Gershon Shaked’s history of modern Hebrew fiction traces the emergence and development of a literature “against all odds”—from its European roots in the 1880s, when it had neither a country nor a spoken language, to the flowering of a literary culture on Israeli soil from the founding of the State through the 1990s. The product of more than twenty years of research, it is unique in its scope, profiling four generations of Hebrew writers from I.L. Peretz and Haim Nahman Bialik through S.Y. Agnon, Aharon Appelfeld, Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua, David Grossman, Meir Shalev, and Orly Castel-Bloom. Translated from the Hebrew by Yael Lotan.