Dolly City

Orly Castel-Bloom was born in Tel Aviv in 1960 to parents originally from Egypt. After studying film at the Beit Zvi Institute and Tel Aviv University, she published her first collection of stories in 1987 and has been a leading voice in Hebrew literature ever since, constantly expanding the boundaries of the Hebrew language as well as of narrative style. Castel-Bloom has lectured at Harvard University, UCLA, UC Berkeley, New York University as well as at Oxford and Cambridge Universities; at present she teaches creative writing at Tel Aviv University. She has published novels, collections of short stories, and a book for children. Her postmodern classic, Dolly City, has been included in UNESCO's Collection of Representative Works, and was nominated in 2007 one of the ten most important books since the creation of the State of Israel. In 2013, it was also listed by Tablet Magazine as one of the 101 Great Jewish Books in English translation.

Gruesome, unhinged, and hilarious, Dolly City is widely recognized as one of the most disconcerting--and brilliant--literary works ever to come out of Israel.