“Moral, mordant, irreparably torn, Tova Reich is the conscience of the diaspora—of all diasporas—as she shows in her outstanding first collection of short fiction, The House of Love and Prayer.”
– Joshua Cohen, author of The Netanyahus
“[Tova Reich’s] verbal blade is amazingly, ingeniously, startlingly, all-consumingly, all-encompassingly, deservedly, and brilliantly savage.”
– Cynthia Ozick
“Fearless, hysterically funny, and with the sharpest eye for truth and falsity, Tova Reich is a brilliant writer.”
– Jonathan Safran Foer
“Reich’s stories have a density to them: long paragraphs weighted with rich description, bricks placed carefully to build constructions capable of supporting the weight of history. But they do not make for labored reading. Rather, they build worlds worth returning to.”
– Gwen E. Kirby, The New York Times Book Review
“Few contemporary writers are truly original. Tova Reich is one of them.”
– Howard Norman, author of The Bird Artist
“Reich’s five novels, including One Hundred Philistine Foreskins (2013) and Mother India (2018), are volcanic satires of Jewish traditions and paradoxes, holy fools and wily wheelers and dealers. Her fervid, whirlwind yet pinpoint imagination and insights are potently distilled in her lacerating, often macabre, acidly funny short stories, collected here for the first time. Reich forensically depicts human bodies dead and alive and lassos the thrashing emotions of those in acute distress. Her dialogue somersaults with Yiddish intonations and the feints and jabs of intimate conflicts and negotiations… In these ingenious, disturbing, radically incisive, stinging, and hilarious tales, Reich wrestles with antisemitism, misogyny, deceit, profiteering, faith, and guilt.”
– Booklist
“Reich’s trademark subjects and recognizable style fill the pages of The House of Love and Prayer and Other Stories, the publication of which marks the first time her short fiction has been gathered into book form. … This much seems certain: If Reich’s novels have provoked strong reactions in the past, this collection will fuel vivid conversations, too. Try it in your book club — if you dare.”
– Erika Dreifus, Moment Mag
“Reich’s prose brims with authenticity, as she utilizes Hebrew and Yiddish words as their speakers would, without unnecessary translation. Moreover, her prose is fluid and engrossing; the reading experience is easy but rewarding and always a joy. An impressive collection that captures the complexity and diversity of the Haredi Jewish world.”
– Kirkus Reviews
“Tova Reich’s short stories have rattled readers with their biting satire since the mid-nineties. She finds absurdity in certain Jewish practices and events, a humor that riffs on shared understandings within the diaspora.”
– Sharon Elswit, Jewish Book Council
“The stories in Tova Reich's collection The House of Love and Prayer occupy the perspective of Orthodox Jews — they are written from the 'inner precincts,' to use a character's phrase, but for a readership in the 'outer sphere.' Some venture into the most distant and heretical margins of the faith. . .But even when Ms. Reich sets her stories in more traditional Orthodox milieus, the collision of mysticism and worldly interests gives rise to devastating satire. Women, the moving story 'The Lost Girl' suggests, are frequently treated like fungible commodities that exist in order to be quickly married off. But nowhere is Ms. Reich more trenchant than in 'The Third Generation,' an adaptation of the first chapter of her 2007 novel My Holocaust—one of the few 21st-century satires that successfully shocked people—about businessmen who have gotten rich certifying that corporations are sufficiently Holocaust-respectful. The obsession with memorialization is pursued further in the futuristic 'Dead Zone,' in which Israel has to be evacuated because it is designated a Unesco World Heritage site as the planet’s largest Jewish cemetery. . . If there is a quibble with this collection it is that Ms. Reich is only reluctantly interested in the art of narration, her brilliance lying more in startling premises and razor-sharp character sketches. Hers is no commonplace brilliance, however, and this book is full of black comedy at its most unsettling.”
– Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal
