Hunting in America - by Tehila Hakimi (Paperback)

About the Book

"An Israeli woman relocates to America on assignment from her tech company. In an attempt to leave her past behind and adapt entirely to the new culture in which she finds herself, she joins her colleagues on a deer hunt, discovering a surprising acumen for the sport. She fires again and again, refining her skills with every shot. As she embarks on an affair with her hunting guide and colleague, David, she sinks deeper into hunting season, vacillating between predator and prey as the boundaries between man, woman, work, and nature begin to collapse. Hunting with David becomes the one stable aspect of her life until one day everything changes. With a poet's eye and a hunter's aim, Tehila Hakimi's beguiling debut novel is a taut, twisty story about the everyday violence that haunts countries, and one woman's tenuous grasp on reality"-- Provided by publisher.

Book Synopsis

"A fable becoming reality of a woman becoming herself: Tehila Hakimi's Hunting in America just purely bangs." --Joshua Cohen, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Netanyahus

"This tantalizes." --Publishers Weekly

An award-winning, thrillingly subversive novel about an Israeli woman who moves to America, takes up hunting, and is drawn into a world of predator, prey, and dark attraction

An Israeli woman relocates to America on assignment from her tech company. In an attempt to leave her past behind and adapt entirely to the new culture in which she finds herself, she joins her colleagues on a deer hunt, discovering a surprising acumen for the sport. She fires again and again, refining her skills with every shot. As she embarks on an affair with her hunting guide and colleague, David, she sinks deeper into hunting season, vacillating between predator and prey as the boundaries between man, woman, work, and nature begin to collapse. Hunting with David becomes the one stable aspect of her life until one day everything changes.

With a poet's eye and a hunter's aim, Tehila Hakimi's beguiling debut novel is a taut, twisty story about the everyday violence that haunts countries, and one woman's tenuous grasp on reality.

Review Quotes

Advance Praise for Hunting in America

"A fable becoming reality of a woman becoming herself: Tehila Hakimi's Hunting in America just purely bangs."
--Joshua Cohen, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Netanyahus

"Hunting in America is chilling and thought provoking. Tehila Hakimi is a skillful hunter."
--Ayelet Gundar-Goshen, author of Waking Lions

"This novel exhales a kind of danger. It crackles with tension. Hunting in America is an uncanny, unnerving read. I held my breath to the last brilliant page."
--Bea Setton, author of Berlin

"Slim, serious, and searching, Hunting in America revolves around some major topics right now: the experience of our inter-country relations, gun usage in our country, and the vacuous void at the center of one's quest for power and meaning in America."
--Julia Hass, Lit Hub's "Most Anticipated Books of 2025"

"Sexy, witty, and spare, like an unexpected stranger with whom you might be persuaded to leave a party. Except the party's in middle America and involves guns."
--Elisa Albert, author of Human Blues and The Snarling Girl and Other Essays

"Provocative. . . . Told differently, the novel could be a classic noir, but Hakimi keeps the reader on their toes with the narrative's disarming obliqueness and ambiguity, all the way to the final crack of a gunshot. This tantalizes."
--Publishers Weekly

"In this astonishing debut novel, Tehila Hakimi weaves a darkly seductive tale of alienation and desire and asks hard questions about the sacrifices made and challenges faced by women in a male dominated workplace, revealing the violence inherent in our daily lives. Hakimi's protagonist straddles the thin line between reality and fantasy, between cultures and languages, between hunting and being hunted. Utterly gripping and chilling in its razor-sharp precision, Hunting in America will leave you breathless."
--Ayelet Tsabari, author of The Art of Leaving and Songs for the Brokenhearted

"A debut that stuns with originality and guile, Tehila Hakimi skillfully weaves a narrative that explores womanhood, the workplace, and the unsettling normalization of violence in both Israel and America. I was caught in the spell of the narrator's obscure voice from the first paragraph."
--Dorit Rabinyan, author of All the Rivers

"Reading Tehila Hakimi's stunning debut is a propulsive experience. My eyes moved seamlessly and fluidly across the blocks of text, going deeper into the narrator's experience of being a newcomer in a strange yet familiar land. One of her new American colleagues teaches her to smile to appear more friendly while another instructs her how to kill a deer safely. And yet, as a reader, I wasn't smiling and I certainly never felt safe. Like one of the bullets shot from the narrator's rifle, Hunting in America whistles, soars, and eventually collides into a thrilling conclusion.״
--Amelia Morris, author of Wild Cat

"In the company, who is the prey? An extraordinary novel."
--Amélie Nothomb, author of Fear and Trembling

"Hunting in America is an enigmatic novel, which I read in a few hours, but lingered in my mind long after the final page."
--Dror Mishani, author of The Man Who Wanted to Know Everything

About the Author

Tehila Hakimi is a Jewish Book Council Award-winning fiction writer and poet. She was a participant in the 2018 Fulbright International Writing Program Fellowship at the University of Iowa, and is a recipient of the 2015 Bernstein Prize for Literature. Hakimi's short prose and poems have been published in translation in Asymptote, World Literature Today, and The Poetry Review, among others. She was also awarded Israel's 2019 National Library's Pardes Scholarship for writers and the 2018 Levi Eshkol Prize for Hebrew Writers.

Joanna Chen is a British-born writer and literary translator from Hebrew to English whose translations include Agi Mishol's Less Like a Dove, Yonatan Berg's Frayed Light (finalist for the National Jewish Book Awards), and Meir Shalev's My Wild Garden. Her own poetry and writing has appeared in Poet Lore, Mantis, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Narratively, and the Washington Monthly, among other publications. She teaches literary translation at the Helicon School of Poetry in Tel Aviv.