Maxwell Bauman is not running out of imagination. When he’s not creating some magical construction out of Lego, he writes outrageous, Jewish-inspired horror stories. Six of these stories have made it into his first published collection, titled The Anarchist Kosher Cookbook (Clash Books, 2017).

No, it’s not a literal cookbook. It’s an unpredictable mix of morbidly sexual, irreverent, at times hilarious narrative elements, manifestations of Bauman’s Jewish humor. This Cookbook may not rewrite any popular recipes, but it does rewrite some of the teachings and stories every nice Jewish boy is told at a young age.

Think of the Biblical episode of God manifesting itself to Moses through a burning bush. In Bauman’s story, the “bush” happens to be a Jewish woman’s pubic hair. She wakes up one morning to find her bush in flames. The pubic hair speaks: “I will open your womb only for the Junior Rabbi Kauffman.” The woman is torn between following the will of God and staying faithful to her gentile partner.

Bauman, 28 years old, was born and raised in the Bronx, but now lives in Massachusetts. He likes to describe himself as a “halfway-decent Jewish boy.” By day, he’s the editor in chief of a small literary magazine titled Door is a Jar. The morning we spoke on the phone, Bauman had just finished creating a black raven with Lego (You can see a photo in Bauman’s Twitter account, where he shares all sorts of Lego-related news).

Both of his parents are Jewish, but Bauman was not raised in a religious household. “I even protested having a Bar Mitzvah,” he said. “Because I didn’t want to lie and say I was going to dedicate myself to God and serve the community all for a dumb party.” This episode inspired one of the collection’s characters, who goes through a much-relatable bar-mitzvah crisis.

“I rewrote the stories many times,” he said. As he began writing the book, he adopted what’s known as the snowflake method, developing what was at first one joke into a larger picture.

In one story, that core gag is how the return of the Messiah interrupts a couple’s honeymoon is Martha’s Vineyard. The savior, however, turns out to be a disgusting, deformed man that does indeed raise the dead and turn them into a horrific army of zombie-like creatures. The book’s titular Anarchist Kosher Cookbook story is written as a list of instructions to create a golem to fight Neo-Nazis and anti-Semites and, why not, also get some late-night loving (“You can find the parts of old golems in the attic of any synagogue. It’ll be in the box labeled ‘Xmas Decorations’”).

Bauman has some brilliant ideas, albeit ones that are sometimes polluted with less hilarious, at times cheaper humor. In more than one instance, the narration goes on tangents that can detract from the core, more creative ideas. These passages may not contribute to the overall quality of the work, but with leviathans, dybbuks and Baphomitzvahs, the Cookbook will still leave you hungry for more stories.

Photo by Simone Somekh

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Shelly Oria’s debut short story collection, New York 1, Tel Aviv 0, is simultaneously delicate and shattering. The book derives its title from a story of the same name, in which an Israeli expat from in New York obsessively tallies the merits of the two cities that she has called home. “It’s an ongoing competition,” she says, “But I forget to keep track, so I have to keep counting all over again.”

Many stories in Oria’s collection are rooted in two cities on opposite sides of the globe, their central characters Israelis who have made their way to the United States. But New York 1, Tel Aviv 0 is more textured than a simple exploration of migration and cultural difference. Quietly and without ceremony, Oria’s narratives veer into worlds that are unidentifiable and bizarre. In ‘The Beginning of a Plan,’ a young woman flees Israel to America to escape criminal prosecution, and discovers that she can quite literally freeze time. In ‘Victor, Changed Man,’ a couple reunites and promptly separates against the backdrop of an anonymous city that has been overtaken by a dense, unyielding fog. Often, the book’s fantastical narratives border on the grotesque. Oria writes of a North American town that traffics in human organs and blood, of another dominated by a band of vengeful, violent women. “We hold our men by their balls,” the nameless protagonist says. “And we squeeze.”

Even in the stories situated in identifiable locations, there is something disarming about the characters, who speak and think in jarring declaratives. “I always look them in the eye throughout, so as not to miss my moment,” says the protagonist of ‘This Way I Don’t Have to Be,’ explaining her addiction to sleeping with married men. “In that moment, their lives turn to air.” But beneath the cryptic authority of statements like these lies confusion and chaos. The lives of Oria’s characters are steeped in loneliness, unrequited love, and confounding lust. They subsist in fluid, often queer, sexual relationships that prove agonizing. Booney, the central character of a story called ‘The Thing About Sophia,’ develops feelings for her female roommate, and is invited into her bed, but not into her heart. In the titular ‘New York 1, Tel Aviv 0,’ an Israeli immigrant moves in with a former IDF soldier and falls desperately for his girlfriend, a woman who cannot be tamed.

