Jay Cantor

a love story

Aaron and Ahmed

Krazy Kat, Ignatz Mouse, and other Coconino County residents travel to Alamogordo, New Mexico, where Krazy is awed by a giant tower and Ignatz falls for J. Robert Oppenheimer

A Novel in Five Panels

Krazy Kat

Essays on Art and Society

On Giving Birth to One's Own Mother

A thought-provoking, sometimes heartbreaking sequence of stories based on a group of real people held together by their love of Franz Kafka. Here friends, fans, and lovers find themselves haunted by the death of the great author. Imbued with a gravitas and dark irony that recall Kafka’s own work, these stories nonetheless also bear the singular imaginary stamp and the keen psychological and emotional insight that have marked all of Jay Cantor’s writing.

Four Stories for Franz Kafka

Forgiving the Angel

In his critically acclaimed epic first novel, Jay Cantor, author of Krazy Kat and Great Neck, draws on history, myth, and his own prodigious imagination to take on the life and death of revolutionary icon Che Guevara. In his now famous progress through modern times, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the scion of a liberal Argentine family, abandoned a medical career to become a revolutionary. A fiery comrade of Fidel Castro’s who joined him in overthrowing the Cuban government of Baptista, Che later broke with Castro to lead a guerrilla movement in Bolivia. As the novel charts Che’s bold evolution, it also offers an incisive look at Latin America’s revolutionary struggles, an exploration of the nature of truth and storytelling, and a brilliant exegesis of the psychology of radical activisim.

The Death of Che Guevara

From one of our most thought-provoking and admired writers, a brilliant, beautiful, and sometimes heartbreaking group of stories based on a circle of real people who are held together by love of their friend Franz Kafka. The sequence opens with Max Brod, Kafka’s friend and literary executor, telling us about Kafka and Dora Diamant, their love growing stronger even as Kafka is dying of tuberculosis. Kafka talks with Brod about forgiving the Angel of Death, but Brod wonders if Franz is really talking about Brod’s forgiving Kafka for the predicament he’s put him in, having instructed Max to prove his love for Franz by burning the work Brod most admires: Franz’s unpublished stories. Next there is a brief interlude—perhaps a lost Kafka story, or is it a story about a lost Kafka story which is perhaps itself masquerading as one of the things that in anger Brod neither burned nor published? The story that follows tells of Dora’s marriage to the militant German Communist Lusk Lask and his attempt to break the hold of the angelic Kafka on his wife’s imagination by giving her a daughter. We watch this family in its move to the Soviet Union to escape Hitler, and as Dora and her daughter flee the Soviet Union to escape Stalin, leaving Lusk behind in the Gulag. Later, when Lusk tries to connect with his daughter again, the Angel Kafka seems once again to stand in his way, a force in his daughter’s life that seemingly destroys as it sustains. In the last story we meet Milena Jasenska, another of Kafka’s lovers, and Eva, the woman who, after surviving Stalin’s camps, meets Milena in a Nazi concentration camp and is reborn in this hell through her love for her, though perhaps trapped there in memory because of that love as well. By the end, these moving love stories with Kafka as their presiding ghost have told the calamitous story of Europe in the Century of the Camps. Imbued with a gravitas and dark irony that recall Kafka’s own work, these stories nonetheless also bear the singular imaginary stamp and the keen psychological and emotional insight that have marked all of Jay Cantor’s fiction.

James Romberger

"What causes terrorism? After his fiancee dies on 9/11, the question plagues Aaron Goodman. It makes him give up his career a a doctor to become an interrogator at Guantanamo Bay. It leads him to meme theory, as he wonders if there could be a cold science behind the conversion of people into suicide bombers. And ultimately, it brings him to Ahmed, a Gitmo prisoner who promises the answers to all of Aaron's questions."--Jacket.

A Love Story

Describes a group of friends, black and white, growing up radical amid the turbulence of the sixties and seventies, following them from their 1960 sixth-grade class in Great Neck to their involvement in civil rights and peace movements.

A Novel

Great Neck

Krazy Kat, Ignatz Mouse, and other Coconino County residents travel to Alamoqordo, New Mexico, where Krazy is awed by a giant tower and Ignatz falls for J. Robert Oppenheimer

William H. Gerdts

Warren Adelson

Celebrates Hassam's imposing career as one of America's foremost impressionists. Adelson (president of Adelson Galleries), Cantor (teacher, writer and lecturer on American art) and Gerdts (author and professor emeritus, Graduate Center of the City U. of New York) approach the artist from several angles (an international context, his little-understood late work, and predominant themes) to reveal his many facets and uncover previously unknown aspects of his life and work. Illustrated with color reproductions that represent all of Hassam's styles, the volume concludes with an illustrated chronology and an annotated bibliography. Oversize: 10.25x12". Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Childe Hassam, Impressionist

A fictionalized account of the life and death of revolutionary Che Guevara details his growth as a radical, his role as a military and ideological leader of the Cuban revolution, and his death in the mountains of Bolivia. Reprint.

Jay Cantor

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