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Item Description

HYSTERA
THE NEW NOVEL by LEORA SKOLKIN-SMITH
Set in the turbulent 1970s when Patty Hearst became Tanya the Revolutionary, Hystera is a timeless story of madness, yearning, and identity. After a fatal accident takes her father away, Lillian Weill blames herself for the family tragedy. Tripping through failed love affairs with men, and doomed friendships, all Lilly wants is to be sheltered from reality. She retreats from the outside world into a world of delusion and the private terrors of a New York City Psychiatric Hospital. Unreachable behind her thick wall of fears, the world of hospital corridors and strangers become a vessel of faith. She is a foreigner there until her fellow patients release her from her isolation with the power of human intimacy. How do we know who we really are? How do we find our true selves under the heavy burden of family and our pasts? In an unpredictable portrait of mental illness, Hystera penetrates to the pulsing heart of the questions.

 Edges/The Fragile Mistress

In the summer of 1963, fourteen year old American teenager Liana travels to Jerusalem, accompanied by her older sister and her larger than life mother. The trip takes her from the sheltered life of an East Coast suburb to the hot, bustling and thoroughly confusing landscape of the Middle East, where Jewish and Arab cultures exist side by side in an uneasy truce…

Leora Skolkin-Smith celebrated novel Edges is now in preproduction as a Feature Film, The Fragile Mistress, from Triboro Pictures. In anticipation of the film, Hamilton Stone Editions has published a revised and expanded version of the novel, containing yet unpublished chapters and text, added to the original. More info here.

Item Special Note

Both autographed books are the paperback editions.

Praise for Hystera

HYSTERA is the WINNER of the 2012 Global E-Books Award. HYSTERA is also a Finalist in Literary Fiction, The International Book Awards, 2012

Chosen for The Princeton University Series:
“Women Writers from the Fertile Crescent Moon”…

“Hystera is a haunting, mesmerizing story of madness, longing and identity, set against one of the most fascinating times in NYC history. Skolkin-Smith’s alchemy is to inhabit her characters even as she crafts a riveting story that is nothing short of brilliant.”âÂÂA?¨
— Caroline Leavitt, Reviewer, “New York Times” bestselling author of Pictures of You

“Poetic, strange and evocative… A poignant prose-poem…” — Publisher’s Weekly

Praise for Edges/The Fragile Mistress

“Edges takes the reader to an Israel before the high walls formed, a border, when instead metal wires hung like “hosiery lines” across the land…Here, Skolkin-Smith’s young heroine tries to shake off her father’s suicide and her mother’s mourning by making an escape with the missing son of an American diplomat…Skolkin-Smith, in clear, burnished prose, fuses personal and political rifts into an exhilirating debut novel.”
–Philip Graham, Director, Creative Writing Program,University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

“…. Leora Skolkin-Smith’s new novel, Edges: O Israel O Palestine (is) about the adventures of an adolescent girl in Israel in the early ’60s. Her character’s mother had grown up in British Mandate Palestine, one of several factors making the memory bank of this book so rich — appropriate for a place with almost too much history to bear and retain one’s sanity at the same time.

What is most memorable to me is the sense of place that Ms. Skolkin-Smith has achieved — the sunny and scary Jerusalem and countryside — and the hope, love, hate and fatalism of the groups, Palestinian and Israeli, living amongst and apart from each other in a thin, rocky, brilliantly bright corridor too rarely shaded by old gray-green olive trees.

Perhaps above all, the novel, told with restraint and poetic precision, is about how we shoulder on (and wing it) under the weight of history — family and public.
– Robert Whitcomb, Providence Journal