Oria author was born in Los Angeles, but raised in Israel, and she taught herself to write fiction in English when she was an adult. If she is at any disadvantage when it comes to proficiency in the language, it does not show. Her sentences are piercing, her tone cool and assured. She is admirably bold in her storytelling, weaving her short narratives with ribbons of the strange and the surreal.

Every now and then, however, Oria overreaches in her attempts at originality. ‘Fully Zipped,’ which chronicles a series of exchanges between a customer and a salesperson in the fitting room of a clothing store, relies more on concept than on characters, and fizzles away without leaving much of an impression. ‘Documentation’ explores the unravelling of a relationship through a catalogue of kisses—a narrative technique that feels gimmicky and stale.

Some of the most striking stories in New York 1, Tel Aviv 0 are, in fact, the ones rendered in simple linear narratives. ‘The Disneyland of Albany,’ the strongest story in the collection and the most overtly political, follows an Israeli artist named Avner, who leaves his young daughter Maya in Tel Aviv when he moves to New York to further his art career. During one of Maya’s visits to the States, Avner travels to Albany to meet a wealthy Jewish patron, who subtly attempts to bully Avner into infusing his work with Zionist symbolism. At one point, Maya becomes agitated when she learns that a community was displaced so Nelson Rockefeller could build Albany’s Empire State Plaza. “Did they use tanks?” she asks, a reference to the Israeli demolition of Palestinian homes.

If the circumstances of Oria’s more ethereal narratives are unnerving and strange, so is this story of a little girl who carries the trauma of her country’s wars. In New York 1, Tel Aviv 0, devastating realities collide with haunting landscapes of the surreal, until it cannot be said where one ends and the other begins.

Related: New Short Story Collection Explores Tel Aviv’s Dark Side

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It was a smart move to ask beloved Israeli weirdo Etgar Keret to co-edit Tel Aviv Noir, Israel’s entrée into Akashic Books’ expansive series of noir-themed fiction anthologies. Keret—aided by compatriot Assaf Gavron—allows his fantastical leanings to push beyond the genre’s typical boundaries. As a result, only a few stories invoke the genre’s classic tropes: more often than not, the streets are not rain-slicked, the dames not long of leg, and the mysteries not so compelling. In fact, the more memorable characters in this collection would be markedly out of place on the streets occupied by Raymond Chandler’s hard-boiled heroes.

The upshot of this thematic liberalism is an anthology of startlingly varying quality. The stories that stick to Chandleresque modes of storytelling are often weaker than those that attempt subversion, perhaps because it’s so difficult to improve on the masters—I found myself torn between wanting the stories to hit the genre notes and then, when they often did, wanting them to subvert the clichés.

In the clunky opener “Sleeping Mask,” Gadi Taub’s protagonist narrates the story in relentless exposition; on the same page, we read that his “sex was like a tornado,” and that “everything was up in the air. [They] were playing with fire.” Lacking are the whimsies of The Big Sleep, or Michael Chabon’s Yiddish Policeman’s Union. Instead, we’re given stock characters and stock plot set in motion by a conspicuously authorial voice.

The other stories in ‘Encounters,’ Part I the anthology, fair slightly better. In Matan Hermoni’s “Women,” a failed novelist meets the ghost of an obscure Polish poet while attending the funeral of famed Yiddish poet Abraham Sutzkever, and they become roommates. “The Time-Slip Detective,” by Lavie Tidhar, is a particular highlight. Tidhar is a ghostly presence in the story itself: the protagonist, a journalist, is on assignment to interview Tidhar about his recent World Fantasy Award—which he won in 2012 for Osasma. The journalist finds himself magically transported to 1930s Mandate Palestine, where he is chased by a fictional detective from a series of Hebrew pulp novels. The disorienting and propulsive story allows for cliché—eyes are frequently twinkling and sparkling—but it feels earned in the context of smarter language: our journalist describes cars moving “like tiny beetles,” an unsettling image that calls to mind the surrealist shrinking of tilt-shift photography. A story of fused identities, disruptions in time, and literary parlor tricks, Tidhar’s piece is not the only one in the anthology to borrow heavily from Borges.

