Dolly City - Paperback

by Orly Castel-Bloom (Author), Dalya Bilu (Translator), Karen Grumberg (Afterword by)

Gruesome, unhinged, and hilarious, Dolly City is widely recognized as one of the most disconcerting-and brilliant--literary works ever to come out of Israel.

"Dolly City--a city without a base, without a past, without an infrastructure. The most demented city in the world." In the midst of a futuristic-primitive metropolis, the accumulation of all our urban nightmares, Doctor Dolly (certified by the University of Katmandu) finds a newborn baby in a black plastic bag, and decides to become a mother. Overcome by unfamiliar maternal urges, Dolly dispenses with her private lab of rare diseases and turns all her surgical passion onto her son. Ceaselessly cutting and sewing, Dolly is the scalpel-wielding version of the all-too-familiar Jewish Mother archetype, forever operating upon her son with destructive, invasive love. In this grotesque satire of war and the defensive measures taken to survive it, Orly Castel-Bloom, one of Israel's most provocative and original writers, turns her own scalpel upon that most holy of institutions, the myth of motherhood--and its implications in the life of a nation.

Author Biography

Orly Castel-Bloom is a leading voice in Hebrew literature today. Her postmodern classic Dolly City has
been included in UNESCO's Collection of Representative Works, and was
nominated in 2007 as one of the ten most important books since the
creation of the state of Israel. An Egyptian Novel won the Sapir Prize in 2015. Castel-Bloom's books have been published in 14 languages.