Sign-In
Cart
Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation
Hardcover
HumorGeneral FictionLiterary Fiction
Publisher Price: $27.95
Please select the version of book you would like to purchase.
ISBN10: 1938603281
ISBN13: 9781938603280
Publisher: Dzanc Books
Published: May 6 2025
Pages: 347
Weight: 1.15
Height: 1.30 Width: 5.80 Depth: 8.70
Language: English
ISBN13: 9781938603280
Publisher: Dzanc Books
Published: May 6 2025
Pages: 347
Weight: 1.15
Height: 1.30 Width: 5.80 Depth: 8.70
Language: English
Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award and The Republic of Consciousness PrizeOne of the funniest, truest novels I've read in years. -Jess Row, author of The New Earth and Your Face in MineFollowing a tight-knit, eccentric Jewish family, the Rosenbergs, over four decades, Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation combines the madness of motherhood with the manic absurdity of grief in a stunning tale for fans of Allegra Goodman and Rebecca Makkai.
The night after fleeing her mother's funeral, cellist Louise Rackoff meets aspiring therapist Leon Rosenberg at a Rosh Hashanah dinner in 1974. Over the next two decades, they build a marriage and a family based on honesty, argument, and a shared appreciation of the absurd. But that rock-solid foundation crumbles when Louise is diagnosed with a rare degenerative disease--the same one responsible for her mother's slow, agonizing passing.Determined to spare Leon and their daughter Lydia from her messy decline, Louise makes the simultaneously selfish and altruistic decision to leave her family and die on her own terms. Her disappearance forces the Rosenbergs to grapple with how to find meaning in the face of mortality--a manic and mystical quest that sends them careening across the globe, colliding into tattoo artists, Chasidic Jews, playworkers, and witches. And finally, back into each other.Bursting with humor and heartbreak, and inspired by Yahm's own experience as a disabled author facing the existential terror of parenting while ill, Unfinished Acts of Wild Creation leaps into the trials of motherhood, the impossibility of adolescence, the hopelessness of grief, and all the wild beauty and hilarity that makes life worth living anyway.
2 different editions
Also available
Also in
Literary Fiction
Elizabeth Spencer: Novels & Stories (Loa #344): The Voice at the Back Door / The Light in the Piazza / Knights and Dragons / Stories
Spencer, Elizabeth
Hardcover
$38.00
James Fenimore Cooper: The Leatherstocking Tales Vol. 1 (Loa #26): The Pioneers / The Last of the Mohicans / The Prairie
Cooper, James Fenimore
Hardcover
From $19.99
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Other Stories (Barnes & Noble Classics Series)
Stevenson, Robert Louis
Paperback
$5.99
Philip Roth: Novels 1973-1977 (Loa #165): The Great American Novel / My Life as a Man / The Professor of Desire
Roth, Philip
Hardcover
From $17.99
The Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk
St Aubyn, Edward
Paperback
From $9.99