Five Selves (Barasch-Rubinstein) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
(Starred review) While preoccupied with different issues—grief and privacy, inflexibility and a changing work culture, generational rift, and a phobia—characters are interconnected in the literature through their common search for personal insight.... Barasch-Rubinstein's lean, beautiful writing prevents the characters from overstating emotion and avoids any melodrama.... This anthology is a highly visual, spiritual gem.
Publishers Weekly


A man in a hospital percreives the world through semi-consciousness; another seeks to overcome his fear of dogs; a teacher confronts her limitations; a woman coming to terms with the death of her father travels to a symposium.... [C]aptured at a moment of crisis, are written with an affecting, powerful intelligence, and shot through with an emotional intensity. A memorable and singular voice."
Mail on Sunday: Best New Fiction (UK)


Some writers dwell on flesh and furnishings, others, like Emanuela Barasch-Rubinstein, look deep into interior lives. Her Five Selves is a mindscape masterpiece—a handful of novellas in which the dramatis personae struggle to understand themselves in dark times. An Israeli-born scholar of culture, religion and philosophy, Barasch-Rubinstein seems to perceive the soul through x-ray eyes—or perhaps, as the daughter of a renowned art historian, she was raised to look way beyond canvas and brush-strokes.
Madeleine Kinksley - Jewish Chronicle