It flows with a narrative spin only the singular Zink could pull off-including both authentic and fictional versions of characters from Shats's life and work such as the author herself. Sailing Towards the Sunset by Avner Shats is Zink's faux-translation of Shats's 1998 novel Lashut El Hashkia ('Sailing Towards the Sunset').

Now, this tongue-in-cheek homage is available to Nell's growing readership for the first time, accompanied by a second dazzling and imaginative work that breathes-at Shats's request-the perfumed air of the Old Europe and stars a figure very much like Shats. Unable to read his Hebrew, she was forced to start from scratch. Years ago, Nell Zink resolved to write a book for her friend, the Israeli novelist Avner Shats, that would mirror his remarkable style. (Oct.From the brilliant and incisive author of Mislaid-'a writer of extraordinary talent and range' (Jonathan Franzen) whose 'capacity for inventions is immense' (BookForum)-comes a new collection of her earliest work: two wildly funny novellas (Sailing Towards the Sunset by Avner Shats and European Story for Avner Shats) available in one compact volume. It’s a tension that strangely fits this eccentric book, in style and in substance, binding its disparate parts together. Initially written in three weeks’ time and for Shats’s eyes only, the writing can be at times pleasingly uninhibited, at other times recklessly dashed off. An appended short story, “European Story for Avner Shats,” about three artists on a fellowship in Florence, is slightly less scattered, and much more of a lark. Interspersed with literary criticism, “irrelevant interludes,” and copied-and-pasted email correspondence with Avner Shats himself, the novel winds to a kind of conclusion in which the author literally writes herself into the narrative to help Yigal and Mary dispose of a bomb. The result is a fractured narrative about an Israeli spy, Yigal, who while on a mission meets and impregnates Mary, a mythical sea creature called a silkie.

In this surprising and entertaining metafictional experiment, Zink attempts to translate the Israeli author Avner Shats’s 1998 novel, Sailing Towards the Sunset, from the original Hebrew, despite not being able to read the language (she bases her translation on a synopsis given to her by Shats).

Private novelist nell zink