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praise
"This outstanding Southland author, who won critical acclaim with her collection of stories, Stop Here, My Friend, scores again in this warm and moving novel of family love, courage and dignity . . . the author writes with humor and compassion, combining an artistic intelligence with flawless technical craftsmanship. This is a first-rate story by a first-rate writer.” —Los Angeles Herald Examiner
"What An Antique Man does with chilling effectiveness is to show exactly where the sting of death is: in the heartless bureaucracy of a hospital; in the ghastly commercialism of a cemetery salesman; in the grotesquerie of a funeral eulogy. In counterpoint to the terminal agonies of Abram Goldman is the author’s passion and humor, which makes them all matter a great deal to the reader.” —The New York Times
"This author, in her first full length book, has managed to invest her story with a quality of such human and universal appeal that it becomes everyone’s sorrow—everyone’s personal loss . . . The author has a fine sense of narrative and a keen ear for dialogue. She holds the reader’s interest to the end . . .”—The Boston Globe
"This is a first novel and a splendid one. It comes to us from a twenty-nine-year old Brooklyn-born girl named Merrill Joan Gerber, acclaimed as an author to watch when she published a short story collection, Stop Here, My Friend, in 1965. ‘She is a writer of strength and compassion,’ exulted one critic, ‘and her technical skill is such that she can apply these attributes to a marvelous variety of human situations.’ Like, for instance, the lingering death of an ordinary man.” —The National Observer
“This is the poignant story . . . It is everyone's story in that it tells in specific and particular terms the general human experience of love and loss, suffering and death. It is agony redeemed by art. . . . To experience the love and pain in this book is of the deepest private value. A moving book about an agonizing subject, the slow death by leukemia of a good man . . . There is something of the quality of A Death in the Familyhere, although the clinical details are harrowing. The story ends with the survivors of this little Jewish family trying to rebuild their lives after the father’s death.” —Publisher's Weekly
about the author
Merrill Joan Gerber is a prize-winning novelist and short story writer. Among her novels are The Kingdom of Brooklyn, winner of the Ribalow Award from Hadassah Magazine for “the best English-language book of fiction on a Jewish theme,” Anna in the Afterlife, chosen by the Los Angeles Times as a “Best Novel of 2002” and King of the World, which won the Pushcart Editors’ Book Award.
