Tsipi Keller

Tsipi Keller was born in Prague, raised in Tel Aviv, studied in

Paris, and now lives in the U.S. Novelist and translator and the

author of thirteen books, she is the recipient

of several literary awards, including National Endowment for

the Arts Translation Fellowships, New York Foundation for the

Arts Fiction grants, and an Armand G. Erpf Translation Award

from Columbia University. Her translations of Hebrew literature

have appeared in literary journals and anthologies in the

U.S. and Europe, as well as in The Posen Library of Jewish Culture

and Civilization (Yale University Press, 2012). Her latest novel, Nadja on Nadja, has just been released (2019) by Underground Voices.

Reviews for "Elsa" (excerpts)

Elsa is the third in Tsipi Keller's trilogy of psychological novels. The first two were Jackpot and Retelling, which trace the fortunes of women. Elsa calls to mind some of Richard Burgin's noir fiction. Both writers explore the world of nefarious, but initially engaging, operators who insinuate themselves into the lives of lonely strangers aiming to control or ruin them.... Much more than a tale about a smart woman who makes foolish choices, Elsa is a fast-paced, tightly crafted, suspenseful, psychological crime novel that sidles up to the reader, then pounces. Lynn Levin/Cleaver Magazine.

Women Only

Evan Steuber

From: American Book Review

Volume 35, Number 5, July/August 2014

Elsa is a woman of thirty-nine: a tax lawyer who lives alone with her cat. She talks about men with her friends. Imaginatively, she plays out the roles she may yet be prepared for ... the way she will move and interact in the world "just like in the movies." She is a classic literary figure, caught in the everyday ... escaping the present through her romantic imaginings, a Madame Bovary in the twenty-first century. Tsipi Keller is more than aware of this, as Flaubert sticks his head in at one point: "The promise of love, faint as it is, does wonders for her. The promise of love, of romance, of beautiful sex. So what if women, to believe Flaubert, mistake their vaginas for their hearts? So what? Let them. Let her. What does Flaubert know about love? Let her mistake what part she chooses for her heart."

Read Melanie Page's review of "Elsa" here:

http://grabthelapels.com/2015/08/10/elsa/

Reviews for "The Prophet of Tenth Street" (excerpts):

"Tsipi Keller has taken us into a writer's very being.... This is a provocative story that stays with the reader." Jewish Book World

"Poet and novelist Keller (Retelling) handles this poignant tale with the deftness of a writer who has struggled alongside her characters." -- Publishers Weekly

"It is beyond difficult to write fiction about a fiction-maker; not only do you have to get into the guy's head, you've got to create a plot in which something actually happens. Keller does both, and in a way that's unnerving--how does she know so much about what it means to be a man, trapped in his head, convinced he will find and reveal the essential truths of life?" -- Head Butler

Reviews for Nadja on Nadja:

Nadja’s book title — but I see I’m speaking of Nadja as a person, not as a character in a novel; that’s how seductive Keller is — suggests her acute self-awareness. “I have this idea about women in trouble of their own making,” she tells her best friend. “Women who end badly because of their own gullibility and poor judgment. In fiction and in life.”

Graduate students will note that “Nadja” is the title of a book by André Breton; it’s one of the most significant works of French surrealism, posing the question “Who am I?” Keller is a gifted translator, mostly of Hebrew literature into English; she’s won prestigious fellowships. You may confidently believe she was thinking about Breton’s question and his title when she named her character. It is a testament to the high-wire act she has created that Keller has translated her erudition into prose in a way that doesn’t show off anything but her talent.

Jesse Kornbluth/HeadButler.com

To read more, go to: https://www.headbutler.com/reviews/nadja-on-nadja/

Review The Forward for David Avidan's "Futureman":

How David Avidan Became Hebrew’s Most Experimental Poet

Aviya Kushner July 6, 2018

A new and important translation aims to introduce readers to David Avidan, the most experimental poet in the history of Hebrew poetry, and a poet unjustly unknown to nearly all English-language readers. Avidan was also a filmmaker, a conceptual artist, and a television and radio host. In all his pursuits, he was obsessed with the future and riveted by the possibilities of technology and translation. Most of all, he was in love with the Hebrew language — its grammar and its system of constructing words — and he could not resist making up many words of his own.

This translation by Tsipi Keller, who brought great passion to the project, which is called “Futureman” — “very simply, I love him,” she told me — admirably preserves Avidan’s made-up words, such as his famous description of himself as an adamila, or “wordman.” The translation is accompanied by an extensive and helpful introduction by scholar Anat Weisman, which explains Avidan’s place in the history of Hebrew poetry, and shows the effect his radicalism had on other Israeli writers.

Weisman quotes the poet Aharon Shabtai, who wrote that Avidan “personified all that was forbidden and deviant.” She explains that Avidan was a poet fascinated by poetry’s relationship with other genres — which Weisman intriguingly describes as “prayer, science, logic, lyrics, film, and television.”

Not surprisingly, with a world-view like that, Avidan definitely did not fit into his own time. Avidan’s birthdate places him squarely in Dor Hamedina — the poets who began publishing after the state of Israel was established in 1948 — but he was not interested in their aesthetic. “Avidan’s poetry was always grandiose,” Weisman writes, “designed to be read resoundingly in the public square, while also cognizant of the fate of poetry to vanish from the square.”

You can hear the grandiosity, as well as the fear for poetry’s role in history, in Avidan’s wild titles, like “Violation Ticket to the Messiah for Weeping in Public” and “What Did Kurt Waldheim Expect from the Polish Pope?” Keller, who has brought many Israeli poets into English, deserves readers’ gratitude for taking on the major challenge of Avidan. The publisher here is interesting as well: Phoneme Media, a new translation press in Los Angeles that is committed to social activism. If Avidan were alive, he would probably be delighted to be on Phoneme’s extremely cool list, next to a graphic novel about life in Angola prison that was translated from the French. It fits with his international, avant-garde aesthetic.

see more: https://forward.com/culture/404923/how-david-avidan-became-hebrews-most-experimental-poet/

NADJA ON NADJA

Buzzfeed: 18 Books to read this Fall (2019)

Keller’s 14th book follows the namesake protagonist as she holds down a mundane job while trying to write a novel. Hyper-relatable to anyone who has been stuck in a soulless corporate gig, Keller does a great job making Nadja the character and Nadja the book fully realized portraits that capture the tensions between doing wage work and trying to have an artistic life.