Set half in Israel and half in the States, the stories in this prize-winning collection explore the experience of exile, belonging, and what it means to call a place home. A visiting professor from Boston forms an unlikely bond with an Israeli born in Iraq. Two teenage tourists are startled out of their naiveté in a restaurant in Jerusalem’s Old City. A gifted yeshiva student spiraling into mental illness takes refuge in the poetry of Walt Whitman. An aged widower returns after sixty years to the Bronx neighborhood of his youth to make amends with a first love he abandoned to go to prison. Shimmering with insight and compassion, Displaced Persons is a profound, exquisite collection that illuminates pivotal moments of transition, longing, and hope.
Winner of the 2022 New American Fiction Prize, Joan Leegant’s new collection Displaced Persons: Stories is available at your favorite local independent bookstore and all online retailers, including Bookshop.org. Every purchase at Bookshop.org financially supports independent bookstores.
Publicity Contact: Julia Borcherts | Kaye Publicity | julia@kayepublicity.com | 773.878.0722
Praise for DISPLACED PERSONS
“In the funny and harrowing short stories of Joan Leegant’s excellent collection Displaced Persons, characters navigate myriad forms of displacement, from putting a new life together after divorce to finding their place in an adopted country….The short stories in Displaced Persons address difficult issues of Jewish identity and social expectations about marriage and family with complexity.”
— FOREWORD REVIEWS
“Displaced Persons is a stunning collection of literary excellence. Each story tackles the enormous questions of the human experience and is masterfully rendered in beautiful, affecting prose.”
— WEIKE WANG
Whiting Award-winning author of Chemistry and Joan Is Okay
“These stories are somehow both tender and tough: while never sentimental, they have a clear-eyed vision of those who have been displaced, unhoused, and dispossessed. Though often wry and witty, they recognize the cost of anybody’s personal history–Israeli, Jewish American, European–and those who must pay when the bill comes due. Joan Leegant writes eloquently about families, and she has a genius for portraying children and young adults. This book is beautiful and wonderfully readable. I loved it.”
— CHARLES BAXTER
PEN/Malamud Award-winning author of The Sun Collective and The Feast of Love
“With all the wit, wisdom, and sexy humor of Malamud and Paley at their best, Leegant leads us through the cockeyed complexities of contemporary Jewish life in Israel and America. Who is displaced and who at home? What makes a family a family? You will find yourself thinking about these elegant, heartbreakingly true stories for a very long time … and recommending them to all your friends.”
— EILEEN POLLACK
Rona Jaffe Award-winning author of Maybe It’s Me: On Being the Wrong Kind of Woman and The Professor of Immortality
“What does it mean to be unsettled, to be neither here nor there? This is the question that animates Joan Leegant’s uncannily sharp-eyed story collection Displaced Persons; caught between cultures, generations, geographies, and realities, her protagonists stumble into danger and emerge with desperate insight. The ground underneath this phenomenal book is both unsteady—moving in every sense of the word—and richly fertile.”
— DAVID EBENBACH
Drue Heinz Literature Prize-winning author of Miss Portland and The Guy We Didn’t Invite to the Orgy and Other Stories
“Joan Leegant’s stories of women and men grappling with displacement (sometimes in their own homes) shimmer with wit and compassion. Few writers see so deeply into their characters’ lives. Prepare to feel a shock of recognition.”
— DAWN RAFFEL
Christopher Award-winning author of Boundless as the Sky and The Strange Case of Dr. Couney
“Moving, riveting, masterful—these stories, exploring the many ways human beings can be displaced, take the reader on a most profound journey. With impressive courage and beauty, they reveal how people can not only be displaced from their original homelands by the violent sweeps of history, but also how individuals can be exiled, through the loss of love or health or innocence, from their neighbors, their families, and their past selves. This collection forms an expansive and gorgeous tribute to the resilience people show when they manage, while still haunted by all that was endured or lost, to make homes in new and foreign realities.”
— JESSAMYN HOPE
J.I. Segal Award-winning author of Safekeeping
For her first book of stories, An Hour in Paradise: Stories, JOAN LEEGANT won the 2003 PEN/New England Book Award and the Edward Lewis Wallant Award, and was a finalist for the National Jewish Book Award and a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers pick. She is also the author of a novel, Wherever You Go. Her prize-winning fiction has appeared in over two dozen literary magazines and anthologies. Formerly an attorney, she has taught at Harvard, Oklahoma State, and Cornish College of the Arts in Seattle where she was also the writer-in-residence at Hugo House. For five years, she was the visiting writer at Bar-Ilan University in Tel Aviv where she also spoke at Israeli schools on American literature and culture under the auspices of the U.S. Embassy, and taught English to African refugees and asylum seekers. She lives in Newton, Massachusetts, with her family.
