This imaginative reworking of the story of Abraham and Sarah combines in a 'novelized essay' myth, rabbinic lore, storytelling, and psychological insight to create new and revealing interpretations of ancient texts.

Mario Brelich, a Hungarian author writing in Italian, was a superb ironist. In his three novels, of which this is the first, he explored central episodes of the Old and New Testaments with unsparing wit and intelligence. In Navigator of the Flood, Brelich's Noah is a man laboring under a burden of responsibility by a Lord who appears from time to time to "correct"--at man's expense--His own foreknowledge and omniscience. If Noah finds God's commands at times cruel or incomprehensible, if he still sees beauty in a life now under threat of extinction, and wonders why he and his family...

This imaginative reworking of the story of Abraham and Sarah combines myth, rabbinic lore, storytelling, and psychological insight to create new and revealing interpretations of ancient texts.

In The Holy Embrace, Abraham repudiates the idols worshipped by his ancestors and accepts God when the Lord selects him as the ambivalent patriarch of His chosen people. But the greatest impediment to God's designs is Abraham's infatuation with his wife, "the most beautiful woman in the world," who is also narcissistic and frigid. How the miracle of their holy embrace is finally accomplished,...