The World to Come: A Novel (edit title)

Shelfari edited the description of The World to Come: A Novel Friday, July 31 2009.

• "Nothing short of amazing."— Entertainment Weekly A million-dollar painting by Marc Chagall is stolen from a museum. The unlikely thief is Benjamin Ziskind, a thirty-year-old quiz-show writer. As Benjamin and his twin sister try to evade the police, they find themselves recalling their dead parents—the father who lost a leg in Vietnam, the mother who created children's books—and their stories about trust, loss, and betrayal. What is true, what is fake, what does it mean? Eighty years before the theft, these questions haunted Chagall and the enigmatic Yiddish fabulist Der Nister ("The Hidden One"), teachers at a school for Jewish orphans. Both the painting and the questions will travel through time to shape the Ziskinds' futures. With astonishing grace and simplicity, Dara Horn interweaves a real art heist, history, biography, theology, and Yiddish literature. Richly satisfying, utterly unique, her novel opens the door to "the world to come"—not life after death, but the world we create through our actions right now. Reading group guide included.

Shelfari edited the contributors of The World to Come: A Novel Wednesday, July 22 2009.

• Added a contributor: Dara Horn: (Primary Author)

Shelfari edited the first sentence of The World to Come: A Novel Friday, July 17 2009.

• There used to be many families like the Ziskinds, families where each person always knew that his life was more than his alone.