Scribblers on the Roof is a weekly Summer event with readings from Jewish writers held on the roof of Ansche Chesed (with alternate indoor space in case of inclement weather). Also reading on the 9th will be Sarah Stern from her Another Word for Love.
Zinsky the Obscure Synopsis:
“If your childhood is brutal, your adulthood becomes a daily attempt to recover: a quest for ecstasy and stability in recompense for their early absence.” So states the 30-year-old Ariel Zinsky, whose bachelor-like lifestyle belies the torturous youth he is still coming to grips with. As a boy, he struggles with the beatings themselves; as a grownup, he struggles with the world’s indifference to them. Zinsky the Obscure is his life story, a humorous chronicle of his search for a redemptive ecstasy through sex, an entrepreneurial sports obsession, and the cathartic exercise of writing it all down.
Fervently recounting both the comic delights and the frightening horrors of a life in which he feels – always – that he is not like all the rest, Zinsky survives the worst and relishes the best with idiosyncratic style, as his heartbreak turns into self-awareness and his suicidal ideation into self-regard. A vivid evocation of the all-consuming nature of lust and ambition – and the forces that drive them – Zinsky the Obscure is a novel of extraordinary zeal, range, and power.
