Arafat's Elephant — Jonathan Tel

So offers the narrator in one of Jonathan Tel's brilliant and insightful stories. Set in and around Jerusalem, now, in the past, and in the future, this remarkable collection introduces us to a wide range of complex characters: some extraordinary in their ordinariness; others lifted from the pages of history; still others with lives given significance simply because of where they are or who they're with at a single moment in time. We meet a young religious Jewish woman who loses herself in thought and wanders off en route to her arranged marriage, a would-be Islamic terrorist who offers assistance to American vacationers, an Internet millionaire doing his military service, a torturer who writes children's books, an elderly couple rediscovering their love in a coffee factory, and Moshe Dayan while he's having his glass eye fitted. These are stories that will give you pause, make you think, challenge your preconceptions. Stories that, while deceptively simple and hauntingly beautiful, form a rich and complex portrait of a conflicted land and the glorious variety of its inhabitants.