Housebroken

The men, women, and even animals in this collection live at the mercy of their hearts. Young and old, on two legs or four, they grope for love and tenderness, knowing that all connection is fraught with danger and all relationship random and evanescent. Yet the heart wants what it wants. The title novella, a wrenching account of the end of love, traces a gentle dog's transformation into a vicious beast as the couple who owns him breaks apart.

In The Happiness Game the tenuous bonds between husband and wife are undermined by black crows and weak hearts, while Matti presents a chorus of voices—doctors, nurses, jilted wife, dying husband—that recounts an old man's passion for his lover, a fifteen-year-old Lolita. Wise and deft, Housebroken navigates the moments of decision, betrayal, longing, and jealousy that torment the souls of wounded lovers.

Praise

"Housebroken is extraordinarily affecting, even heartbreaking. Hedaya is a brilliant, poised writer who has come into the world fully formed. I am amazed."—A. B. Yehoshua, author of Mr. Mani

"[Hedaya's] love stories manqué are an exploration of the fractured bourgeois dream of domestic bliss. She has written three tales, fabulous in nature, of our housebroken estate, stories in which ordinary people confront the limitations of passion and the adaptations of love."—Maureen Howard, Los Angeles Times

"Funny, touching, fiercely honest, with an intelligent eye and sensitive ear on every page. Housebroken will make you weep for the sorrow at the heart of all living things."—La Stampa (Italy)

About the Author(s)

Yael Hedaya

Yael Hedaya, former journalist and humor columnist for the Hebrew daily Yediot Aharonot, was born in Jerusalem in 1964. She teaches journalism and creative writing, and has written two novels and one collection of novellas. This is Hedaya's first book to appar in English. She lives in Tel Aviv, Israel.

photo: Orna-Itamar

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