Part II, ‘Estrangements,’ falls flat, but contains a jewel in “Swirl,” by Norwegian journalist and critic Silje Bekeng. Her story finds the wife of a seldom-home foreign diplomat encountering the strange, spectral man who has been subtly misplacing objects in her apartment, whilst riots on the streets of Tel Aviv threaten to spill over into her world. Sandwiched between misfires from Gon Ben Ari and Julia Fermentto, “Swirl” shines.

If hints of noir seem absent from many of these stories, a pervasive sense of terror and violence certainly is not. In Taub’s story, one character warns another against hitchhiking, saying, “There are Arabs out there, trying to abduct soldiers.” The hero of Tidhar’s “Time Slip Detective” is comforted by the threat of terrorism when he returns to modern Israel. And in Alex Epstein’s eccentric and sadly too-short “Death in Pajamas,” the Grim Reaper visits a café while missiles erupt near Hadera, a double car bomb detonates in Jerusalem, and a pregnant Palestinian woman miscarries her twins because of a delay at a checkpoint. (It’s curious—and disappointing—that from a roster of international authors, including a Norwegian, a Colombian, and an Iranian, no Arab or Palestinian writers are represented.

Sensibly, Keret and Gavron save themselves for Part III, ‘Corpses,’ offering strong stories that finish a wildly uneven anthology on a high note, and illustrate the problems inherent in opening up the definitions of noir.

Keret’s “Allergies” is the story of a couple who can’t conceive, so they adopt a dog with a picky appetite and violent tendencies. The dog, as you would expect, threatens to derail their relationship. But smartly, Keret pivots from the obvious, and the story ends with a touching and absurdist twist. Though it’s dark, you’d be hard-pressed to identify a single detail that evokes the concept of ‘noir.’

Meanwhile, Gavron’s “Center” is noir subversion at its finest, featuring two renovators who pretend to be private detectives for a few days and wind up solving a gory murder mystery. Gavron brilliantly allows amateurs to take the reins in his story, perhaps signaling to the reader that he himself is an amateur in the genre. Instead of trying to best Chandler at his own perfected game, Gavron gives us lovable fools running amok in a noir universe. The result is a story that gleefully calls to mind the absurdist, hard-boiled logic of a Coen Brothers film.

Despite the unfortunate ratio of clunkers to winners, Tel Aviv Noir evokes the mood, sensitivities, and neuroses of Israeli life to good effect. As Keret asks in the introduction, “Tel Aviv is one of the happiest, friendliest, most liberal cities in the world. What could possibly be dark about our sunny city, a city nicknamed ‘The Bubble?'” Turns out, plenty—even if isn’t actually noir.

Zachary C. Solomon is a Brooklyn-based writer and fiction M.F.A. candidate at Brooklyn College. Follow him on Twitter at @z_solomon.

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Here’s an excerpt taken from the title story—it’s about weed and Texas and a hairdresser named Kathleen:

“The haircut would be easier to get than the weed, but he wanted the weed first so he could be stoned during the haircut. For the weed I had to approach a Texan. The Texans hated us, but some hated us less than others. Luckily, a kind woman bummed a cigarette off me, called me “Sweetheart,” and agreed to help with both my tasks. Her name was Kathleen, and she was the on-set hairdresser.

Kathleen didn’t give a shit about the higher-ups like Tipplehorn. Just did her thing in the hair trailer, smoking bats and talking on speakerphone to her teenage daughter who was spending the summer at an arts camp ­outside Denton. When they said good-bye, Kathleen waved her hand as if her daughter could see her from the other end of the line. She said, “Girl,” and her daughter said, “Bye now,” and Kathleen looked in the mirror and saw me behind her, squint-eyed in the barber’s chair, finally sun-shaded, ­almost asleep.”

Participating is a piece of cake: just log onto Twitter when the chat begins at 1:30pm, follow Jewcy and the Jewish Book Council, and tweet your questions for Wilson (@BubblesDepot) with the hashtag #JLit.

Read more about Twitter book club here.

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Israeli writer Etgar Keret is known for his entertaining short stories, and now they’re getting the animated video treatment, thanks to a new project called Storyvid.io.

The first is for his story “What Do We Have in Our Pockets?” and it’s pretty cute:

Want more Keret? Here’s the writer on how his son helped him vote in this week’s Israeli elections.

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