SHA'AREI TORAH
(Gates of Torah)

Reviews for
If I Could Sleep by Alex B.Stone

Patricia Anaya, Co-Founder, Aztlan Prize:

"I have had the privilege of reading the work of Alex [Stone] for a number of years and have always admired his language usage, vocabulary, knowledge of art and human nature and many other aspects of the writing endeavor.

"I am delighted that the Red Heifer Press has accepted this novel for publication. Alex is a master of dialogue, his characters are authentic and his plot structure not only believable but intriguing. I love Fred [the protagonist of If I Could Sleep]. What a depiction of a sensitive soul bearing with the impositions of family and friends. The underlying message is so true to the quiet desperation so many people have to live with when other people try to take control of their lives."

SPARING: Shiva Conversations

Few among us do our primary communication through the mode of expression known as prose. That exercise in literary artifice we leave for the writers. The rest of us make do with something called conversation. It's how most of us conduct the great majority of our self-expression and dialogue.

Author Alex B. Stone—despite the fact that he is a writer—obviously understands this, and it is this understanding that breathes life into this powerful little novel. Although technically written in the first person, our protagonist—a reflective Jewish widower in his 70s sitting shiva after the accidental death of his daughter—uses that voice effectively but very sparingly.

The bulk of the story, rather, is composed of conversation, much of it between the grieving man and his talkative, over-protective, intrusive but still very loving sister. Their conversation is believable and realistic. Like conversations we have all had ourselves, it meanders through the mundane and practical, occasionally flows through and around truth, and sometimes approaches the rarified level of revelation.

Through the course of all this talking, and sometimes between the lines of its obviously Jewish and faintly Yiddish texture, we encounter nothing less than the substance of life itself. There's a great deal here about love, about aging and loss, about dreams and their abandonment, about fulfillment, about death, about the challenge of facing life in the wake of profound grief.

Disguised as living room conversation—so familiar to us all that it sometimes seems almost inaudible—Stone has composed an authentic, beautifully understated and ultimately moving picture of living and of life.