Amazon.com description: Product Description: A literary love story.

In this literary love story, Marcus Weiss, a loyal denizen of New York City, retires at age fifty to work on a dictionary he has grandly titled “The Human Gesture in Western Literature.” Comparing himself to Flaubert, who read fifteen hundred books in order to compose his Bouvard and Pécuchet—Marcus immerses himself in literature, culling quotations and passages for his dictionary and treating his friends to impromptu readings of the “pearls” he finds, all the while lecturing them about the emptiness and futility of consumerism. His lover, Gina, and his best friend, Oscar, do their best to indulge him, but when they’ve had enough, they poke fun at this modern-day “prophet.” One day, while Marcus is at work in his warm and secluded study, an old man invades his imagination, and Marcus, enchanted, allows the old man entry and begins to write his biography. Soon, time distinctions blur: does Marcus, as he looks far into the future, imagine himself as an old man, living alone with his books, or is the old man the actual Marcus, now eighty years old, looking back and recounting a time in his life when his dear ones—Gina, Oscar, and all his other contemporaries—were still living?

“In this haunting novel, Marcus Weiss is trapped in the legacy of the Holocaust and the presence of anti-Semitism. Writing a novel, and compiling a dictionary, he seeks to capture the totality of experience. The silences of the book, and Marcus’s own collections of quotations, are eloquent and memorable.” — Lew Fried, Kent State University

“In elegant, pitch-perfect prose, Tsipi Keller explores what it means to be a writer in a post-Holocaust world. Her evocation of Marcus Weiss—at once tender and wise—lays bare the felt life of the novelist. Along the way, Keller pays honor to the human experience and to the artful language that gives us our measure.” — Andrew Furman, author of Israel Through the Jewish-American Imagination: A Survey of Jewish-American Literature on Israel, 1928–1995

“Marcus Weiss preaches the love of literature in a wilderness where people don’t read. Moreover, he is a writer. He is writing a book about himself writing, and about his lover and his friends, who wonder if they’ll appear in his book. He exhorts them to read books that matter, that make us more human, that make the mind dance. And the marvelous thing is that the book he is writing, which is the one we are reading, is just such a book, because Marcus is generous, opinionated, foolish, and inspired, not merely a creature of words and paper. I’m sure he would add Tsipi Keller to his list of favorite authors if he knew her.” — Joel Agee, author of Twelve Years: An American Boyhood in East Germany