Master storyteller Ehud Havazelet earned his first Oregon Book Award in 1999, but the creative writing professor couldn't stop with just one. In 2008, Havazelet's first novel, Bearing the Body (Farrar, Straus and Giroux) took home the Ken Kesey Award for Fiction.
Bearing the Body tells the weighty story of Nathan Mirsky, a young doctor with unresolved anger and uncontrollable vices. The novel follows Mirsky as he escapes his fragile domestic life to travel west and investigate the circumstances of his brother's recent murder.
The winner of multiple awards, including the California Book Award, a Pushcart Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship, Havazelet has been praised by The New York Times for writing "with a kind of anatomical precision, his scalpel slicing at his characters to expose the dark reality beneath." The Times also chose Bearing the Body as a notable book of the year.
Read an excerpt from Bearing the Body.
- Chrisanne Beckner