Dolly City - (Dalkey Archive Essentials) by Orly Castel-Bloom (Paperback)

About the Book

"In the midst of a futuristic-primitive metropolis--the accumulation of all our urban nightmares--Doctor Dolly (certified by the University of Katmandu) finds a newborn baby in a black plastic bag, and decides to become a mother. Overcome by unfamiliar maternal urges, Dolly dispenses with her private lab of rare diseases and turns all her surgical passion onto her son. Ceaselessly cutting and sewing, Dolly is the scalpel-wielding version of the all-too-familiar Jewish Mother archetype, forever operating upon her son with destructive, invasive love. In this grotesque satire of war and the defensive measures taken to survive it, Orly Castel-Bloom, one of Israel's most provocative and original writers, turns her own scalpel upon that most holy of institutions, the myth of motherhood--and its implications in the life of a nation"--

Book Synopsis

Gruesome, unhinged, and hilarious, Dolly City is widely recognized as one of the most disconcerting--and brilliant--literary works ever to come out of Israel.

"Dolly City--a city without a base, without a past, without an infrastructure. The most demented city in the world." In the midst of a futuristic-primitive metropolis, the accumulation of all our urban nightmares, Doctor Dolly (certified by the University of Katmandu) finds a newborn baby in a black plastic bag, and decides to become a mother. Overcome by unfamiliar maternal urges, Dolly dispenses with her private lab of rare diseases and turns all her surgical passion onto her son. Ceaselessly cutting and sewing, Dolly is the scalpel-wielding version of the all-too-familiar Jewish Mother archetype, forever operating upon her son with destructive, invasive love. In this grotesque satire of war and the defensive measures taken to survive it, Orly Castel-Bloom, one of Israel's most provocative and original writers, turns her own scalpel upon that most holy of institutions, the myth of motherhood--and its implications in the life of a nation.

Review Quotes

"From the first pages, Dolly City asserts itself as an important text . . . Kafka has finally arrived in Tel Aviv." -Le Monde

About the Author

Orly Castel-Bloom was born in Tel Aviv in 1960 to parents originally from Egypt. After studying film at the Beit Zvi Institute and Tel Aviv University, she published her first collection of stories in 1987 and has been a leading voice in Hebrew literature ever since, constantly expanding the boundaries of the Hebrew language as well as of narrative style. Castel-Bloom has lectured at Harvard University, UCLA, UC Berkeley, New York University as well as at Oxford and Cambridge Universities; at present she teaches creative writing at Tel Aviv University. She has published novels, collections of short stories, and a book for children. Her postmodern classic, Dolly City, has been included in UNESCO's Collection of Representative Works, and was nominated in 2007 one of the ten most important books since the creation of the State of Israel. In 2013, it was also listed by Tablet Magazine as one of the 101 Great Jewish Books in English translation.

Castel-Bloom has received the Tel Aviv Foundation Award (1990), the Alterman Prize for Innovation (1993), the Prime Minister's Prize three times (1994; 2001; 2011), the Neuman Prize (2003), the French WIZO Prize for Human Parts (2005), the Lea Goldberg Prize (2007) and the Rishon LeZion Prize for Creativity in Hebrew Language (2016). Her last book, An Egyptian Novel, was awarded the Sapir Prize (2015). Castel-Bloom's books have been published in 14 languages.

"The greatest Israeli fiction writer of her time."--Haaretz