Authors Out Loud presents: The Frozen Rabbi February 16, 2011

Authors Out Loud presents:

Steve Stern, author of
The Frozen Rabbi

In this critically-hailed novel, 15-year-old Bernie Karp discovers a most unusual family heirloom in the basement: a rabbi frozen in a block of ice since 1899. Once thawed, Reb Eliezer feasts on a world where Jerry Springer and Viagra exist quite nicely alongside Tantric Kaballah and his new-found celebrity. Meanwhile Bernie begins transforming into a Kabbalistic master whose outer-body experiences keep preventing him from losing his virginity, to name only one problem of being a true spiritual master in a modern age.

Steve Stern's fiction, with its deep grounding in Yiddish folklore, has prompted critics such as Cynthia Ozick to hail him as the successor to Isaac Bashevis Singer. He is the author of critically acclaimed books such as Isaac and the Undertaker's Daughter, winner of the Pushcart Writers' Choice Award; The Wedding Jester, which won the National Jewish Book Award; The Angel of Forgetfulness, one of The Washington Post's Best Books of 2006; and, The North God. Stern currently lives in Balston Spa, New York, and teaches at Skidmore College.