Nir Baram’s article in Haaretz: New Israeli vision: where Palestinians are equal and not separate..
“The real role of the left in Israel at this time is to help the Jews living here to recognize the fact that they don’t have to live in a society that speaks a language of “Jews vs. non-Jews,” “Jews vs. Palestinians,” “Jews vs. Gentiles.” This corrupt way of thinking has dominated our consciousness over the past decades, and we must fight it…”

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Nir Baram published an Article in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung about the war in Gaza: “According to the news in Israel, “The IDF doesn’t kill children for no reason” – and Israelis nod in agreement. Over 1,300 Palestinian children were killed in the last decade, hundreds of civilians died in the current military attack, yet the tired mantra is still recited: the army doesn’t kill without good cause, we never kill children intentionally, we’re alright, we are. This robotic proclamation and the moral superiority most of the Israeli public clings to keep us sheltered from reality and create a false and dangerous sense of victimization and persecution…”

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Nir Baram’s interview on Leo Zuckermann’s TV show in Mexico. A conversation about “Good people” and other things..

Click here to watch the full interview:
Nir Baram interview by Leo Zuckermann

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“A literary miracle” – Hanoch Marmari writes about World Shadow

June 6, 2014EN

Hanoch Marmari the former editor of Haaretz in an article about World Shadow in’The Seventh Eye Journal’ : “A literary miracle, a novel that builds a glorious floor above the capitalist mall inside which we all lost our way. Amongst other subjects Nir Baram’s novel World Shadow deals with a group of anarchists that manage to corrupt, through a series of sloppy events, art works in museums and to capture for one moment the attention of millions.”

to read the whole review in the The Seventh Eye Journal click read more

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Nir Baram’s novel “Good People” (Gute Leute) paperback edition was published in Germany on 1.6.2014 by DTV publishing house. The hardcover edition was published by Carl Hanser Verlag.

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One of the most serious and original reviews ever to be written about “Good People” in the great literary magazine ‘Letras Libris’: “Good people is not a novel about the Second World War… The challenge that Baram takes on himself is to break the reader identification system that often goes looking for a character to identify with and to believe in. There is no doubt that Good People comes out victorious”

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El Mundo

March 3, 2014ES

“Celebrated as the future king of Israeli literature, praised and translated into several languages and considered the new voice of the left, Nir Baram reaches Spain.”

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After participating in Hay Festival in Cartagena, Columbia in the beginning of 2014, Nir Baram will be participating in Bogota book-fair in May 2014.

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So Far the rights to “World Shadow” were sold to the following publishing houses:
Text publishing (English rights). Hanser (Germany). Alfaguara (Spain). De Bezige Bij (Netherlands and Belgium). Gyldendal (Denmark). Fraktura (Croatia). Gyldendal (Norway).

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An interview in English about “World Shadow” in the culture program of I24 news.

Starting at 6.45 minute

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Pre publication review in France – Livres Hebdo:
“So it is finally here, the great novel that earned its author great success in Israel, comparable to the novel “The Kindly Ones” here in France… ‘Good People’ is a masterful metaphysical novel written by a true artist.”

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The Author A.B Yehoshua on World Shadow

January 1, 2014EN

“World Shadow is a novel that will fire-up people everywhere it’ll be published, especially young people.
Only rarely can you read such a novel that is sophisticated, full of energy, imagination, innovation, rage and humor. More than anything: World Shadow changes the way you see the world. It is very possible that in a few years World Shadow will become a novel that young people  all over the world qoute.”

(author A.B Yehoshua)

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The famous international Mexican Author Jorge Volpi writes an excellent review about “Good People” in the Mexican daily Reforma:

“Like all great historical novel, the greatest merit of Good people lies in its ability to speak on the present time, rather than the past. Because those good people who tolerate the Nazi butchers are similar to those who chose not to hear the news that warned about the genocides in Cambodia and the former Yugoslavia, Rwanda or Darfur…”

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A different Israeli literature is possible

A young literary consciousness of Israel
Nir Baram faces Jewish clichés with the first novel is a Hebrew WWII without focusing on the Holocaust

There is something intensely challenging in Nir Baram ..in his work and his personality. In rebellion, he has done something that only an Israeli without fear can do. He has offered his country a novel portraying the pre-World War II horrors so disturbing: without portraying monsters or tell their bloody crimes, leaving barely seen the death of millions. Good people in Baram’s novel subject the course of history by two special human beings, full of talent and sensitivity. They tempt the reader with their fascinating personalities, and tragically end up choosing to be collaborators of the great evils of the twentieth century by a cruel and soulless opportunism. Their decisions have devastating effects and engulf themselves and the dignity of an entire generation.

