Loss of Memory Is Only Temporary : Stories
Author(s): Johanna Kaplan
A funny, fresh, and brilliantly insightful collection of stories from a beloved writer, with a new introduction by Francine Prose
Johanna Kaplan’s beautifully written stories first burst on the literary scene in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Today they have retained all of their depth, surprise, and humor—their simultaneously scathing, hilarious, and compassionate insight into character and behavior. From Miriam, home from school with the measles, to Louise, the daughter of a family that fled Vienna for the Dominican Republic, to Naomi, a young psychiatrist, her heroines are fierce, tender, funny, and cuttingly smart.
At once specific to a particular period, place, and milieu—mainly, Jewish New York in the decades after World War II—Kaplan’s stories resonate with universal significance. In this new collection, which includes both early and later stories, unforgettably vivid characters are captured in all of their forceful presence and singularity, their foolishness and their wisdom, their venality and their nobility, while, hovering in the background, the inexorable passage of time and the unending pull of memory render silent judgment.
In its pitch-perfect command of dialogue matched with interwoven subtleties of insight and feeling and a masterful control of language, Loss of Memory Is Only Temporary is itself a timeless collection of the finest work by one of the most extraordinary talents of our age.
Review(s):
“Kaplan’s achievement, which continues to make her fiction relevant, is the creation of ?'ferociously observant,' embattled-yet-avid young women who possess a complicated consciousness. With remarkable insight and empathy, Kaplan, like the characters in these stories, troubles the surfaces of Jewish family life, revealing an emotional landscape marked by grief and trauma. In the process, Kaplan reawakens the distinctive, and slowly disappearing, Bronx voices of mid-twentieth-century Jewish New York. Both old and new readers will relish Kaplan’s brilliant artwork of ventriloquism.”
“Kaplan’s incisive attention to detail matches her gift for conveying the mysterious mesh of physicality and consciousness, while her characters' predicaments are at once ordinary and profound, specific yet universal in their illumination of inheritance, loss, exile, and generational divides.”
“A warm, funny, Jewish collection of stories featuring bold and nuanced Jewish women.”
"This reissue seems likely to find [Kaplan] a new set of fans...Snarky young ladies are timeless. Plus, the dialogue is to die for."
“A joy of discovery attends the publication of Johanna Kaplan’s Loss of Memory is Only Temporary (Ecco)—a volume that gathers her cacophonous, mordantly funny stories from the 1960s and ‘70s (and includes the contents of her prized debut, Other People’s Lives)… It fizzes with the urbane energy of J.D. Salinger, Grace Paley, and Deborah Eisenberg—a restless delight.”
“Kaplan offers sly glimpses of human foibles and vulnerabilities. . . . Francine Prose’s preface aptly praises Kaplan’s 'paradoxically scathing and compassionate insight' into characters revealed in the midst of an uncertain present, poised between Old World and New. A rare gem, recovered.”
“Readers…can learn much from Ms. Kaplan…This is fiction of complexity and depth.”
ISBN: 9780063061637