The Prince of West End Avenue - Tapa blanda

"A masterpiece" (Hugo Barnacle Independent)

"Alan Isler's novel has been compared with the works of Isaac Bashevis Singer and Saul Bellow... Can it possibly live up to such praise? It can, it does" (Anita Brookner Spectator)

"Masterly, imaginative and provocatively disturbing in its effortless transitions between the comic and the tragic" (Geoffrey Elborn Guardian)

"Hilariously funny...a wonderful acheivement. Not since the heyday of Bellow and Heller has language been used to such good effect, at once hilarious and profoundly humane. Not since Malamud have comedy and tragedy and pathos and romance come together so effortlessly" (Gabriel Josipovici Jewish Quarterly)

"Poignant, comic and delightfully clever" (Observer)

In the Emma Lazarus retirement home in uptown Manhattan, the Jewish inmates embark on a chaotic, bitchy production of Hamlet.

Comedy and tragedy combine as our hero, Otto Korner, directs his quirky, libidinous fellow residents in the play and looks back over his adventures in Germany, Zurich, (where he met Lenin and inadvertently invented Dada), Auschwitz and America.

Winner of the National Jewish Book Award and finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award.