To the full on-line interview:
http://cultura.elpais.com/cultura/2013/12/03/actualidad/1386101395_866224.html

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Author Dror Mishani on World Shadow

November 11, 2013En, Heb

Dror Mishani the author of the international best seller, award winning “The Missing File” in an evening about “World Shadow”.

World Shadow is a marvelous and revolutionary novel that in its greatest moments refuses to accept the world as it is and as we “already” know it – but rather starts to read as a text on the verge of what the world is ‘no longer’ but ‘could be’ and ‘might some day be’.

This dimension which is beyond “knowing the world” opens up in the novel mainly due to the process of repentance that its two main characters go through.

Gabriel Mantsur from Jerusalem changes during the novel, so much so that in the end of the novel he is no longer the same man; he drifts away from the business world and the financial world due to his decline in them but also because he undergoes a deep transformation, so deep that in the end he supports the strike.

Like Gabriel, Daniel Kay also undergoes an ideological transformation which brings him not only to betray his ex-co workers at MSV but to even join the strikers.

Through Daniel Kay, Gabriel Mantzur and the group of young strikers – the world as we know it is on the verge of repentance and comes closer to a real change. The truly fascinating things is that this also happened in Baram’s novel Good People – so much so that even in that historical novel Baram created the feeling that if the two main characters dare just a bit more they’ll be able to minimize the disastrous effects of the war that already happened.

In World Shadow this feeling is even stronger because while reading this seemingly realistic novel, a novel that knows the world better than any other Israeli novel, you feel that turning the page will make the world different.

In its liberating moments World Shadow is not written in the present tense of “knowing the world”, also not in future tense (utopian time), but rather in a unique tense that lays between a familiar present and a yet unknown future. A tense or a time that could be named “the time which is forming now” (a line from World Shadow, page 402). And this tense continuously asks the readers: which time do you want it to be?

To the full lecture –

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C_olsPleHG0

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World Shadow by Nir Baram hits No. 1 on Best-Seller lists!

November 11, 2013EN

3 months after publication – World Shadow by Nir Baram hits No. 1 on the Best-Seller lists. This goes to show the immense effect and the enthusiastic reactions this novel has in Israel.

Haaretz best seller

(Ha’aretz, 13.11.2013)

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“I do not know when an author justifies this title that barely survives our days. Baram’s mission is to find that hidden, elusive and rare matter of freedom; that of the inner freedom, which exists in humans and is the first thing they hurry to put to death.”

“World Shadow is an accurate, shimmering and unique literary Achievement, a  representation which while screening through the political net of enslavement, displays the relations between the human being and the enslaver in the depressing period of global capitalism.”

 

to read the whole review click read more

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Haaretz – Neri Livneh

November 11, 2013EN

The famous and popular columnist of Haaretz Neri Livneh also writes about World shadow: ” This great novel is the only good thing to emerge from the social protest that took place two summers ago…There are three different voices in the book in three completely different styles. There is the voice of the individual, Gavriel Mansour, the tragic hero of the book. Mansour’s voice is heard through the narrator in beautiful Hebrew with a wonderful power of description. The other voices are delivered directly, without the narrator’s mediation. There is the voice of the American campaigners, whose polished, witty and purposeful style is expressed in their email exchanges. The voice of the protesters, who are trying to organize a worldwide strike with one billion participants, is also heard directly.”

 

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Shelly Yachimovich

October 10, 2013HE

Shelly Yachimovich the head of the Israeli opposition in parliament wrote on her facebook page about “world shadow” (her post got more than 2000 likes and hundreds of comments):

Nir Baram’s World Shadow delves into the viscera of crony capitalism in Israel and similar arenas around the world. It explores the methods in which capital-intensive campaigns fabricate reality, what the next mass protest could look like, and how unbridled, insatiable greed, which no one even attempts to restrain, leads to… well, you’ll find out all about that in the book.

This is the most intelligent, insightful and thought-provoking documentation written to date of the economic, social, moral and cultural processes that are sending seismic waves throughout our world.

The novel is highly political, yet contains no moral sermons – it is a fun read. Baram has no pity for those in power or for their victims. He is cynical and empathetic towards everyone equally. And yet, despite having setting himself the rule of not taking a stand (and this is a good thing, because reading manifestos in novels is such a turn off), he manages to place a huge warning sign: when there are no balancing and restraining forces – there comes a moment where everything falls apart, and it doesn’t necessarily make the world a better place.

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06/10/2013 – The Israeli Left’s last novel by Noam Sheizaf – A new best-selling novel by Nir Baram takes aim at the Israeli ‘peace industry,’ globalization and the sense of betrayal a generation of left wing and progressive operatives is leaving behind.

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