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Yair Assulin, born in 1986, studied philosophy and history at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem. The Drive is the first of two novels he has written and for which he won Israel's Ministry of Culture Prize and the Sapir Prize for debut fiction. He has been awarded the Prime Minister's Prize for authors, writes a weekly column in the newspaper Haaretz and has been a visiting lecturer in Jewish Studies at Yale. Jessica Cohen shared the 2017 Man Booker International Prize with author David Grossman for her translation of A Horse Walks into a Bar. She has translated works by Amos Oz, Etgar Keret, Dorit Rabinyan, Ronit Matalon and Nir Baram.
Poignant ... Assulin shines at depicting the soldier's feelings of unease and the irreconcilable space between soldier and commander ... This work on the fragility of the human spirit is touching. --Publishers Weekly A beautifully written, formidable and moving tale about the boundaries between an individual and the collective. --Shani Boianjiu, author of The People of Forever Are Not Afraid A powerful, compelling and fascinating look inside the mind of a young man as he struggles to find his way in life, grasping to balance the expectations of his family, romantic partner, and country with his own troubled sense of who he is. --Joseph LeDoux, author of Anxious and The Deep History of Ourselves The Drive serves up the mesmerizing story of a young Israeli torn between his own powerlessness and his lust to live. Suffocated by an army base he calls a 'kingdom of slaves, ' he journeys to a mental health clinic on which he pins all his hopes of redemption. In the grip of Assulin's bracing novel, those hopes become ours. --Benjamin Balint, author of Kafka's Last Trial Assulin's novel is impressive in its breadth. His hero, like Joseph Heller's Yossarian in Catch-22, is a young man struggling to make sense of the world and himself amid the surreal madness of war. --David Margulies, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Dinner With Friends The Drive is raw, poignant, tense, terse, and brutally honest. We see, hear and feel a soldier's soul shredding until all he has left is the wish to die. This book shatters ideals and illusions about glorious and patriotic military service. --Edward Tick, author of War and the Soul and Warrior's Return The Drive is a psychologically astute book--a good read concluding with an insightful, hilarious depiction of mental health professionals engineering a way for the protagonist to preserve his dignity while getting the help he badly needs. --Thomas Ogden, psychoanalyst and author of The Parts Left Out A touching, gut-wrenching work. It is astounding and troubling at the same time. --Makor Rishon Assulin lays bare the emotional distress of a person, any person, and the world's inability to understand it except by means of mechanical categories from the field of psychiatry. --Benny Ziffer, Haaretz One can compare the story to the biblical journey of Abraham and Isaac to Mount Moriah, where God commanded that father bind and sacrifice his son. --Yedioth Ahronoth Shattering ... expressing a complicated mental situation, uncovering in a uniquely direct way painful truths about one of the most significant days in the lives of Israeli young people. --Ynet
