KIRKUS REVIEW: In Berengaut's (The Estate of Wormwood and Honey, 2012) second novel, two women discuss love, physics, infidelity, polyamory, mathematics, the Holocaust and the importance of family. Imagine if My Dinner with Andre, with its emphasis on dialogue and the nuanced analysis of past adventure and philosophy, took place between two contemporary, highly accomplished women having lunch. Berengaut has accomplished something remarkable: a novel composed entirely of dialogue, with no chapter breaks, that is riveting from beginning to end. Sabine Stern is an academic who is regularly...

Here is a collection of 52 poems-just like the title says-dexterously composed by novelist Julian Berengaut. Some have been published in various journals, but they all appear together here for the first time. They're about growing up and hearing and trying to decipher family stories, and about telling in turn the life stories of those who followed. And they're about today's culture, too, celebrating the successes of art and literature while asking tough questions about our basic problems. The poems of Julian Berengaut are smartly observant and sympathetic to the little crumbs of reality that,...

The Biblical story of Job has echoed to us throughout humanity's long experience with suffering and with searching for gods. In The Master and Margarita, Bulgakov imagined Satan visiting the Soviet Union; The Book of Comrade Yovskiy imagines a Soviet Job facing punishment, searching for the reason why, and trying to face his God.
The Book of Comrade Yovsky is Julian Berenagut's third novel. His second, This Isn't Easy for Me, was found by Kirkus to be "remarkable," "riveting," "deeply felt" and "one of the most memorable in literature in the...