Last Tower to Heaven
Days before his thirty-third birthday, Jacob Paul, an ordinary New Yorker, learns that his life is the dream of a man being slowly gassed in the back of a box truck headed from the Chelmno extermination camp to a mass grave in the Polish woods. And, thus begins a 500-page, 18-years-long, Quixotic, often comic, picaresque. J’s adventures lead him to Chase, his fellow traveler and love interest, and to Art, Chase’s husband, the evangelical governor of Mexico, who enlists J to build a new kind of Holocaust museum next to the Creationist Museum outside Cincinnati, a Holocaust museum that Art and his evangelical backers hope will finally show Jews as they really were. Yid World, which ends up being a Lithuanian-shtetl theme park, is obviously a failure, as, seemingly, are all of J’s attempts to connect to his awesome and awful legacy, until finally J embarks on one last epic attempt to build the means by which to confront his dreamer. Last Tower to Heaven grapples with what it means to derive agency and identity from collective trauma, with what it means to be at once a dream of the Holocaust and, yet, messily alive in our world. Ultimately, that struggle forces J to learn how to build a story out of love, for his love.
“Paul has written a madcap, heartbreaking romp across a confused America. It’s as though Charlie Kaufman and Philip Roth got together and said: ‘Let’s go nuts with this one”
Joshua Mohr
author of SirensOther available titles
Sarah/Sara
Haunted by her parents’ death by a terrorist bombing in a Jerusalem café, and in particular by memories of her father, a 9/11 survivor whose dream was to kayak through the Arctic, Sarah embarks on her own solo kayak across the Arctic Ocean, unprepared for the strenuous physical and emotional trial that lies ahead.
A Song of Ilan
Wracked by guilt over a long-ago shooting in Israel and obsessed with a translation of the Psalms that bitterly asks God to be God, Ilan races across three fractured realities frantic to reconcile himself to his relationships with his beloved and his faith, as each reality drags brings him closer to donning his own bomb before boarding his morning subway.