art and enlists Sara to create a forgery to replace it. While trying to evade the police, Ben attempts to find the truth of how the painting got to the museum.

From a Jewish orphanage in 1920s Soviet Russia where Marc Chagall brought art to orphaned Jewish boys, to a junior high school in Newark, New Jersey, with a stop in the jungles of Da Nang, Vietnam, Horn weaves a story of mystery, romance, folklore, history and theology into a spellbinding modern tale. Richly satisfying and utterly unique, her novel opens the door to "the world to come"—not life after death, but the world we create through our actions right now.

About Dara Horn

Dara Horn earned her Ph.D. in comparative literature from Harvard University in 2006. In 2007, she was chosen by Granta magazine as one of the Best Young American Novelists. Her first novel, In the Image, received a National Jewish Book Award, an Edward Lewis Wallant Award, and a Reform Judaism Fiction Prize. Her second novel, The World to Come, received the 2006 National Jewish Book Award for Fiction and was selected as an Editor's Choice by the New York Times Book Review and as one of the Best Books of 2006 by the San Francisco Chronicle. She has taught courses in Jewish literature and Israeli history at Harvard and at Sarah Lawrence College, and she has lectured at universities and cultural institutions throughout the United States and Canada. Dara lives with her husband, daughter, and son in New Jersey.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Fabian on February 05, 2019

Unpredictable & not at all pedantic like other modern works, "The World to Come" is about heaven and did indeed serve as an anesthetic at times (it's January for g*dsakes!). A cloudy feeling sometimes fills the room. It is a book about faith: if you DO have it, then "The World to Come" will make you......more

Goodreads review by emma on June 22, 2022

in 2015 i said that this book was amazing, and beautiful, and that every paragraph had a line i wanted to remember forever, and that it was one of the best books i'd ever read. and now i can't even remember anything about it, really. funny how life works. but even in spite of it being one of the quote......more

Goodreads review by Ty on April 22, 2008

This is one of those books, if you're an aspiring writer, that either inspires you to take the plunge and give birth to that novel that's been lurking in your heart since you were fifteen or (to continue the swimming pool/underwater birth analogy) intimidates you back into the dressing room, forces......more

Goodreads review by Colleen on July 21, 2009

In the beginning I had such high hopes for this book. The story got off to a very intriguing start when a man, Benjamin Ziskind, walks out of a museum with a Chagall painting he believes used to hang in his parents' house. The story then flashes back in time to Russia in the 1920s to begin to explai......more

Goodreads review by Christia on June 24, 2008

An absolutely exquisite, beautifully written book! I loved the Yiddish folklore included throughout the book (especially the story of the already born returning to heaven to prepare the not yet born for their lives) and the ideas of the not yet borns "eating" art and "drinking" literature in heaven......more